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31/12/2004
Happy New Year!
Best wishes for 2005! Make it a crackin’ year!
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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31/12/2004
Gelukkig nieuwjaar
Gelukkig nieuwjaar, maar...
je weet dat je in 2004 leeft, wanneer...
1 je per ongeluk je PIN-code intoetst op de magnetron...
2 je in geen jaren ’patience’ met echte kaarten hebt gespeeld...
3 je 15 telefoonnummers hebt van een familie met drie personen...
4 je e-mail stuurt aan de persoon die naast je zit...
5 je geen contact meer hebt met oude vrienden, omdat je hun e-mailadressen kwijt bent...
6 je thuis komt en nog steeds de telefoon opneemt met je ’werkstem’...
7 je nog steeds een ’0’ draait als je van huis uit telefoneert...
8 je vier jaar lang achter hetzelfde bureau hebt gewerkt, maar voor drie verschillende bedrijven...
10 je baas jouw werk niet kan doen...
11 je je familie belt om te kijken of ze thuis zijn, terwijl je de oprit in komt rijden...
12 alle reklame op TV een internetadres heeft...
13 het van huis weggaan zonder GSM, die je de eerste 10,20,40 jaar van je leven niet had, paniek veroorzaakt en dat je vervolgens teruggaat om hem op te halen...
14 het eerste wat je ’s ochtends doet is ’online’ gaan, zelfs nog voordat je koffie gehaald hebt...
15 je een ’smile’ op z’n kant legt om te glimlachen...
16 je dit leest, knikt en glimlacht...
17 en nog erger; je precies weet naar wie je dit door gaat sturen...
18 je te druk bent om te merken dat er geen nr.9 bestaat in deze lijst...
19 je daadwerkelijk omhoog gescrolld bent om te checken of er echt geen nr. 9 was...
20 en je nu om jezelf zit te lachen.
Wedden dat 2005 niet veel beter wordt ?
Toch nog de beste wensen, vanwege...uw dienaar.
PS. Ga vanaf 2005 af en toe eens een kijkje nemen op deze knappe website over Westerlo, de gemeente waar ik woon en leef. Maar wachten tot volgend jaar he!
PPS. Een paar nieuwjaarswensen: promotie in januari, veel sneeuw in februari, minder belastingen in maart, een geslaagd familiefeest in april, Anderlecht kampioen in mei, topmaand voor mijn weblog (en Anderlecht bekerwinnaar) in juni, schitterende halfjaarresultaten voor Be Sited! in juli, vakantie in de V.S. in augustus, vrijheid van meningsuiting haalt het van terrorisme in september, nog een dictator (na de Taliban, na Saddam...) die wordt afgezet in oktober, echte vrije handel in november, een witte kerst in december, en geen ruzie meer binnen de VLD in 2005 (yeah, right!). Dertien in een dozijn, en in één jaar.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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31/12/2004
Great news to end the year
Amidst all the shocking disaster news of the past few days, there is also some good news. AdamSmithee reports:
Worldwide, income levels aren’t converging. But life expectancy, infant survival, the percentage of the population adequately nourished, primary education enrollment, tertiary enrollment, female to male educational equality, literacy, income equality within countries, the percentage of children out of the labor force, inflation, political and civil rights, access to clean water, electricity consumption, and cars, radios and telephones per capita all are. Even beer production is converging.
Now if everything important is converging, incomes are bound to become converging too in the future, if not already. It just seems impossible that if more and more people are becoming literate, are getting an education, are no longer discriminated because they are female, are living longer and healther lives, are having more political and civil rights, are having better access to clean water, electricity, cars, radio’s and phones...that their incomes will stay behind. And maybe due to this convergence in the future less and less people will be as brutally confronted with natural calamities as the people of South-Asia. This is little consolation for the victims of course, but nevertheless it is better than nothing.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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29/12/2004
Setting the record straight
Sometimes Bush-bashing is going too far. Chris Mooney writes:
Bush To Speak on Tsunamis
Here’s what bugs me about this. So far, this tragedy has been discussed in admirably secular tones. Overwhelming forces of nature; an amoral and dynamic planet that doesn’t care about us; etc. But now, you just know that Bush is going to inject God into it somehow.
But this doesn’t show in the article Mooney points to. Yes, Bush says that "our prayers go out to the people who’ve lost so much to this series of disasters." So what? He is a religious person and as he person he has a right to say that he will pray for the victims. There is nothing wrong with that. The rest of his remarks stay with the secular tones Mooney (and I) likes. Bush announces help and says that more is about to come. And he wants to build a warning system for this kind of calamities. I don’t know but if you want such a warning system the last thing you want to inject is God. No, Bush is invoking science here! For Bush, there sometimes is just no way to pleasing some people.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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29/12/2004
Hitchens on Clinton
Just to set the record straight towards our friends on the left, who have a great time bashing Bush (sometimes rightly so). Here is Christopher Hitchens on Bill Clinton:
In my book on the man, No One Left To Lie To, I have a chapter on rape. It contains the evidence of three women, all of them socially “upscale,” all political supporters of Clinton (or at least supporters at the time they first knew him) and all unknown to each other when they told their stories. They offer appallingly similar accounts of being forced to submit, and of being forced by the same M.O.
I would only be wearying you if I said that the official feminist movement showed no interest in this evidence. And it is not true that "boys will be boys" in this instance. Only thuggish and cowardly boys go in for this kind of thing.
As for crookery, I think you will find if you look at the Congressional reports on campaign finance, and at the findings of the Center for Public Integrity, that they unearthed more evidence on revolving-door contributions and shakedowns than for any campaign even since Nixon’s CREEP. "Nice to see you again, Mr. President,” as Roger Tamraz says on a tape of a meeting in the White House. I think he was still wanted in Beirut at the time. Many other inquiries can’t be completed because of the number of donor/witnesses who fled the country. It’s all there on the record.
Cowardice is not just a private vice, by the way. When he was running against Bush Senior, Clinton said that the atrocities of the Bosnian war were reminiscent of the Final Solution. That may have been an exaggeration, but you can’t employ a phrase like that and then run away from it. When elected, Clinton backed away for almost three years before he did anything about Bosnia, and a lot of people died there because they had believed him and kept on resisting. Much the same with Iraq and the Taliban: he kept saying that something would have to be done about Saddam Hussein but never did it, which meant that a much more scarred and bankrupt Iraq became somebody else’s legacy. His lack of effort in Afghanistan needs no further comment from me.
It’s true that much of the GOP was weak on this as well, at the time, but it’s also true that when Clinton did finally act he could count on some tough-minded Republican support, even from people who privately or publicly thought that he deserved impeachment and might even be "wagging the dog.” That by the way is the conspicuous difference between then and now, when even people who were co-responsible for the Clinton policy (like Al Gore and Madeleine Albright) suddenly claim that they don’t know what the President is talking about when he mentions the Ba’ath Party’s long record of tyranny and aggression and deception.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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28/12/2004
The internal contradictions of capitalism
Marx, Schumpeter et al. are right. Capitalism is sowing the (cultural) seeds of it’s own destruction (but not just yet). Cause: the profit motive.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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28/12/2004
Ask the expert (system)
Would you like to be diagnosed by a computer instead of a physician? Most people would recoil only from the thought of it. It’s a reason for the popularity of alternative medicine: it’s much more personal than traditional medicin. But now comes Alex Tabarrok pointing to the benefits of an even more impersonal system than we already have. Here comes the machine:
Many people complain that medicine is too impersonal. I think it is not impersonal enough. I have nothing against my physician (a local magazine says he is one of the best in the area) but I would prefer to be diagnosed by a computer. A typical physician spends most of the day playing twenty questions. Where does it hurt? Do you have a cough? How high is the patient’s blood pressure? But an expert system can play twenty questions better than most people. An expert system can use the best knowledge in the field, it can stay current with the journals, and it never forgets.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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28/12/2004
Ukraine: lessons for Chechnya?
It is possible after all to combat authoritarian rule with peacefull means, it just happened in the Ukraine where autocrats not only of the Ukraine itself, but also Russia were roundingly defeated. That’s the way to tackle Vlad Putin, not by terrorists acts like that in Beslan, which only strengthens his authoritarian rule. Here we have also a lesson for the international community, for Chechnya of course still is part of Russia and has not the same means to protest peacefully than the Ukranians. But by all means, if there is something of a peacefull democratic movement in Chechnya left, we should support it, and built it, so that maybe in the future, the same can hebben in that ravaged place then what is happening now in Ukraine. What are the Georges (Bush/Soros) waiting for?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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27/12/2004
Unhealthy government failure
Andrew Samwick sees a solution for the rising obesity rates in the U.S.: cut agricultural subsidies. A healthy suggestion:
We are a nation with rising obesity rates, and we decide to keep in place extensive subsidies for wheat, corn, beef, and bacon, but not for fruits and vegetables. Now this looks like a government program. It provides little insurance, seems to reward patronage rather than need, and appears to be at odds with sensible nutritional advice.
In Europe, as always with government failures, the situation is worse. On the one hand there is the war against smoking. On the other there are subsidies for tobacco producers. Absurd and very unhealthy.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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26/12/2004
In defense of America’s meddling with the Ukraine
Today democray is triumphing in at least one former republic of the Soviet Union: the Ukrain. It’s election time again, and now the people will elect the president it really wants. In part we have America’s meddling to thank for it. In other former republics the situation is rather different both concerning the state of democray and America’s support for it. From the left here is professor Stephen Zunes:
After more than three centuries of subjugation under Russian rule—first under the czars and then under the communists—followed by a dozen years of independence under corrupt and autocratic rule, the Ukrainian people appear to be on the verge of a new era of freedom. This development is significant, given that—with a population and land mass comparable to France, rich in minerals, fertile farmland, and modern industry—a democratic Ukraine could become a pivotal, independent player in European and international affairs.
But rather than embracing this inspiring triumph of the human spirit against authoritarianism and repression, much of the left media has focused instead upon the opposition’s shortcomings and on the double standards and questionable motivations of the Bush administration’s support for the movement. Although these concerns are not without merit, they miss the fact that we are witnessing one of the most notable popular democratic uprisings in history. Furthermore, the left’s lukewarm response has given both the right and the mainstream media an opportunity to brand the entire progressive community with allegations that we oppose freedom and democracy.
(...)
We should be pleased that the Bush administration is actually embracing, albeit for suspect reasons, an authentic, grassroots democratic movement against an authoritarian regime. Instead of questioning U.S. support for Ukrainian democrats, progressives must seize this opportunity to emphasize the need for the United States to champion nonviolent democratic movements everywhere and to end U.S. backing for autocratic regimes and occupation armies that suppress such movements.
George Packer from the New Yorker expands:
The popular uprising in Ukraine has now secured a new Presidential election, the previous vote having been discredited by huge fraud. There’s a quiet American story behind that achievement. For years, beginning in the nineteen-nineties, governmental and non-governmental organizations poured millions of dollars into Ukraine’s politics, building up the parties, training civil-society groups and journalists, establishing election monitors. These efforts helped strengthen the opposition against a corrupt government, but they were nonpartisan: technical support was given to all parties. The work in Ukraine built on earlier experiences in Serbia and Georgia, where groups like the National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Institute contributed, behind the scenes, to popular movements that eventually seized the moment to overthrow strongmen. Three peaceful democratic revolutions in ex-Communist countries in four years—a tremendous success, and few Americans even know that part of the credit belongs to this country.
Not surprisingly, the outgoing President of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, have complained about American meddling. So has an unlikely tandem in this country. “Ukraine has been turned into a geostrategic matter not by Moscow but by Washington, which refuses to abandon its Cold War policy of encircling Russia and seeking to pull every former Soviet Republic into its orbit,”The Nation claimed, once again taking the Russian side of the Cold War. And Pat Buchanan declared, “Congress should investigate N.E.D. and any organization that used clandestine cash or agents to fix the Ukrainian election, as the U.S. media appear to have gone into the tank for global democracy.”
But in Ukraine the meddlers have done nothing worse than help guarantee a people’s right to choose a government freely.
(Hat Tip: Norman Geras)
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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26/12/2004
The future of the pc
The end of the pc is not near it seems, diversity is it’s future. From industry specialist Mitch Wagner:
General-Purpose PCs: The device we think of when we think of a PC is a general-purpose computing device. It has a PC processor (usually Intel, these days), a PC operating system (usually Windows, these days), memory, disk storage, monitor, keyboard and mouse. It comes with an array of special-purpose software, and can be used for anything: running a spreadsheet, writing software, games, playing music, educational software, writing, whatever.
Increasingly, that all-purpose device is becoming a laptop computer. Everybody’s mobile, even if it’s just moving the laptop to a conference room down the hall.
High-powered PCs: For big development jobs, high-powered gaming, creating multimedia. It’s the general-purpose PC after it’s been through six weeks of grueling boot camp. Might be a notebook computer, but likely to be a traditional desktop or mini-tower just because the hardware’s frequently modified to get the last little whisker of performance out of it. Basically the same hardware and software as the general-purpose PC, but more of it. Often runs Windows, but you see a lot of Linux and Macs in high-powered PCs.
Kiosks: Sometimes it’s an *actual* kiosk, like the one at the mall with the touchscreen that tells you where the food court is. But it might just be a dumbed-down PC, used just for the web and e-mail and a little office productivity, with processor, memory, and disk drive that are five years out of date. Often they’re, simply, old PCs, with underpowered hardware and software by the standards of today. But sometimes they’re new models, optimized for small form-factor or ruggedness.
Probably the most commonplace example of a kiosk is the TiVo. It doesn’t even look like a PC; it looks vaguely like a VCR, or DVD player, or stereo component, or some other component of a home entertainment system, which is, of course, what it is. It has no keyboard, mouse and the display is a TV. But it’s a PC in there: it’s built out of PC hardware components, and the software is a version of desktop Linux that’s been so extensively customized that it’s not even recognizable to the casual user as PC software at all.
If this is the future of the pc, i don’t know. More interesting i think is the relationship between the different kinds of "personal computers" and the software running on it. Mitch Wagner seems to suggest that general purpose pc’s will keep on running with Windows and it’s follow ups. The same is true for high-powered pc’s, although here the Mac comes in. Open source software on the other hand will power the kiosks. Maybe this is not far from it: Windows/Intel if you want a pc to be used for everything, the Mac for high performance, and open source for customized solutions.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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25/12/2004
Zalig Kerstfeest - Merry Christmas!
Zalig Kerstfeest - Merry Christmas!
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan the Christman
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23/12/2004
Medical uses of Marijuana
Here is one:
The Canadian government announced today that it is ready to approve a natural marijuana extract, sold under the brand name Sativex, as a prescription drug. Sativex -- a liquid that is sprayed into the mouth -- will initially be approved for treatment of neuropathic pain in multiple sclerosis patients.
The Qualifying Notice issued today by Health Canada sets out the conditions under which the drug, produced by GW Pharmaceuticals, can be approved as a prescription medicine. GW immediately signaled that the conditions were acceptable. Given the administrative procedures required, a company spokesman said it would be "months, but not many months" before Sativex will be available to Canadian patients.
Sativex is, for all practical purposes, marijuana in liquid form. Made from marijuana plants bred for specific levels of various active components, called cannabinoids, Sativex is similar to marijuana-based extracts and tinctures that were legally available in the United States until 1937. (Such products were manufactured by major drug companies and sold through pharmacies until the federal government banned marijuana in 1937.)
The Arnold Kling question now. For discussion: why should governments decide wich uses of Marijuana are good for you and wich uses not? Can’t you do it yourself, as an informed consumer?
(Via Hit and Run)
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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23/12/2004
Complaining about the Postal Service
From the Mises Institute:
I trained for it as though I would be in a life or death situation. Now it was time for a terrible event, a thing that I do as infrequently as possible; a thing that any sane person approaches the way one would heart surgery.
I had to return a package so I went down to the Forest Hills, New York post office on Queens Blvd. I went early in the day—I was there just before 9 a.m. on December 8, 2004—in the mistaken belief that maybe I could complete my simple transaction—sending a small box to Ohio—in a few minutes.
I was wrong.
When I came in the post office, there were exactly 32 people ahead of me in a line that never seemed to end. And it was early in the day, who knows how many people would be there by midday or at the peak hours?
There are some seven windows in the office. Two were open. Several employees ambled around the back in the office. Apparently, they were not available to pitch in.
Gee, I hope none of the patrons planned on getting to work soon. I hope no one was planning to go somewhere quick. All of us now had a new job—waiting in line at the post office and taking orders from surly civil servants.
After better than thirty minutes in this egregious place—there were still ten people in front of me—it seemed as though we were all in the speed lane on the highway to Never Never Land. It was all too much for one poor soul. He jumped out of line and started banging on the door of the branch supervisor. After several minutes, he finally found this postal priest, “Would you come out and look at this?”
Now there were three windows open.
Still, the line moved very slowly. Forest Hills residents, who have been sentenced to the cruel and unusual punishment of going to their post office (or any post office), are advised to bring beach chairs, a hot meal and a radio.
Forty minutes into this ordeal and there were still plenty of people behind me. All of them, I’m sure, wondered if it would ever be possible to escape from this sentence. Yet, I wasn’t sure if I actually wanted to achieve the “Impossible Dream.” Did I really want to get to a window, with all the perils of dealing with a government that could ruin my life; that could lose my package?
(..)A delightful distinguished elderly Spanish woman stood in front of me in line. She couldn’t believe what was happening. She just wanted some stamps, a task that was turning into an hour-long event. She quietly asked,“Why is this taking so long? I’m never coming here again.”
Ojalá, senora! Olajá! (Here is an Arabic phrase that made its way into the Spanish language, a phrase signifying “may God grant” something. Olajá! If only we could privatize the post office and the…”). In any language, here is a phrase that sums up the anguish of millions of people who must deal with our postal service (sic).
If only this lady’s quite reasonable objections, and the objections of millions of others who dare to question this moron monopoly, made any difference in the world. Unfortunately, buena senora, they just don’t. Believe me, they don’t. Letters to members of Congress—clowns like Rep. Anthony Weiner and career television performer Senator Chuck (“Where’s the camera?”) Schumer—about the mails are useless. You get back idiotic form letters from these mountebanks telling you they “care” and “are investigating.” Why should anyone expect reform from these hinds? Many of these pols are in the pockets of the postal service union.
Luckily, the technological revolution is making the postal service, and it’s monopoly increasingly irrelevant. What letters to Congress won’t do, e-mail will. One advice to the postal service: adapt or die (Question: will it adapt as long as it has a monopoly, sanctioned and backed by the government? I vote no.).
(Via AdamSmithee)
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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22/12/2004
Een Kerstboodschap
Er zijn 55.000 soorten in ons land, wat betekent dat de biodiversiteit veel groter blijkt te zijn dan gedacht. Geen reden tot paniek dus. Maar dat is alweer buiten onze groene medemens gerekend. Want wat blijkt nu? Een derde tot de helft is met uitsterven bedreigt. Never mind dat zo lang de aarde bestaat, er reeds vele miljoenen (miljarden?) soorten zijn uitgestorven en dat er dit zo in de toekomst ook zal blijven (alhoewel de wetenschappelijke vooruitgang, bvb. op vlak van biotechnologie, hier een handje kan helpen). Misschien zal in de toekomst blijken dat de diversiteit nog groter is dan we nu aannemen. De reden waarom diersoorten uitsterven is spreekt voor zich: het is allemaal de schuld van de mens, ook van de Belg! Zelfs onverhoeds, via klimaatverandering, dragen we bij tot het uitsterven van de dieren. Never mind again, dat klimaatverandering de norm is en niet de uitzondering. Ook zonder mensen zou het klimaat veranderen en zouder er diersoorten uitsterven. Maar de mens draagt nog op vele andere manieren bij tot het uitsterven van sommige soorten. Via rioolputten bijvoorbeeld, zelfs al ligt er een raster op. Anderzijds werden de dieren dan toch gered...door mensen. Typisch niet? In staat tot het beste én het slechtste.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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22/12/2004
12.12.12
Bart Vanhauwaert is individualistisch, progressief en rechts. Het zou op mij kunnen slaan. Laat ik dan ook Bart maar citeren over die leugenachtige 11.11.11.-campagne inzake water:
Was 11.11.11 een bedrijf dan was het al lang op de vingers getikt voor misleidende reclame. Na de schandalige schandalige campagne verleden jaar blijft de NGO zich richten op de (vermeende) gevaren van de privatisering van essentiële nutsvoorzieningen zoals water.
11.11.11 hanteert een handige coctail van aangepaste boodschappen voor ieder publiek. Helaas schuwen ze de halve waarheden of zelfs ronduit leugenachtige verklaringen niet.
In contradictorische analyses ziet Marc Maes alvast bijvoorbeeld geen graten. Zo fulmineert in zijn toespraak op het watercolloquim (deels terecht) dat de private watermarkt een quasi duopolie is geworden. Maar twee paragrafen verder zet hij de aanval op de GATS akkoorden in met de beschuldiging dat die inhouden dat ...publieke en privémonopolies niet meer in stand mogen gehouden worden.
De perstekst over waterprivatisering in de Filipijnen is een schoolvoorbeeld van een halve waarheid. Letterlijk dan. Er wordt namelijk sterk ingezoomd op de problemen van Maynilad, een privaat waterbedrijf in Manila. Daarbij vergeet 11.11.11 ’handig’ dat naast Maynilad ook Manila water actief is. Een consortium dat het heel wat beter doet, ook voor de gebruikers.
En uiteraard wordt er met geen woord gerept over de crisis van 1997, El Niño uit 1998 of de vele politieke en administratieve rompslomp waarmee de twee bedrijven te maken hebben. Laat staan dat een journalist geïnformeerd wordt over de situatie voor privatisering met een publieke watervoorziening waar corruptie hoogtij heerste, werknemers onvoldoend opgeleid en uitgerust waren om de basishygiëne te garanderen van het distributiesysteem en waar door jarenlange onderinvestering het netwerk in een erbarmelijke staat verkeerde...
De fundamentele (halve?) onwaarheid in de 11.11.11-campagne betreft het beeld dat van GATS geschetst wordt. GATS wordt voorgesteld als een internationale Leviathan die van plan is om de hele bevolking van de derde wereld een basisrecht, namelijk water, te ontzeggen. Dit is volledig naast de feiten. GATS legt geen enkel land ook maar iets op, zonder dat het betrokken land daarmee akkoord gaat. Zo lang de Filipijnse regering niet aangeeft dat ze bijvoorbeeld haar watersector onder de regels van de GATS wil plaatsen, is deze organisatie compleet machteloos. Privatiseringen in de nutssectoren in Mexico bijvoorbeeld zijn er niet gekomen op vraag van de GATS maar onder druk van de V.S., via NAFTA. Deze privatisering overigens zijn wél grotendeels geslaagd, en hebben de overheid heel wat geld opgeleverd dat besteed werd aan sociale voorzieningen. En dan nog! Zelfs al laat een bepaald land haar watersector in aanmerking komen voor de GATS, dan nog wordt het geenszins verplicht om de staatsbedrijven te privatiseren. Maar als ze het doet, moet ze het kapitaal wel ook volgens gelijke regels openstellen voor buitenlandse ondernemingen.
Dit gezegd zijnde, is water nu een basisrecht of koopwaar? Beide. Het is niet omdat ik betaal aan de overheid in plaats van aan een privaat bedrijf voor het water uit mijn kraan dat het geen koopwaar is. En water uit de fles is zeker een koopwaar, én geproduceerd door private ondernemingen. Of stelt 11.11.11 voor dat we SPA (niet de partij) nationaliseren? Wat de Filipijnen nodig hebben is een Wal-Mart waar men tegen goedkope prijzen water in fles kan kopen. Dan komt hier een lastige vraag: waarom willen blijkbaar dat soort bedrijven onvoldoende investeren in de Filipijnen?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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22/12/2004
Utopia and the role of the state
I want to draw attention to these two pieces from Samuel Brittan. It’s about liberalism and the real role of the state in a liberal capitalistic and democratic system. First, is there a thing "called" the state? We all now that Margeret Thatcher once said that there was no such thing as society. This, i think, is not true. Society does exist. After all, humans are social animals. And we need some collective mechanisms at the least to overcome problems of coördination. Sometimes these mechanisms are voluntary, sometimes they are not. The "state" is a non-voluntary mechanism:
What is called "the state" is simply a mechanism by which citizens can provide collectively for items such as defence and security, which cannot readily be provided either through the market or through voluntary co-operation. It is also a mechanism for transferring claims to income or property from one citizen to another.
We need this "mechanism" if we want to have a decent society, a decent liberal society, a society where no one is "left to perish in the gutter". Beyond that the role of the state becomes much less clear. And we always, as liberals, have to ask ourself if the same goals - some collective provision, some minimum standard provided to everyone - cannot be reached with a more voluntary scheme. As Brittan writes:
Even at this time of year, adults could do well to remind themselves that there is no such thing as Santa Claus, Good King Wenceslas or any similar provider.
To adapt a famous remark of President John Kennedy, we should ask not what the state can do for us, but what we should do for each other.
In the second piece Brittan writes about the thoughts of J.M. Keynes. Keynes of course is known as the economist who provided for a new role for the government namely the stabilization of the business cycle. Without it, Keynes thought, capitalism would crash. In this he was probably right, but he was wrong in the main mechanism to achieve that:
A question that has long puzzled me is why Keynes attached such importance to public investment as a way of raising expenditure both in relation to deep-seated stagnation and to more conventional business cycle recessions. After all if a recession or slump is due to attempted savings exceeding attempted investment, why not then tackle the savings side by stimulating consumption?
The point that Brittan want’s to make is that, again, when we prefer voluntary mechanisms above state compulsion, we should prefer stimulating consumer demand when trying to stabilize the economic system. Let’s quote Brittan in full:
But now consider another possibility, which looks similar, but is basically very different. This is that people will voluntarily and without state compulsion move towards shorter working hours or a more congenial working environment, or longer holidays or more sabbaticals or some mixture of all these things. This will mean, not that saturation has been reached, but that above certain levels of income the demand is for leisure and a better environment rather than for more take-home pay and tangible goods. (Income elasticity of demand for "leisure" would then well exceed 1). Then we really would have the world of "economic possibilities for our grandchildren" described in an earlier essay of Keynes. The economic problem would not really have been solved, but we would enjoy a less puritanical and work-obsessed culture. This would be a utopia rather than a nightmare.
The danger is that policy-makers and opinion-formers will mix up those two kinds of reaction and plague us, as has already happened in the European Social model, with compulsory reductions of working hours, artificially early retirement and all the rest of the ridiculous battery of make work measures, instead of just encouraging flexible personal choices in all these matters.
To conclude. The chronic deficiency of demand, which Keynes feared was endemic to capitalism as a result of the experiences of the 1930s, has not been a feature of the post-World War II world, but who can be dogmatic that it will not recur? It is indeed important to maintain effective demand at a sufficient but non-inflationary level. If stimulus is required, consumer demand is just as worthy of being stimulated as investment, so long as consumption is broadly defined to include leisure environmental improvements and amenities in the workplace.
We can indeed have market capitalism without the Puritan work ethic if only we have sufficient imagination.
The danger indeed is that in Europe, it seems to me, people do not voluntary choose for more leisure, but are pushed into the informal and black economy by high taxes. They are working less time for the market, yes, but do they have more "real" leisure and amenities than, say, the Americans? Work in the formal market may not be great, but work in the black market could be worse. But most people do not choose to work in the black market, they are in a way forced into it. The U.S. may not be Utopia, but neither is Europe in this sense.
Searching for a common ground between proper Keynesianism (a role for government in stimulating demand and as such stabilizing capitalism) and proper neoliberalism (increasing personal flexibility and choice) may be the best way to reach utopia.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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22/12/2004
Een echte liberaal!
Een dikke proficiat voor Patrick Dewael:
De fankaart als verplicht controlemiddel is vanaf het seizoen 2005-2006 niet meer nodig. Minister van Binnenlandse Zaken Patrick Dewael wil zo families opnieuw warm maken voor het voetbal.
Door het afbouwen van de identificatieplicht kan één persoon weer meerdere tickets aankopen en op de dag van de wedstrijd beslissen om een match naar keuze bij te wonen.
De fankaart is wat mij betreft nooit een controlemiddel geweest, laat staan dat het de bedoeling had de veiligheid in de stadions te verhogen. Het was vooral een middel om wat extra geld uit de voetballiefhebber zijn zakken te kloppen, wat overigens voor weinig clubs veel aarde aan de dijk heeft gebracht. Voor de rest was de fankaart vooral hinderlijk: in de eerste plaats dan nog voor de sportliefhebber die altijd braaf naar zijn wedstrijd ging kijken. Fankaart? Pestkaart ja! Ik denk dat ik volgend seizoen maar eens terug naar het voetbal ga kijken, waar het moet bekeken worden, in het stadium.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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21/12/2004
Sprekende zoekmachine
Dat Lernout & Hauspie hier nooit aan gedacht heeft. Te veel bezig met boekhoudkundige truks waarschijnlijk:
Een Schots spraaktechnologiebedrijf heeft een zoekmachine voor het Internet ontworpen dat de zoekresultaten mondeling kan weergeven. CEC Systems verenigde in november al spraaktechologie met het zoeken op het Internet. Het werd de Speegle: een zoekmachine om informatie te zoeken die desgewenst auditief wordt weergegeven. De gebruiker heeft de keuze uit drie stemmen die bovendien nieuwsberichten van de BBC of het persagentschap Reuters kunnen aflezen.
Achterliggende idee is dat surfers door de enorme hoeveelheid informatie op het Internet afhankelijk zijn van zoekmachines als Google, AltaVista en andere Yahoo’s. Het uitzicht lijkt op dat van de startpagina van de gekende zoekmachine Google. Maar felle kleuren moeten mensen met visuele stoornissen helpen.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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21/12/2004
Wal-Mart, the U.S. and China
Again the U.S. and European countries like Germany and France have no reason to do China-bashing, because there are lot’s of profits to be made. The reason is that China, in contradiction to Japan but also Germany and France(hypocrites!), welcomes foreign companies with open arms:
While nations like Germany have worked hard to keep the American juggernaut out, the Chinese are saying, in effect, yes, please set up in our backyard. In recent years Beijing had allowed foreign retailers to open stores in China, but only for chains with sales of more than $2 billion. That rarefied global group included only Wal-Mart, Carrefour of France (which Wal-Mart is rumored to be interested in buying) and the Metro Group of Germany. Last week Beijing opened the door to smaller players, and lifted rules that had confined the three giants to a limited number of cities and forced them to work with Chinese partners.
Wal-Mart also buys a lot of goods in China so that is can sell it at high profits and low prices in the U.S. As such Wal-Mart is resposible for a large part of America’s trade deficit with China. This, however, is good news for the U.S. because prices of those goods imported from China would otherwise be much higher. The benefits for China are real as well:
What is obvious is that China, more than most nations, welcomes the disruptive impact of Wal-Mart’s business model, built on the scale of its stores and innovative use of information technology to keep track of what sells and what doesn’t. Chinese suppliers say Wal-Mart is already having a transformative effect on everything from supply chains, to distribution networks, to customer service. The company has a network of 10,000 suppliers for its China operation, most of which are small and not part of its global supply chain. Thus, the spread of Wal-Mart stores is raising efficiency standards for a growing number of Chinese suppliers, which is likely to make the nation an even tougher competitor in the international arena as well. Government officials see Wal-Mart as a good way to accelerate China’s transition from state planning to free markets and to "bring the country’s economy into the 21st century," says Li Fei, a retail-marketing professor at Tsinghua University.
As are the benefits real for the Chinese consumer: quality cd’s for instance can be bought for a price almost as low than prices charged by cd-pirates. Wal-Mart is making piracy unprofitable! Higher productivity, lower prices, better quality...only Wal-Mart also is a relentless cost-cutter. The costs cut first are wage costs. The result of the impact of Wal-Mart’s businessmodel onto the Chinese economy could well be lower wage increases. So the end result could well be that Chinese economic growth in the future will be good for profits but not so much for wages. That however in the long run would not be good for Wal-Mart as many Chinese still have not enough bying power to buy even very cheap products at the super market. If Wal-Mart want’s the create new powerfull markets, it should allow the incomes of the Chinese people to grow further. Now, at first sight, Wal-Mart seems to be accomodating:
Perhaps the biggest accommodation Wal-Mart has made for China is to allow unions. Wal-Mart fights unions around the world, and resisted at first when Beijing warned the company to allow unions in its China stores. Last month Wal-Mart appeared to reverse itself, saying it would allow unions—but only if employees asked. It’s not certain if any have yet, and Chinese unions are arms of the Communist Party anyway. They generate money for the party through dues and help it keep tabs on workers—many union leaders are actually company executives. They are not going to obstruct Wal-Mart’s drive to raise efficiency.
There you have it. It is very likely that the Chinese unions will more be a partner instead of adversary of Wal-Mart’s management to keep the cost cutting process ongoing, and to subdue every form of labor unrest. Chinese unions are not Western unions.
Brad DeLong notes that in the U.S. productivity growth of 3%-4% a year has not lead to real wage growth after three years. This could well be because of the spread of the cost-cutting model of Wal-Mart where high productivity is the result of cutting the cost of wages. Will the same thing happen in China?
(Hat Tip: Always Low Prices)
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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21/12/2004
Interesting Developments
Some interesting developments in the ICT-world. Wal-Mart is introducing the cheapest laptop to date, and it’s running on open source software. The deal between Wal-Mart and Linspire is likely to give a boost to sales of open software from home users, where Microsoft is still going strong. Because even if Microsoft is more user-friendly than open source, the lower price may overcome that problem for consumers searching low-priced ICT. On the other hand Microsoft is fighting back, using the positive elements of open source. Microsoft works with others on a plan allowing consumers to download all songs on Napster’s catalog. The only condition for consumers is that they have to subscribe for 5 dollards a month. Experts say that Microsoft’s innovation will provee to be a better businessmodel than that of the Apple iPod. Of course you are "stuck" with the music on Napster’s catalog, and thus restricted in choice, however wide. And this wealth of choice, i think, is still the biggest attaction of "illegal" file-sharing programs, not the fact that it is free. Nevertheless, and thanks to competition from open source, all these developments are beneficial to consumers.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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20/12/2004
Election advice
At the Iraqi elections, vote for the communists:
Once one of the strongest in the Arab world, the Iraqi communist party has always prided itself on being virtually the only faction to overcome the country’s communal divisions and recruit senior cadres from the long oppressed Shiite and Kurdish communities as well as the Sunni Arab elite.
But after two decades of Saddam Hussein’s iron-fisted rule which manipulated and accentuated sectarian division, and forced the party itself to go underground, the ageing militants who have resurfaced are facing an uphill struggle in their bid to take advantage of their newfound freedom.
The communists’ historic slogan: "A free country and a happy people," which echoed around the stands of this stadium Friday would have been a virtual death sentence under Saddam’s regime.
(...)
A full 91 of the 275 candidates on the party’s People’s Union list are women, a matter of great pride for Culture Minister Mufid Al-Jazairi, the communists’ representative in the US-backed interim government.
It seems to be the only proper secularist political party in Iraq, with a liberal slogan, and with due attention for women rights. And it’s the only Communist party i know to get a representative in a US-backed government, so they must do something right. Freedom for communists: quite a cause to be backed by the American imperialists pigs. Yes, G.W. Bush is reshaping the rules of politics. For the Iraqi communists, it’s for the better.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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19/12/2004
Time Person of the Year
According to Time, the Person of the Year is G.W. Bush:
For sticking to his guns (literally and figuratively), for reshaping the rules of politics to fit his ten-gallon-hat leadership style and for persuading a majority of voters that he deserved to be in the White House for another four years, George W. Bush is TIME’s 2004 Person of the Year
The other contenders apparently were: Bush’s nemesis’ Michael Moore, Mel Gibson and the blogger community (here, here!). Something to think about: a moron who is capable of reshaping the rules of politics (and reshaping the rules of the economy, and reshaping politics in the Middle-East)! For better or for worse, the guy is having an impact.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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19/12/2004
The battle for the free market is not won, not even half
A few days ago i reported on an article of Milton Friedman. He wrote that neoliberalism has won the battle of idea’s against socialism, but that on the other hand government interference still is on the rise, irrespective of who is in power. Now comes Arnold Kling saying that even the battle of idea’s isn’t won yet, and that it is unlikely it will be won by neoliberalism in the future. The fact is that the structure of the economy is shifting towards sectors were governments still plays a big role, and will play a big role in the future: education, heath care and leisure time (including retirement). In the past two decades neoliberalism won big victories in some sectors. Take telecom. Governments role there, at least in terms of public provision, is much smaller than two decades ago. Other examples are electricity, public transport and so on, were liberalization and privatization has made large inroads. But those neoliberal principles are not getting any foot on the ground in growing sectors like education. Even the smallest suggestion of opening up the sector of higher education for foreign influences and competition, for instance via GATS, is sending shivers through the spine of even liberal parties in Europe. And so government worshippers have an easy time:
Simply by holding on to public provision of schooling, Medicare, and Social Security, those who distrust markets can ensure that government will play an ever-larger role in our lives.
The struggle continues, the struggle for educating the public:
My sense is that the vast majority of citizens are indifferent, confused, or content regarding the expansion of the welfare state. They neither understand the economic argument for the benefits of a smaller profile for government nor appreciate the philosophical argument for freedom and responsibility.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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19/12/2004
The future of science and innovation
What’s wrong with America’s system of science and innovation? Here are some facts from the National Innovation Initiative Final Report:
* Federal funding, a mainstay of discovery research, has been
in long-term decline, now only half of its mid-1960s peak of 2
percent of GDP. Excluding spending on defense, homeland security
and space, federal investment in fundamental research
is expected to decline in real terms over the next five years.
* Corporate R&D dropped nearly $8 billion in 2002, the largest
single year decline since the 1950s.
* Total scientific papers by American authors peaked in 1992
and have been flat ever since.
* The service sectors, that represent more than half of U.S.
economic activity, lack the underpinning of robust research
investment into innovative business process design, organization
and management.
* Manufacturing has not been sufficiently linked up to the new
sciences and technologies – emerging fields like nanotechnology,
multifunctional materials, and process design – that could
revitalize America’s competitiveness.
Of course even if America gets everything right, it’s leadership in science and technology still will be under "threat", for the simple reason that the rest of the world is getting better also. Again some facts from the same report:
* Foreign owned companies and foreign-born inventors account
for nearly half of all U.S. patents with Japan, Korea and Taiwan
accounting for more than one-fourth.
* Sweden, Finland, Israel, Japan and South Korea each spend
more on R&D as a share of GDP than the United States.
* China overtook the United States in 2003 as the top global
recipient of foreign direct investment.
* Only six of the world’s 25 most competitive Information Technology
companies are based in the United States; 14 are based
in Asia.
* Asia now spends as much on nanotechnology as the United
States.
In fact I believe that America should not worry about the rest of the world getting better. A bigger pool of scientists, research & development, innovatieve companies, investments in new technologies is likely to be beneficial for America even if it’s companies are not world leaders and even if it’s scientists recieve much less nobel prices than in the past. This does not mean however that the U.S. should not do everything it can to improve further it’s own system of science and innovation, because that would be good for the rest of the world as well..
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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19/12/2004
Microsoft versus Microsoft
Meet the newest competitor of Microsoft Windows:
Office, Microsoft Corp.’s collection of programs for business documents and tasks, is fast becoming a software platform unto itself.
A growing number of software developers are creating programs that run on top of Office, in the same way that Office and thousands of other applications run on Microsoft Windows.
Plug-ins are available that make Word a lawyer-friendly word processing system or turn the Excel spreadsheet into a virtual financial advisor, along with hundreds of other programs that boost the capabilities of Office software.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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18/12/2004
U.S. is not U.N.
Things are going further astray lately between the U.S. and the U.N.
First, Thomas Friedman accuses the U.S. government of trying to withhold a U.N report on Arab human development because it’s critical of the war in Iraq. The accusation now essentially is confirmed by a U.N official.
Second, and on the other hand, U.S. officials are relishing in the possibility that former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz is going to give names of U.N. officials who took bribes in the oil-for-food scandal.
While the U.S. department of state has denied the first item, U.N investigators refuse to comment on the second. And so the ordeal between U.S. and U.N. continues.
(Hat tips: Harry’s Place and Charles Paul Freund)
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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18/12/2004
Governments versus the people, children versus adults
Governments, of any stretch or ideology, can be so silly. To paraphrase Brad DeLong a bit, why of why are people in the world sometimes ruled by these idiots? Marc Cooper:
It’s a pretty grim scene along Havana’s famed malecon seaside drive this week-- an electrified pissing match between two deeply hypocritical governments.
Washington has no formal in embassy in Cuba but its practical equivalent -- the U.S. Interests Section-- sits in a well-known building right on the coastal road. This week U.S. diplomats put up a merrily-lit Xmas exhibition on the property with twinkling lights, a Santa, a Snowman etc.
That alone probably would have ticked off Fidel’s government. For some time Christmas wasn’t "recognized" in Cuba and it was only a few years ago that Cubans could start buying very expensive artificial Xmas trees in the hard-currency stores. But what really got Castro’s goat this time was the big number ’75’ that the Americans planted in the middle of the holiday display -- the number of Cubans hastily rounded-up and tossed into jail last year for thought crimes.
Now, on its own, this ain’t a bad idea to hector Cuba over its transgressions. The rub, of course, is the obvious selectivity of the U.S. protest gesture. If the U.S. government boldly spoke out against repression in every country where it has a diplomatic mission this world would be a better place. So I’m not opposed to what the gringos did, per se. I just wish they did it everywhere (in China or Pakistan they would have to use a lot more than two digits).
Now, the Cuban government has responded tit for tat. Giant posters of the abuse pictures of Abu Ghraib have now been installed and illuminated right outside the doors of the U.S. mission in Havana. The Cubans have further embellished them with bright red swastikas--something that tells us volumes about the margins for subtlety in Cuban political thought (as it is).
I find both governments to be deeply, deeply hypocritical. The actions of both governments insult our collective intelligence. The U.S. display was certainly intended to provoke (which it has) and does NOT reflect real Bush administration policy (which is to tolerate equal or worse repression by our "friends").
The Cubans should take little succor from the outrages of Abu Ghraib. The misbehavior of American troops in Iraq -- or Guantanamo-- in no way explains, excuses, nor justifies the total lack of political freedom or the absence of rule of law in Cuba.
Those lights along the malecon -- from both sides-- illuminate only the folly of those who have placed them. Where are the adults?
And then governments expect citizens to behave like adults? Well, then stop these silly games and give citizens some real freedom and resposability. Maybe they can behave like adults.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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18/12/2004
World peace coming?
From Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
"Fewer people are dying as a result of war now than at almost any time since the 1920s. According to the forthcoming Human Security Report (to be published by Oxford University Press), there were some 27,000 deaths from all forms of political violence in 2003, the most recent year for which we have data. During the 1990s the average annual figure was more than five times as high, mainly concentrated in Africa—Angola, Congo, Sudan and, of course, Rwanda. The 1980s were bloodier but the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s were the deadliest decades, with most of the fighting and dying concentrated in East and South-East Asia."
And that with the worlds dangerous man in the White House! Or is neoliberal globalization not only leading to less poverty and inequality but also to less war?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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17/12/2004
Apocalyps tomorrow
What have Francis Fukuyama, Hegel, Marx, the Raelians, Zoroaster and the Christians in common? They are all "end-of-timers", believers in one way or another of some kind of apocalyps. Ignoring all the rest I personally prefer Zoroaster above the Christians. At least with Zoroaster after the end of time everything would be perfect for eternity, while with Christians it would only be good for the next thousand years. After which global warming presumably put an end to it!
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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17/12/2004
Predicting the stock market
How to convince people that you can correctly predict the movement of the stock market? Here’s the answer:
Select around 6000 or so names and addresses from the London telephone directory. Divide the names into two groups. To the first write predicting that the market will rise over the coming week. To the second write predicting a fall in the market. At the end of the week keep the 3000 or so names who were given the correct prediction and discard the others. Divide those names in turn into two groups. To the first predict a rise in the market and to the second a fall. Repeat this process for five weeks, at which point there will be around 200 people to whom we could write the following letter. “You may well have been sceptical when you received our first letter, but by now you will know that we have worked out the secret of predicting successfully the direction of movement of the stock market. You know that our method really works. To subscribe to our investment service please send £5000 by return”.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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15/12/2004
Verkiezingen in Iraq
Geweld in Iraq inderdaad. Het lijkt niet op te houden. Maar toch ook 80 lijsten voor de volgende verkiezingen met meer dan 50.000 kandidaten. Tienduizenden Irakezen dus die democratie belangrijk genoeg vinden om mogelijke terreuracties die ook hen kunnen treffen, te trotseren. Niet alleen is er geen tekort aan personen die deel willen uitmaken van het democratisch systeem, maar die het ook willen verdedigen, met hun lijf en leden. Hoe dan ook een positieve evolutie als je het mij vraagt. Het stalinisme van Saddam is dood; de prille Iraakse democratie vecht om te overleven. Laten we het voluit steunen.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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15/12/2004
The wisdom of crowds on roads
I think it was Frans De Waal, a Dutch psychologist, who suggested that to make roads safer the one thing we should not do is ...make them safer (or something like that). If people consider a road unsafe they would drive more carefully. The result is less accidents. Now comes this experiment reported in Wired. Roads are made more dangerous by removering street signs and croswalks. Yes, that’s right, no street signs. The result? Less dangerous roads:
Monderman and I stand in silence by the side of the road a few minutes, watching the stream of motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians make their way through the circle, a giant concrete mixing bowl of transport. Somehow it all works. The drivers slow to gauge the intentions of crossing bicyclists and walkers. Negotiations over right-of-way are made through fleeting eye contact. Remarkably, traffic moves smoothly around the circle with hardly a brake screeching, horn honking, or obscene gesture. "I love it!" Monderman says at last. "Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks out for each other. You can’t expect traffic signs and street markings to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into the design of the road."
(...)
In Denmark, the town of Christianfield stripped the traffic signs and signals from its major intersection and cut the number of serious or fatal accidents a year from three to zero. In England, towns in Suffolk and Wiltshire have removed lane lines from secondary roads in an effort to slow traffic - experts call it "psychological traffic calming." A dozen other towns in the UK are looking to do the same. A study of center-line removal in Wiltshire, conducted by the Transport Research Laboratory, a UK transportation consultancy, found that drivers with no center line to guide them drove more safely and had a 35 percent decrease in the number of accidents.
The wisdom of crowds i guess, not in need of guidance from "above". Wonderfull.
(Via Marginal Revolution)
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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15/12/2004
Wrong war again
I wish i could disagree with Christopher Hitchens but i can’t. He’s so right. Drugs are not the enemy, terrorists are. But by fighting the wrong war (that on drugs), we could turn the Afghans in enemies again. Do we want that?
Reporting from Afghanistan a few months ago (Vanity Fair, November 2004) I pointed out a few obvious facts. Twenty and more years ago, the country’s main export was grapes and raisins. It was a vineyard culture. But many if not most of those vines have been dried up or cut down, or even uprooted and burned for firewood, in the course of the hideous depredations of the past decades. An Afghan who was optimistic enough to plant a vine today could expect to wait five years before seeing any return for it, whereas a quick planting of poppies will see pods flourishing in six months. What would you do, if your family or your village were on a knife-edge? The American officers I met, tasked with repressing this cultivation, were to a man convinced that they were wasting their time and abusing the welcome they had at first received in the countryside. It doesn’t take much intelligence to understand the history of Prohibition, or to know that American consumer demand is strong enough to overcome any attempt to inhibit supply. In any case, we know this already from dire experience in Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico.
I think there is a hell of a case to make for considering drugs (at least those drugs like marijuana which has medical uses) as normal products: consider the fact that drug use by young people is lower in relatively liberal Holland than in other, more stricter, European countries. Maybe we should consider drug use as something unacceptible. But this does not mean that we should criminilize drug users. And it certainly should not mean we have to make war against people who have to grow drugs in order to live, like many Afghans. As always, read the rest.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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14/12/2004
Anti-Americanism
This is not a surprise:
An A-P survey shows that Bush is viewed negatively by a majority of people in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and even among respondents in the closely-allied countries of Australia, Britain and Canada.
Those numbers are particularly high in France, Germany and Spain, where the poll indicates 70 percent of people don’t like Bush.
But what may be suprising is that a majority of the French and the Germans don’t like Americans in general. We always hear that Europeans are not anti-America, they just don’t like Bush. But apperantly something more is going on.
UPDATE
Daniel Drezner writes:
One wonders just how much anti-Americanism abroad is driven by the distorted lens of American expats. Whjile I was waiting in line to enter the magnificent Musee D’Orsay, I overheard one conversation between an American expat living in Germany and the French couple in front of her. The American explained that Bush is worse than Hitler and that he really didn’t win the 2004 election -- he made Democrat ballots disappear.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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13/12/2004
Uninformed comment
Michael Totten doesn’t like Juan Cole:
An American was murdered by an Iraqi because he "looked Jewish" and Professor Juan Cole (perhaps the most over-rated blogger in the world) blames, wait for it, Israel!
"The Iraqi killer of Reserve Navy Lt. Kylan Jones-Huffman has been brought to justice in an Iraqi court. Although he has since changed his story, he at one point admitted to killing Jones-Huffman with a bullet through the back of the neck while the latter was stuck in traffic in downtown Hilla. The assassin said that he felt that Jones-Huffman "looked Jewish." The fruits of hatred sowed in the Middle East by aggressive and expansionist Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza against the Palestinians and in south Lebanon against Shiites continue to be harvested by Americans."
This from a guy who arrogantly calls his blog "Informed Comment."
Well, professor, I suppose you join a phalanx of "informed commenters" who blame the United States for the World Trade Center attacks. Nice company you have there. Do you blame black people for Ku Klux Klan lynchings and cross-burnings? Perhaps you blame the gay rights movement for the murder of Matthew Shepherd. I’m just assuming since you’re a professor that you know how to apply a little consistency in your thinking, but I wouldn’t know. I found this entry via Andrew Sullivan, who reads your blog so I don’t have to.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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13/12/2004
Disgusting department
Here’s a view for the "progressive community":
Given Iraq’s history and ethnic and religious divisions, any leader who is less willing than Hussein to kill large numbers of people may not be able to govern at all. The one thing worse for the average person than a government like Hussein’s is the total absence of government.
Probably. But there are so many things better than a government like Hussein’s. It would be a good thing if the progressive community started to work for one of those, instead of trying to defend Saddam, or the so-called resistence fighters. (Why do we hear so little about the real freedom fighers, the Kurdish peshmerga’s? Is it because they fight with the Americans?)
Via Harry’s place, where a commenter writes:
Unbelievable.
I have a kurdish friend who’s older brother was shot by Saddam himself during a "dissident" lineup.
I’m at a loss for words after reading that...except for the age old adage- "hey, at least the trains ran on time".....
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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12/12/2004
Kerik’s demise
The demise of Bernard Kerik’s nomination for the next Secretary of Homeland Security doesn’t seem to be a bad thing:
It was apparent from the outset that Kerik’s vision was limited to that of a being a former valet to Rudy Giuliani. Or more charitably, he seemed to have the narrow mindset of street cop who believes even the most complex problem can be solved with a swift kick in the nuts.
(...)
The dirt on Kerik was pretty deep. From abusing his authority by using cops for private purposes, to running some sort of racket inside New York jails, to his questionable tenure as top adviser to the new Iraqi police, to once being on the pad of the Saudi elite, to raking in more than $6 million on a deal selling tasers to the same DHS he was going to direct, to having a love child in Korea.
Did I leave something out? Oh yeah, the illegal alien nanny that just got “discovered” and which supposedly undid him earlier tonight. Now there’s a bullshit story if I ever heard one. According to Kerik, he didn’t find out until a day or two ago that the woman in question, the woman who was working as a servant to his family, was actually illegal.
You gonna believe that? And this guy was going to be in charge of all of our immigration agencies?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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12/12/2004
Real Democrats
A few days ago Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez noted that there were no real democratic countries in Latin-America. One could take issue with this assessment of course, but let’s take a look at the man himself. Chavez is the winner of this year’s Human Rights Award, the Human Rights Award that is of... Colonel Ghadafi. Ghadafi: a real democratic leader! Chavez just completed a tour of a few of the real democratic countries in the world: Cuba, Libya and Iran. And Chavez has just enacted a new real democratic law in Venezuela, so real and so democratic that the law has been condemned by Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Watch.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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12/12/2004
Less than half full
Milton Friedman notes that after two decades of neoliberal idea’s in politics (and the intellectual defeat of socialism), big government is still with us. Friedman writes about the U.S. but the last part is even more true in Europe. The era of neoliberal globalization did not change the global impact of government. In Europe the glass is less than half full.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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12/12/2004
Better than tranquilizers (or parents)
Video games:
Letting children play video games on a Game Boy in the operating room before undergoing surgery can help relax them better than tranquilizers or holding Mommy’s hand, researchers say.
(Via Marginal Revolution)
The toy industry is good for something after all. What a wonderworld we live in.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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9/12/2004
China is opening up
China is not Japan, overwhelming the rest of the world with cheap exports while keeping it’s own economy closed. Not true, China (already remarkably open, if you take the share of trade or FDI in GDP) is opening up, and business leaders know it:
Senior executives and scholars across the world believe that China has done a fairly good job in fulfilling its World Trade Organization (WTO) commitments in the past three years, according to a survey conducted by Andrew Stoler, a former deputy director-general of the WTO.
However, inconsistent laws and practices at different level of government and intellectual property right (IPR) protection remain top concerns.
About 70 per cent of 119 survey respondents think that China is taking its WTO pledges seriously and agree that barriers in most sectors are coming down quickly. Only 2.5 per cent hold a different opinion.
A majority of them, roughly accounting for 90 per cent, believe China’s efforts to honour its WTO commitments to date has had a positive impact on foreign business operations in China.
About 80 per cent agree that China has so far basically kept pace with its WTO commitments with respect to the banking sector.
The survey shows that confidence has replaced early concerns and worries among foreign investors over China’s process of opening-up under the WTO.
"China has well stood by its WTO promises since it became a member in late 2001," said Fan Ying, a professor at China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing.
"The country opened some of its sectors such as tourism and trading ahead of the deadline," she said. "And a number of non-tariff barriers were dismantled to facilitate goods inflows."
Remember this when you hear textile (or other) executives whining about unfair competition from China.
MORE
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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9/12/2004
Outsource this!
China is rising:
In a moment on Wednesday, the gathering might of the Chinese economy became as imposing and obvious as the Great Wall. This was no economic forecast - no set of percentages and decimal points that hinted obliquely at the power that 1.3 billion shoppers could someday wield. This was news that a Chinese company had agreed to buy one of the most venerable product lines in the history of American technology: IBM’s PC business.
The deal, announced in Beijing, evokes images of the 1980s, when Japan swept through the American marketplace in sorties of Sony TVs, turning homegrown companies like Zenith into free-market flotsam. Indeed, in coming years, a tide of Chinese cellphones and refrigerators could find their way into American homes. Yet China Inc. goes beyond that.
The IBM deal symbolizes one of the first waymarks of the new economic order, as China not only adds innovation to its well established assembly-line ethic, but also opens its borders to the global marketplace with an eagerness - and a population - that Japan could never match.
And while the upshot is not likely to lead to the collapse of the American business machine, it does point to the seemingly inevitable rise of a challenger to the economic hegemony America has enjoyed for nearly a century.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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8/12/2004
Look who’s talking...
President Hugo Chavez said that there are no real democracies in Latin-America. One wonders if he also includes his own country.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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5/12/2004
To which type do you belong?
It occurs to me that there are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.
(Via Andrew Samwick)
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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4/12/2004
Succes is relative, Joe
From Jagdish Baghwati:
(...) Stiglitz is my colleague at Columbia and he’s hard to pin down because when he talks with people like us he sounds very amiable and agreeable. But then he goes in front of a crowd of a hundred thousand in Bombay at the World Social Forum...suddenly all restraint and wisdom gets dropped, and then he’s sort of speaking to a large crowd. He actually told me that he faced a hundred thousand people at Bombay. (...) But I did tell him that he should not get too excited, because I grew up in Bombay and when I went for a walk to the beach, I normally saw about two hundred thousand people! So that doesn’t mean very much in Bombay.
Great to know. The beach is much more popular than the anti-globalists.
(Via Marginal Revolution)
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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4/12/2004
Quote of the day
From the new Becker-Posner Blog:
(P)reventive war is justified because of the potential severe consequences of waiting until attacked to apprehend.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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4/12/2004
Pat Buchanan is a jerk
Right-wing paleo-conservative Pat Buchanan finds that Putin has all the right to intervene in Ukraine. The U.S. on the other hand should not meddle in the internal affairs of that country. It has no vital interests there. It interests are keeping up it’s relations with Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin. But be siding with Putin the U.S. sides also with the current rulers of Ukraine who are now officially accused of election fraud and harassment of the Ukrainian people. So it’s pretty clear on which side Pat Buchanan is on. Don’t forget that the same Buchanan was against the invasion in Iraq. And don’t forget that Buchanan is only protesting now when the U.S. sides with the democratic forces in a former Russian republic. We did not hear him about the middling of the U.S. in other former republics like Kazachstan popping up dictatorships. Democracy is not in his dictionary.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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4/12/2004
En dat we toffe mensen zijn....
De VRT schiet tekort in zijn opdracht, vindt Luc Van Braekel:
De VRT vindt het blijkbaar belangrijker om met geld van de belastingbetaler de privé-sector concurrentie aan te doen op het vlak van amusement, dan om actief te zijn op dat terrein waar de privé-sector in een kleine markt als Vlaanderen onvoldoende rendabel kan of wil zijn: het voltijds brengen van informatie, nieuws, duiding, en discussie via een radiostation dat geen muziek uitzendt, maar enkel woord. In landen als de VS en Groot-Brittannië bestaat wel nieuws- en/of talkradio die op louter commerciële basis wordt gebracht, naast de publieke nieuws- en praatzenders (NPR in de VS, BBC Radio 4 in de UK). In een kleinere markt als Nederland zijn daartoe diverse mislukte pogingen ondernomen, o.a. met Veronica Nieuwsradio en Talk Radio. Het huidige Business Nieuws Radio, dat zich toespitst op zakelijk nieuws, lijkt wel te overleven. Zolang er op de Vlaamse markt geen privé-initiatieven opstaan die een 24-uurs nieuws-radiostation willen exploiteren (en die kans is klein), lijkt het mij de verdomde plicht van de VRT om daarvoor te zorgen, eerder dan allerlei pretnetten uit te baten.
Lezer Eric Jans reageert:
Hallo, mensen van de VRT (mochten jullie dit lezen), hallo Luc!
Radio 1 is een toffe, vlotte zender met tof nieuws en vlotte duiding! Al dat gepraat... is dat wel nodig. Kort en krachtig, vlot en tof moet het zijn!
Net zoals wij in ons land toffe, vlotte scholen hebben waar gelukkig niet te veel aandacht besteedt wordt aan de geschiedenis. Enkel wat data en toffe, vlotte historische feiten.
Wij zijn dan ook een land vol toffe, vlotte mensen met een toffe, vlotte regering en een zo mogelijk nog toffer en vlotter koningshuis.
Ook ik ben een toffe jongen die elke dag weer vlotter door het leven gaat.
Daarom, wees niet te streng, Luc, voor die toffe, vlotte mensen van de VRT.
Inderdaad. Pret lijkt te overheersen op de Reyerslaan. Nochtans moet de VRT een aantal performantiemaatstaven halen. Ze moet een ruim publiek bereiken ook voor nieuws. In feite is de VRT de enige openbare omroep in Europa die inzake kijk- en luistercijfers elk jaar prestaties moet leveren. En die zijn overigens niet van de poes. Op zich vind ik het niet slecht dat men van een openbare omroep verlangt dat het een ruim publiek bereikt. Men mag immers ook niet vergeten dat de VRT als openbare omroep niet zomaar objectief nieuws moet brengen, maar ongemanipuleerd nieuws. De burger heeft daar recht op. Probleem natuurlijk is dat de VRT dat wel eens durft de vergeten. Het halen van de performantiemaatstaven lijkt belangrijker te zijn dan de kwaliteit van het nieuws. Eric heeft gelijk: het moet blijkbaar alleen maar vlot en tof zijn. Type voorbeeld: De zevende dag. Informeren is niet zo belangrijk, als het maar leuk en gezellig is. Het programma is domweg knullig als je het vergelijkt met Buitenhof op Nederland. Zelfs Amerikaanse commerciele zenders als CNN en NBC doen het veel beter met hun zondagse politieke praatprogramma’s. Of vergelijk Witteman met Bracke. Paul Witteman is ook een sociaal-democraat, maar dat merk je niet, hij is gewoonweg een goede journalist waar die kinderachtige Sigfried Bracke niet kan tippen. En wanneer men op Nederland erin slaagt met een wetenschappelijk programma (nieuwslicht) een groot publiek te halen, terwijl de VRT op hetzelfde moment het debiele Swingpaleis uitzendt, heb ik een gevoel van plaatsvervangende schaamte. Ook radio 1 is dus blijkbaar in hetzelfde bedje ziek. Toch haalt de VRT met gemak zijn performantiemaatstaven (logisch op radiovlak, met vijf zenders!). Desondanks schiet ze tekort. Iets om over na te denken.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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4/12/2004
A general advice...
A general advice for politicians in Belgium and abroad: be carefull comparing others (or yourself) with Stalin....
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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4/12/2004
Free trade in textiles? Not in your life...
In less than a month, the policy of textile quota’s will end. In principle we will have a system of free trade beginning on january 2005. But in principle only because it’s very unlikely that all countries will eliminate all limits on textile imports. We probably will see an big increase of activities on the anti-dumping front. Countries like the U.S. will probably restrain textile imports from China because of so-called unfair competition. Nothing new under the sun here, as the first restraint on Asian textile imports dates from 1701:
Britain’s East India Company, finding the heavy black woolen "broadcloth" its directors had hoped to export unappealing to tropical-country buyers, began instead to ferry Asian cotton back to London late in the 17th century. Cool, cheap, and colorful, the Indian "calicoes" (so-called because many were shipped from Calicut in modern Kerala) sold well, but their popularity was not universal. Daniel DeFoe -- associated with the wool industry as well as the author of Robinson Crusoe -- asserted that "above half of the woolen manufacture was entirely lost, half of the people scattered and ruined, and all this by the intercourse of the East India trade;" John Barrett, MP for Lynn, gloomily said that wage gaps gave India an advantage so big as to threaten the British textile industry’s future, as English garment workers earned a shilling a day and Bengalis only "a copper."
Such arguments proved convincing to Parliament, which passed a law in 1700 (but as noted above, effective as of September 29th, 1701; the delay was meant to accommodate ships en route), to ban the stuff. Familiarly known as the "Calico Act," it asserted that "the continuance of the trade to the East Indies... must inevitably be to the great detriment of this kingdom, by exhausting the treasure thereof, and melting down the coin, and taking away the labour of the people..." The act thus outlawed imports of "wrought silks and stuffs mixed with silk, of the manufacture of Persia, China or East India, and all calicoes [i.e. cotton] painted, dyed, printed or stained there," unless it was then reshipped for export to Europe or the American colonies.
The law, apparently not a total success, was augmented in 1720 by a second Calico Act, which claimed that British manufacturing faced "utter ruin and destruction," and imposed five-pound fines on anyone found wearing Asian-made cotton clothes. (This no small penalty -- at a shilling a day for a garment worker, five pounds represented about four months’ wages.) This seems not to have worked either; by 1728 another writer friend of the wool industry was denouncing British women as driven by "their passion for their Fashion" rather than the national interest, and scandalously indifferent to the balance of trade. Ultimately, as in some more recent similar challenges, technology proved a better solution: the invention of the spinning jenny and the water-frame loom, kept Britain in the 18th-century textile field.
Note that not protectionisme (which did not work), but technology kept Britain competitive. It should be a lesson for all those whining about China’s unfair competition caused by low wages.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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4/12/2004
Comparative advantage
We are all free traders and that’s a great thing, but alas we don’t seem to know it:
In running our personal affairs, virtually all of us exploit the advantages of free trade and comparative advantage without thinking twice. For example, many of us have our shirts laundered at professional cleaners rather than wash and iron them ourselves. Anyone who advised us to "protect" ourselves from the "unfair competition" of low-paid laundry workers by doing our own wash would be thought looney. Common sense tells us to make use of companies that specialize in such work, paying them with money we earn doing something we do better. We understand intuitively that cutting ourselves off from specialists can only lower our standard of living.
Now i like to think that we Europeans are less of a free trader than Americans. I think we do more tasks ourselves that we could "outsource" to specialized companies in the market than Americans, thus less exploiting our comparative advantage. And i do like to think that this is not because of cultural differences but because of high taxes:
Taxes tend to penalize market time. If I use goods and services bought in the market to save on household chores, then I have to pay sales taxes. When I work additional hours to earn income to buy those goods and services, I have to pay payroll taxes and income taxes. Those taxes constitute a tax wedge.
That tax wedge is higher in Europe than in America, and very high by the way in Belgium. We can consider this as a kind of tariff. Instead of goods from another country, goods and services coming from the market are taxed this time. The result is that they become dearer and that we "consume" less of them. Either way we are cutting ourselves of from the people and companies that can do these things better, lowering our standard of living. Then again, we are already rich enough aren’t we? And working at home and not for the market is so much more gratifying isn’t it? And all those taxes are well spend no? Maybe, but even if this all is true,why should it be forced upon us by high taxes? Maybe we should have more freedom to choose here for ourselves. Specializing in those things we are good it can be very gratifying. And it does not only lead to a higher standard of living but ultimately to more leasure too(you generally need less time to do things you are good at). The joys of comparative advantage.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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4/12/2004
Yes, global warming IS caused by human activities
Is global warming caused by human activities? Well, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says so, and other scientific institutions and associations agree. And so do most papers published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 (928 papers in total). In fact, not one paper disagreed with the scientific consensus. Of course consensus does not mean that we have found the truth here, and we should not jump to the conclusion that the Kyoto-protocol is a good and efficient way to deal with climate change. But these observations surely makes one sceptical of the sceptics case. I hate to say this, but there is no other way to interpret this i think. Besides, i’m a great defender of another issue that is (almost) the consensus view in science (well, at least in the economic science): the superiority of free trade versus protectionism. So i have to be consistent. However, this does not mean we must dismiss the sceptics view (which goes way beyond the simple link between global warming and human activities). Science needs dissent too.
(Via Chris Mooney)
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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2/12/2004
North versus South
Hey, even G.W. Bush is right sometimes:
"I haven’t seen the polls you look at," Mr Bush said, when asked about his unpopularity among Canadians. "We just had a poll in our country," Mr Bush continued with a faint smile, "where people decided that the foreign policy of the Bush administration ought to be - stay in place for four more years."
(Via Norman Geras)
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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2/12/2004
Show me a tariff...
Show me a tariff and i’ll show companies lobbying for it, wrote Don Boudreaux, in reply to Thomas Frank. Let me do it for him:
The Bush administration yesterday said Chinese and Vietnamese shrimp are sold at unfairly low prices in the United States, siding with U.S. fishermen (here is meant the U.S. shrimp industry) as they try to fend off overseas competition.
The decision reaffirms new trade barriers on the country’s most popular seafood, though the new duties meant to counter the competition are not as high as requested by the industry.
"Although U.S. shrimpers believe the [Commerce] Department understates the amount of dumping in certain instances, they reaffirm our contention that shrimp is dumped in the U.S. market," said Eddie Gordon, president of the Southern Shrimp Alliance, which represents shrimpers from North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.
As Thomas Frank should know the people hurt by this are the people he pretends to stand for. Consumers and the Vietnamese poor. The winners are the coporations that lobbied for the tariff. This will continue as long as people like Thomas Frank believe in the false religion of protectionisme and fail to criticize the Bush-administration using that religion to back up corporate welfare.
(Via Daniel Drezner)
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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2/12/2004
Why free trade?
Why free trade? Here’s the answer:
Opponents of free trade are in the position of arguing that national governments should pick and choose winners and losers among various types of businesses and impose the government between the buyer and seller of various goods and services, an idea completely contrary to individual liberty and free enterprise. The right to engage in voluntary exchange transcends national boundaries.
Trade restrictions on foreign products lower the standard of living for consumers. Tariffs, quotas, and other trade barriers are the functional equivalent of a tax, artificially raising the cost of foreign goods and increasing the price that consumers must pay. Moreover, the structure of trade restrictions imposes a disproportionate burden on those least able to pay. The trade restriction "tax" is a regressive one. Nearly two centuries ago the Corn Law tariffs raised the cost of a loaf of bread, a burden that fell most heavily on the poor, today the European Common Agricultural Policy does the same, raising the cost of basic foods.
Opponents of free trade often claim that foreign competition reduces domestic employment. However, the evidence contradicts this claim. If imports harmed domestic employment, we would expect to see unemployment rise whenever the trade deficit expands. However, an analysis of trade data reveals that exactly the opposite appears to be true. Unemployment appears to fall even as trade deficits increase. In addition, the cost of saving jobs through protectionism is often extremely high. Higher prices and reduced access to goods represents an extremely expensive form of job protection.
However, trade protection actively harms workers because it can cost jobs. First, raising the cost of imports costs jobs in domestic industries that consume foreign goods. For example, protecting domestic sugar producers hampers the export of candy bars. Denying American auto manufacturers access to low-cost imported steel drives up the cost of American-made cars and makes them less competitive on the world market.
Protectionism also encourages other countries to raise barriers against trade. Export-related jobs are high-paying jobs. That a policy of unilateral free trade can lead to prosperity can be clearly seen from the example of Hong Kong. While its products are restricted by most nations, Hong Kong levies no import tariffs and has few import barriers of any kind. Indeed, Hong Kong has one of the most accessible markets in the world. As a result of this policy, the city enjoys one of the highest standards of living in Asia, rising wages, a buoyant capital market, and a rapidly growing economy.
Free trade is good for consumers, business, and workers. It encourages economic growth, which is the engine of poverty reduction. Free markets and free trade provide the goods and services we need cheaply, in a way that would not even be possible without cross border trade. We are all better off as a result.
There is another dimension to free trade, it unites mankind in the bonds of peace. Today we could not imagine the trading partners of the EU going to war, yet in the last century world wars twice ravaged mankind. In the words of the great free trade campaigner Richard Cobden, ""I see in the Free Trade principle that which will act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe - drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonisms of race, and creeds and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace... I believe the effect will be to change the face of the world, so as to introduce a system of government entirely distinct from that which now prevails. I believe the desire and the motive for large and mighty empires and gigantic armies and great navies... will die away... when man becomes one family, and freely exchanges the fruits of his labour with his brother Man."
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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1/12/2004
Het belang van Filip
Twee observaties omtrent het Prins Filip incident:
1) Het land staat nu op zijn kop omdat Prins Filip zich publiekelijk gekant heeft tegen de partij die zijn geliefkoost België wil doen barsten. Maar wisten we dat dan al lang niet? Is er dan iemand die werkelijk dacht dat Filip vóór het Vlaams Belang zou zijn? We weten allemaal perfect dat het koningshuis rabbiate tegenstanders zijn van de partij van dat andere Flupke. Maar nu dat één lid van het huis van vertrouwen die mening ook uit, vallen we schijnbaar allemaal om van verbazing. Mensen die zich nu keren tegen de prins, omdat hij zegt wat hij, en het hele koningshuis, al lang denken, hadden dat dus al eerder moeten doen. Nu verontwaardigd doen over zijn uitspraken is wel heel schijnheilig.
2) Aan de andere kant ben ik het niet eens met Professor Van Orshoven wanneer hij stelt dat Filip, in tegenstelling tot de Koning, recht heeft op vrijheid van meningsuiting. Dat heeft hij, maar enkel tot op zekere hoogte. Kijk, de Koning ontvangt van ons belastingsgeld jaarlijks een flink bedrag om zijn taken te vervullen. Eén van zijn kerntaken bestaat er precies in om zich boven het politieke gewoel te stellen. Daarom ook kan hij zijn mening niet uiten over de partijpolitiek. Hij mag zich daar nu éénmaal niet mee moeien, anders stuikt ons politiek bestel, waar hij als Koning deel van uitmaakt, in mekaar. Hetzelfde geldt voor de andere leden van het koningshuis, en zeker voor de troonopvolger. Ook hij krijgt handenvol geld van de gemeenschap. En dat brengt verantwoordelijkheden mee. Zoals geen uitspraken doen die het politiek bestel schade berokkenen. Ik kan me indenken dat hij graag wél zijn mening wil uiten. Maar dan moet hij niet meer rekenen op zijn dotatie. En dan moet hij ook niet verbaasd zijn als de roep om het koningshuis af te schaffen groter wordt. Ook in zijn eigen belang kan hij dus best zwijgen me dunkt.
Dit alles gezegd hebbende, wat in elk geval overblijft is een gevoel van onbehagen bij de monarchie. Wat een absurd systeem! We zetten aan het hoofd iemand die niet verkozen is. Maar omdat hij niet verkozen is mag hij niet regeren. En om de regeerders en de verkozenen niet in het nauw te drijven, moet hij zwijgen. Daarvoor betalen we hem dan.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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30/11/2004
Fighting for free trade
Fighting for free trade is fighting against:
1) corporate lobbying
2) the false religion of protectionism
3) the fools who think that free trade is a religion and somehow unilaterally pro-corporations.
Don Boudreaux fights for free trade:
To the Editor:
Thomas Frank besmirches the case for free trade ("American Psyche," Nov. 28th). First, he assumes that free trade is largely and only pro-business and, hence, that it is forced on us by "corporate power" and "industry lobbyists." Not so. Show me a tariff and I’ll show you corporations lobbying for it. Show me a tariff cut and I’ll show you corporations that fought the cut as well as consumers paying lower prices and workers in jobs that would have been otherwise impossible.
Second, he smears free traders as being devotees of a "false religion" guided by "faith." So charged, this free trader challenges Frank to a public debate – face to face, or in writing – on the merits of free trade versus protectionism. I promise to use, not faith, but only reasoned arguments and abundant empirical evidence. Contrary to Frank’s assertion, the preachers of false religion are the protectionists who, lacking evidence and coherent arguments, faithfully proclaim that protecting domestic suppliers from foreign competition is key to economic salvation.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Right on!
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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30/11/2004
O de ironie
Steve Stevaert wil goedkopere medicijnen. Dat de industrie daardoor verlies leidt of minder winst maakt vindt de SP-A voorzitter niet erg. Ze besteden toch meer geld aan reclame dan aan onderzoek, vindt hij. Niet onlogisch, als je veel geld steekt in onderzoek voor een kwaliteitsvol medicament dan wil je ook dat het product verkoopt niet? En dus besteed je ook veel geld aan reclame. Zo werkt de markteconomie nu eenmaal. Producten zouden goedkoper kunnen zijn zonder reclame, maar als een producent geen reden heeft om aan te nemen dat hij zijn product verkocht krijgt, zal hij ook geen geld steken in onderzoek. Overigens uit wetenschappelijk onderzoek blijkt ook dat reclame leidt tot meer economische groei. En meer groei betekent meer inkomsten voor de overheid dat aan allerlei sociale doelen kan besteed worden.
Maar goed Stevaert verwijt de industrie dus te veel geld te spenderen aan publiciteit. En dus wil hij zijn idee voor goedkopere medicijnen absoluut aan de man brengen (verkopen dus). Hoe gaat hij dat doen? Door een reclame-bureau in te huren. En wie betaalt dat dan? De SP-A natuurlijk. Maar als democratische partij krijgt die een dotatie vanwege de overheid. Het is dus niet uitgesloten dat voor zijn reclamecampagne de gewone burger meebetaalt. Wat kan de SP-A voorzitter de pharma-industrie dan nog verwijten?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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30/11/2004
Spontaneous (dis)order
Those were the days:
The radio frequency spectrum in the United States was first used, and radio
broadcasting became big business, in an amazingly short time, about twenty years. In
1922, two years after the first regular broadcasts, there were more than 600 radio stations
‘on the air’ somewhere in the nation. Two years later there were 1,400 and at least
one broadcaster could be received in every state. Dozens sprang up in some large cities
although the permitted spectrum could allow only seven comfortably. Broadcasters
were a come-as-you-are party of government bureaus, newspapers, telephone and
power companies, hotels, local feed stores, department stores, and other retailers,
laundries, labor unions, political radicals of many stripes, muck-raking demagogues,
established politicians and office holders, religious organizations (some very
unorthodox), educational institutions, radio manufacturers, small ethnic groups,
chiropractors, piano companies, grain exchanges, poultry farms, sellers of marble and
granite, hospitals, ice cream parlors, and quack doctors specializing in cures for
“middle aged male fatigue.” For the first few years, there were almost no established
broadcasts, networks, enforceable property rights to frequencies, or other government
regulation. Experimentation, spontaneity, and content aimed at small audiences were
common. Many financial models were discussed, and some were tried: advertising,
regular fees from subscribers, fees charged to program-creators for “renting airtime,” a
tax on vacuum tubes, other kinds of government funding, philanthropy (from a few great
benefactors or many small ones), “free” radio provided by businesses in non-broadcast
markets that operated stations to promote their products, and profits from sales of
radios. Most programs came from a few big coastal cities and reached many states,
sometimes across the entire country. In rural areas, where many people lived in those
days, there was little or no locally originated broadcasting. Little content was created
for broadcast; most had been created for other venues (such as hotel ballrooms or college
lecture halls) and was broadcast to distribute it through a new channel (e.g., putting a
microphone in front of the hotel orchestra or a professor). Contrary to the mythology of
later “Golden Ages” of radio and television, early radio contained much news and
cultural and educational broadcasting. For all its unpredictability, radio was hugely
popular and therefore, it is safe to assume, pleasing to consumers.
For all the tumult, by the mid-1920s there were signs of order emerging, with
minimal government regulation. A flurry of local legislation addressed some aspects of
interference. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover imposed, or “jawboned” rival
broadcasters into accepting, agreements to share the same channel by broadcasting at
different times. Courts enforced these agreements. At least one state court decision,
from Cook County, Illinois, applied common law precepts of unfair competition to
resolve an interference dispute between two stations that were using adjacent
frequencies. Secretary Hoover told stations that "they should in case of interference by
’pirate’ stations try out their common law rights.”
Much of the order that was emerging, however, came from the private sector.
Stations worked out private arrangements to share the same frequency or nearby
frequencies. In many cities, all local stations agreed not to transmit for one evening to
allow listeners to tune into popular broadcasts from far away. These “Silent Nights”
required significant coordination, trust, and self-sacrifice among competitors. Stations
in different cities occasionally linked themselves together to give widespread coverage of
an event occurring in one of the cities, representing the beginning of networks. The
NBC network began taking shape in early 1926, CBS about a year later. Content
started to be created just for broadcasting, in the form of the first dramas and situation
comedies.
Yes it was creative destruction, but only later on, when government intervened, emphasis shifted from creative to destruction. Government nationalised th spectrum, and decided instead of the people which radio station got spectrum and which part of it. The era of spontaneous order was over. In Europe of course things were worse: there never was any spontaneous order. Maybe the times are changing.
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30/11/2004
GMO’s to save lives
I wonder what Greenpeace would think of this:
A Danish company, Aresa Biodetection, has developed genetically-modified flowers that change color when their roots come in contact with nitrogen dioxide in the soil. Explosives used in mines produce NO2 as the chemicals gradually decay. The company plans to sow fields of NO2-sniffing Arabidopsis thaliana (Thale or mouse cress) in areas riddled with long-forgotten ordinance from Angola to Cambodia.
The effort’s life- and limb-saving potential is staggering: More than 100 million land mines kill or injure 26,000 people in 45 countries each year. Today’s most popular detection method is poking around with a stick.
And of course we could progam it in such a way that the flowers will turn green. Everybody happy no?
(Via Brad DeLong)
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26/11/2004
Treason
Sabah Salih:
in the Left’s vocabulary the Kurd is no longer a victim but a collaborator with an imperial power bent on sucking up the last drop of an oppressed people’s oil. As vague and sloppy as this line of thinking is, its emotional impact cannot be ignored: many easily fall for it. Sadly, for them thinking about Iraq remains forever locked within the ideological simplicity of such framework. It is a rhetoric within which the beheaders and silencers of the word are glorified as “nationalist” fighters and those opposing them as misguided colonial servants.
And the truly sad part is that the imperial power is letting the Kurds down once again. Read the whole thing.
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24/11/2004
The world...a better place
At least on one indicator the world has become a much better place. Infant mortality has been declining for almost five centuries now. In 1955, 148 of every thousand children died before their first birthday. By 1980 that figure was 79. In 2000 that number declined further to 55. I think this is a major achievement for mankind especially because the decline in infant mortality is (almost!) universal. Indeed, UNICEF, whose 2004 ’State of the Child’ report publishes rates in 1960 and 2002, finds rates falling in all 156 countries supplying data for both years. And this improvement occurred of course in an era of vastly increasing inequality and poverty in the world, or so they say.
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21/11/2004
What governments can learn from markets
Somalia is a so-called "failed state". But that doesn’t mean that the private sector fails too. Sure, Somalia urgently does need a working government to intervene where markets fail (and to stop the violence of course). However, even when governments don’t invervene or, worse, intervene in such a way that markets carry a heavy burden, private succes stories are possible. Take the telecom sector in Somalia:
Many local companies have teamed up with international giants such as Sprint (U.S.) and
Telenor (Norway), providing mobile phones
and building new landlines. Vigorous competition
has pushed prices well below typical levels
in Africa, and Somalia now has 112,000 fixed
lines and 50,000 mobile subscribers, up from
17,000 lines before 1991. Yet not all is well.
Calling every phone subscriber in Hargeisa, in
the Northwest, would require connections from
four telephone firms. But firms in Mogadishu
have now agreed on interconnection standards,
and those in Hargeisa appear to be following
suit.
There are other successes with air travel, electricity and even the justice system, considered as a typical task for government. The general conclusion:
The achievements of the Somali private sector
form a surprisingly long list. Where the private
sector has failed—the list is long here too—
there is a clear role for government interventions.
But most such interventions appear to be failing. Government schools are of lower quality
than private schools. Subsidized power is being
supplied not to the rural areas that need it but
to urban areas, hurting a well-functioning private
industry. Road tolls are not spent on roads.
Judges seem more interested in grabbing power
than in developing laws and courts.
A more productive role for government
would be to build on the strengths of the private
sector. Given Somali reliance on clan and reputation,
any measures allowing these mechanisms
to function more broadly would be welcome;
credit and land registries would be a good start.
And since Somali businesses rely heavily on institutions
outside the economy, international and
domestic policies supporting such connections
would help.
For governments and aid agencies, the capability
of some business sectors to cope under the
most difficult conditions should give hope and
guidance in other reconstruction efforts. It may
take less encouragement than is commonly
thought for stripped-down systems of finance,
electricity, and telecommunications to grow.
We always hear that governments at the least should provide some rules and enforce property righs before the market can even work. But the experience in Somalia seems to suggest that governments can learn something from the private sector too.
(Via Hit and Run)
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19/11/2004
GM-food on the rise
Would you believe it? Trials in China show that genetically modified rice leads to an 80% reduction in pesticide use, while yields are 4 to 8 percent up (so it’s possible to use less land than with ordinary rice, or use as much land but feed more people). And what do Greenpeace do? It’s campaigning against it. Rachel Carson, that "great" fighter against pesticide use, must be turning in her grave.
On the bright side; China, India and Brazil have plans to increase the role of GM-foods:
China, where many farmers already grow GM cotton, is likely soon to authorise commercial growing of GM rice. And Brazil is close to setting up a mechanism that could legalise all GM crops.
Way to go, Lula, you’re my favourite left-wing president. But Europe, due to unfounded fears, is increasingly left behind.
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19/11/2004
Wrong war
This is not good:
Afghan government spokesman Jawed Ludin said the drug war would be the top priority of the new government being formed by President Hamid Karzai after his election victory last month, "perhaps more important than terrorism".
The war on drugs is not only the wrong war, it’s also wrong to consider it a war. I can imagine that the international community don’t want Afghanistan to become a narco-state. But the drug problem is a problem of demand, not of supply. As long as many Americans and Europeans are lured into taking drugs, there will be others to supply them. If not Afghan warlords, then drug trafficers from Columbia. You can’t fight this demand of drugs by making war, not on the users nor on the growers of the crops. Drug addicts should be helped, not punished. And farmers of drug crops like opium should be supported to diversify, not killed. As long as they have no alternatives they will keep on growing opium. It’s their livelyhood. In this war, some don’t hesitate to use weapons of mass destruction like crop spraying (probably used in secret by the Americans - drug eradication is a high priority for the American military, by order of Donald Rumsfeld - luckily it’s opposed by the Afghan government), resulting in too much collateral damage. There are no precision guided weapons here.
UPDATE
Ted Galen Carpenter writes:
Some 264,000 families are estimated to be involved in growing opium poppies. Even measured on a nuclear-family basis, that translates into roughly 1.7 million people, about 6 percent of Afghanistan’s population. Given the role of extended families and clans in Afghan society, the number of people affected is actually much greater than that. Indeed, it is likely that 20 percent to 25 percent of the population is involved directly or indirectly in the drug trade.
So do America really want to alienate all those people for the sake of a misbegotten war, while at the same time their support is needed to win the "war" on terror? We don’t want to drive them back in the arms (no pun intended) of the Taliban again, do we?
SECOND UPDATE
Here is more on the collateral damage of the war on drugs:
Afghanistan has managed to drag a fair number of people out of absolute poverty in the past two years, with some effect on a range of health indicators. One huge reason is a rebounding opium crop, which may have accounted for as much as 60% of Afghanistan’s economic output in 2003. As Brad DeLong points out, if you don’t buy Third World products, their makers just have to go off and do something less rewarding. In the case of Afghanistan, that’s likely to throw people back into absolute poverty, and that in turn means higher mortality. Heroin addiction is terrible. But death is surely worse. Given that, how hard should we persuing opium growers in the country?
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19/11/2004
Secularism and pluralism on the rise
On moral issues, catholic (but socialist ruled) Spain is increasingly becoming a liberal country, like most of Europe. Here are the proposals:
legalize same-sex marriage, relax restrictions on abortion, allow embryonic stem-cell research, simplify divorce proceedings and greatly reduce the role of religious instruction in schools. In addition, some officials have discussed, but have not formally proposed, either curbing taxpayer funding of the Catholic Church or granting subsidies to other religions.
What a difference with America, where Christian fundamentalism is rampant. But, hey, things are changing in America too. An historical artifact of the Puritanical America is coming undone: the ban on Sunday sales of alcohol, the so-called blue laws:
Like other battles between church and state, the repeal of remaining blue laws may be a sign of how secular America has become. "Religion doesn’t play a central role in politics anymore," says Mr. Drummey. "This does represent a shift - more of a symbolic changeover from another time,"
And it’s a sign, too, of America’s growing pluralism. "The Sabbath was a time for religion, for family, to renew kinship bonds," says Dr. Snyder. "But religion isn’t static in this country. Sunday, Christmas, Easter - these aren’t necessarily the days of celebration for everybody anymore. [The repeals] show how dynamic society is, and how much things change."
Of course in the second case the changes are the result of the requirements of commerce and so probably less genial to some on the left (Spain, by the way, has very liberal laws on shopping, it is ahead of many European countries like Germany in this regard). Indeed, these changes are part of a broader trend towards more shopping on sunday’s, which horrifies not only religious people but also many socialists and unions. But nevertheless the result is the same: growing secularism and pluralism. If you want to drink or shop on sunday by all means you may (but don’t drive and not too much hey!). If you want to go to church on sunday by all means you may. If you want to do both you may. And if you are gay and you want to marry you may and, if you are a Christian, in the future maybe on a sunday and before the altar.
(Thanks to Political Theory Daily Review and Kevin Brancato for the pointers.)
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19/11/2004
The dumb historic president
Let’s face it: G.W. Bush is a very unappealing person, and president. He is a liar, he’s dumb, can’t speak, walkes ugly and is a religieous fundamentalist. He is powercrazed and made the American government bigger than ever. And the intrusion into people’s lives by the government greater than ever. Yes, he cut taxes, but for very few and rich Americans and - what is worse - he didn’t cut spending, au contraire. In short, he’s a nutcase. So you have to ask yourself: Why aren’t the Democrats able to beat this moron? And suppose that Bush keeps his promise concering a Palestinian state in 2009. (He does keeps his promises occasionally: look at taxes, Iraq and the Taliban, so why not on Palestine?). Then we have a president that in eight years toppled two dicatorships, Saddam and the Taliban and gave a "resolution" to the question of Palestinian statehood. Shouldn’t we call that historic?
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18/11/2004
With this kind of leader....
Whatever you may call Arafat, an inspired leader or a terrorist, he sure wasn’t a Nelson Mandela:
(...)Arafat managed to be both a killer and a compromiser (Mandela was neither), both a Swiss bank-account artist and a populist ranter (Mandela was neither), both an Islamic "martyrdom" blow-hard and a servile opportunist, and a man who managed to establish a dictatorship over his own people before they even had a state (here one simply refuses to mention Mandela in the same breath)
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18/11/2004
Question
Will the next U.S. president be a former drag queen?
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18/11/2004
Reasons to be cheerfull
Globalization is working, again:
Developing countries will enjoy their best year of economic growth in 2004, producing a "spectacular" drop in poverty around the world, the World Bank said yesterday.
Releasing its annual report on global economic prospects, the World Bank said developing countries will register growth of 6.1% this year and just above 5% in 2005 and 2006. This compares with overall global growth of about 4% for this year.
Nor were these increases confined to the fast-growing economies of China and India but were widespread around the developing world with the notable exception of Africa, said Ari Dadush, director of development prospects at the Washington-based organisation.
"A lot of countries have grown a lot faster in the past couple of years than they did in the 90s. And growth is the single most important driver of poverty reduction. It is absolutely fundamental," he said.
Did someone say neoliberalism?
The faster growth was possible because of a sustained improvement in their macro economic stability, greater flexibility in moving resources to competitive opportunities, a better investment climate and continued progress in reducing trade barriers.
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18/11/2004
The future of libertarianism
Reasons to be cheerfull:
We don’t belong to a single well-defined Group, but, increasingly, to many loosely-defined groups and of our own choosing. The structures we experience are less organizational and more networked and spontaneous. Our epistemic instincts are constantly challenged. We get used to "knowing" many people of celebrity who do not know us. Meanwhile, we do not know the fellow who lives next door. People pursue their own interests and communities and freely ignore the vast social oceans that share a wall to their homes. Increasingly there is no common experience, and people know it. Disjointness proliferates not only in experience but also in interpretation of public affairs. The official political culture is losing dominance. Increasingly, people ignore the major media. They go to the websites, radio programs, and cable television stations that offer the interpretations they prefer. These competitive commentaries take aim at the official interpretation, they turns news dominance into the news, just as school children use email to laugh behind their teachers’ backs. Media success stories like television’s John Stossel and radio’s Larry Elder, as well as many of the popular intellectual blogs, show that the current market demand can sustain a libertarian line, and the demand might increase, gradually but steadily, as awareness of this viewpoint grows. Big government still can exercise brute power, but can it retain support? The impulse and agenda to create encompassing common experience, an encompassing government-led romance, is increasingly recognized as a sham and a menace.
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18/11/2004
Hollow words
French president Jacques Chirac thinks the toppling of Saddam didn’t make the world a safer place:
There is no doubt there has been an increase in terrorism ... it also provoked reaction such as the mobilization in a number of countries of men and women of Islam which has made the world more dangerous.
Well, I can understand that one finds the rise in terrorism more worrying than keeping in power a murderous and terrorist regime like that of Saddam. What is unexplicable, however, is why Chirac’s France supplied(supplies?) terrorist states like that of Sudan with weapons to perpetrate a genocide. Wouldn’t the world (at least a large part of Africa) be safer if France (and other countries) stopped those deliveries? Anyway, as a friend of Saddam, Jacques Chirac is not well placed to lecture Blair or Bush on Iraq. At least he should have the guts to take a more principled stance towards the genocide in Sudan. Until then his words ring very hollow to me.
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15/11/2004
Another reason to ditch agricultural subsidies
More (deadly) costs of agricultural protection and subsidies:
Industrial trawling, much of it subsidised by the European Union, has had a devastating effect on wildlife in coastal west Africa, as higher fish prices force local people to turn to bushmeat, a study published on Friday said.
Populations of 41 species of large mammals in Ghana plunged by 76 percent between 1979 and 1998 while catches of fish by foreign trawlers soared, it said.
The biggest mammal declines occurred during years when fish prices on local markets were high, prompted by scarce catches by Ghana’s fishermen.
Nearly half of Ghana’s human population of 20 million lives within 100 kilometers (60 miles) of the Atlantic coast, which means many people are tempted to turn to bushmeat if the fishing harvest is poor, it says.
Most of the big foreign trawlers are registered in and subsidised by the EU.
EU fish catches off West Africa increased 20-fold from 1950 to 2001 and financial subsidies for vessels working there went from six million dollars in 1981 to more than 350 million dollars (270 million euros) in 2001, it says.
(Via kickAAS)
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14/11/2004
al-Zarqawi escaped....
This is really maddening:
As many as 1,000 insurgents have been killed in the six-day battle for Falluja, an operation that is "almost finished," Iraqi national security adviser Kasim Dawood said Saturday.
But terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and a lieutenant, Abdullah Junabi, both escaped, he said.
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13/11/2004
Humans are not rats
Research on rats has shown that by restricting calories they can live longer. Some has concluded from this that humans can live longer too by eating less and taking antioxidant supplements. But it appears that we cannot just extrapolate the case of mice to the case of humans. We differ to much in terms of metabolic stability. Because of our already high stability there is less room for improvement than with mice. Restricting calories will not lead to a much longer live. So i’m gonna have my steak now. And i’m still going to live forever!
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13/11/2004
Geloof en vrijheid van meningsuiting
De tijd is niet ver meer af dat Theo Van Gogh zelf verantwoordelijk zal worden gesteld voor zijn eigen dood. Zoals de Amerikanen is overkomen na de aanslagen op elf september, zal men zeggen: hij heeft het zelf gezocht.
Op een moment dat nog andere politici worden bedreigt omdat ze hun mening durven zeggen, ook al doen ze dat op een uitgesproken manier, zijn er alweer andere politici die vinden dat de vrijheid van meningsuiting zelf het probleem is. Zo wil de Nederlandse minister van justitie Donner kritiek op geloof harder gaan aanpakken. Hij vindt dat men gelovingen niet in hun diepste overtuiging mag beledigen. Er zijn grenzen aan de vrijheid van meningsuiting, stelt hij. Je mag niet zomaar alles zeggen, aldus nog Donner.
Ik ben het hier niet mee eens.
Vrijheid van meningsuiting is een absoluut recht. Dit wil zeggen dat dit recht voor iedereen geldt, onafhankelijk van ras, geloof of cultuur. Of men nu in Afrika of in Azië woont, gelovig is of niet, Arabier is of niet, doet er niet toe. Altijd heeft men het recht zijn mening te zeggen. Daar kan, in naam van één of andere godsdienst of één of andere fatsoensnorm (wiens fatsoensnorm? die van Donner?), niet op worden afgedongen.
Het feit dat vrijheid van meningsuiting een absoluut recht is (dus niet relatief, afhankelijk van een bepaalde omstandigheid), betekent inderdaad niet dat er geen grenzen zijn aan die vrijheid. Tot zover wil ik Donner nog wel volgen. Zo mag men niet oproepen om een persoon of groep fysieke schade te berokkenen.
Maar daar heeft Donner het dus niet over. Kennelijk is hij van mening dat Van Gogh moslims geen "geitenneukers" mocht noemen. Nog een stap verder en een film als Submission, de film van Van Gogh en Ayaan Hirsi Ali over de onderdrukking van moslimvrouwen, wordt verboden, omdat het sommigen in hun diepste overtuiging kan beledigen (enfin, heeft beledigd). Dat is geen beperking, maar censuur.
Als Van Gogh moslims "geitenneukers" noemt, kan dat van slechte smaak getuigen. Maar het slechte smaak vinden geeft iemand nog niet het recht om mensen als Van Gogh het zwijgen op te leggen, niet via een moord, maar ook niet via censuur.
Het geloof of de kerk moet niet beschermd worden tegen beledigingen, onschuldige maar uitgesproken burgers moeten daartentegen wel beschermd worden tegen de bedreigingen van gelovige fanatici. Als minister van justitie zou Donner zich beter met het laatste bezig houden, dat zal al moeilijk genoeg zijn.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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13/11/2004
America’s trade deficit with China
In 2001 Wal-Mart bought for more than $ 10 billion in goods from China, good for 4% of China’s total exports that year. Wal-Mart did this because of cost savings. The result is that Americans can buy cheaper goods at Wal-Mart than otherwise would be the case. So the facts are that American companies like Wal-Mart are in big part responsible for the American trade deficit with China and that this is a good thing for American consumers.
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13/11/2004
The costs of agricultural protection
The costs of agricultural protection:
1. OECD-countries spend $ 235 billion per year to support agricultural producers while only $ 60 billion on foreign aid. On the other hand, studies suggest that unimpeded global trade in agriculture would boost developing country income by about $ 200 billion per year.
2. American taxpayers support agricultural producers for $ 12 billion in 2002. American consumers pay higher prices for agricultural products because of tariffs, quota’s, and price guarantees. Cost in 2002: $ 15 billion. The American economy lost $ 900 million in 1998 because of protectionism for sugar producers.
3. In Europe price supports exceeded $ 57 billion in 2002. Subsidies, tariffs and other protectionist measures for producers amounted to more than $ 100 billion. British taxpayers alone pay £ 3.9 billion per year.
4. Farmers support goes overwhelmingly to big farms, not small. In the U.S. eigthy percent of subsidies go to big farms and the agribusiness. Ten percent of the recipients collect about two-thirds of all subsidies. Seventy-eight farms got over $ 1 million each in subsidies. The same is happening in Europe. In Britain for instance, the Duke of Westminster, one of the most wealthiest men of the country, recieves £ 1.000 in subsidies PER DAY.
5. Cotton producers in Francophone Africa lost about $ 700 million in income because of lower prices due to cotton subsidies in wealthy countries.
6. Who pays for agricultural protection? Apart from the Third World: taxpayers, consumers, urban and suburban dwellers, employers and workers in less or unprotected sectors of the economy.
So not only are the costs of agricultural protection high. Protectionism is also unfair. Some big agricultural producers benefit, while agricultural producers in the third world AND the vast majority of Americans and Europeans lose through higher taxes and prices. Even small farmers in Europe and the U.S. do not necessarily win in the current regime.
It’s time to eliminate it, won’t you think? Fat chance. Even limited reform seems very remote. However, thanks to recent rulings of the WTO, for instance in cotton, things are starting to change. A big breakthrough probably is only possible when free trades advocates on the one hand and development organizations like Oxfam on the other try to form an alliance. Because in this case both parties are natural allies. It won’t be easy. For most development advocates the mere mentioning of the words "free trade" can send shivers through their spine. Many defenders of free trade on the other hand are not only adamantly opposed to tariffs but also subsidies ignoring the fact that some kind of subsidies are less trade distortionary than others and that some subsidies may well be necessary, for instance to protect the environment.
Take sugar. The European Union proposed a while ago a limited reform of it’s sugar policy. Sugar producers in Belgium of course opposed the reform and got the support of the president of the Flemish government, the christian-democrat Yves Leterme. So far nothing new under the sun. But when Dirk Verhofstadt (brother of the liberal prime minister of the federal government) proposed to eliminate subsidies, Oxfam Belgium opposed it too. It sided with Yves Leterme and chided Dirk Verhofstadt for his favourite stance towards free trade. In this case Oxfam Belgium stood on the side of agricultural interests in Belgium and not on that of farmers in the third world. It even took a position in contradiction to that of Oxfam International. What a shame!
Nevertheless, in the past years a grand alliance of politicians, NGO’s and civil society groups has formed around the issue of debt relief. As Bhagwati has put it, if those groups really want to be the "custodians of the third world", it should be possible to foment a movement of the same groups, including free traders, to "free the world of rich country protectionism".
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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12/11/2004
It’s not the economy, stupid!
It’s values!?
To stay out of poverty in America, it’s necessary to do three simple things, social scientists have found: finish high school, don’t have kids until you marry, and wait until you are at least 20 to marry. Do those three things, and the odds against your becoming impoverished are less than one in ten. Nearly 80 percent of everyone who fails to do those three things winds up poor.
Anything to back this up?
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12/11/2004
Left, right, Hitchens
Maybe this Hitchens will be liked more by the left. The man who (slightly) favors Bush draws attention to the banana-republic behaviour of the U.S., especially under the Bush-administration:
We sometimes like to sneer at the "banana republic" political culture of Latin America. But here’s how things now stand. Argentinean courts have incarcerated Videla. The Chilean courts have just lifted the immunity of Pinochet, who has additionally been accused of using Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C., to stash a fortune in stolen money and other loot. The families of the disappeared have begun to receive a measure of justice and honor. The graves are being exhumed. But these inquiries can go only so far. Judges in Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Paris have asked for Henry Kissinger’s testimony, since it is only in his papers and memos that the answers to many vital (and lethal) questions can be found. He persists in refusing to cooperate. The Bush State Department, to its shame and ours, continues to say that such questions should be addressed only through official diplomatic channels. This makes us complicit in the criminal behavior of a man who was in his time the (naturally, unelected) chairman and patron of the international dictators’ club. A suit has also been filed in a federal court in Washington, D.C., by the family of General René Schneider, charging Kissinger with orchestrating his killing. Every single paper in the prosecution dossier is a United States government declassified document.
The Schneider family has standing in this matter, not just morally, but legally-because of the Alien Tort Claims Act, which allows non-Americans to seek redress in American courts. This act dates from the 18th century and was one of the first laws of the American Republic. The Bush administration recently tried and failed to have the Supreme Court strike the ancient legislation down ... If I add that Henry Kissinger was offered the chairmanship of the 9/11 commission, and declined the honor only when he realized that he would have to disclose his unsavory client list at Kissinger Associates, you might start wondering which country is the real banana republic. While we ponder this solemn issue, the citizens of neighboring democracies petition us for simple justice and are contemptuously turned away, and we earn the distinction of harboring a man who does not travel anywhere outside the United States without legal advice, and who now fears even to set foot in the countries he so recently desolated and profaned.
This Hitchens will not be liked by the right. FrontPage magazine that regularily publishes pieces by Hichens did not publish the one mentioned above, and i don’t expect they will.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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12/11/2004
Caution on the precautionary principle
Cass R. Sunstein has written an interesting paper on the precautionary principle. We should be carefull (no pun intended) to use this principle. For one thing perception of risk is more important in calling for precaution than the risk itself. Sometimes we percieve a certain risk not only as very dangourous but also as something very likely to occur, while in reality this is not so. One should also pay attention to the role played by interest groups in shaping those perceptions. For instance, organizations opposed to gmo’s will talk about Frankenfoods or genetically MANIPULATED organisms, while those who favor it will talk about genetically MODIFIED organisms. Note by the way that it doesn’t matter if those organizations are acting in an altruïstic or self-interested way: they all try to convince people of their viewpoint by framing the question in a certain way. (There is hope, however, sometimes the benefits of a new technology is so overwhelming that the scare-tactics of some groups doesn’t work, and so they won’t use it. Concerning genetics in medicine no one as yet has talked about "Frankenpills" )
More important however is that the precautionary principle, when generally applied, defeats itself. Regulation to prevent some risk to occur, often has risks itself. For instance, one can ban nuclear energy. But as a consequence the problem of global warming will get harder to tackle. Regulating gmo’s out of existence can have grave consequences for poor nations. New medication obviously needs to be tested extensively before brought into the market. It has to be safe, or else it can harm people. But approval can take years, and in all those years, people cannot recieve the possible benefits of that medicine. And so on. As Sustein says, the precautionary principle "is offended by regulation as well as by nonregulation". So at least the precautionary principle can only be applied in a selective way. But in that case perpection and the role of interest groups in shaping those perceptions come into play again. So what to do? Ditch the principle? Maybe a weak version of it can help. Applied to the environment, is can be something like this:
Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.
Entirebly sensible. But it can also be turned around. Lack of full scientific certainty (an impossible goal in any case) that some threats won’t occur shall not be used as a reason for postponing the use of new technologies if they have major benefits and so to prevent these benefits.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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11/11/2004
Bush and social security privatization
It begins:
Fresh off re-election, President Bush is dusting off an ambitious plan to overhaul Social Security, a controversial proposal that had been shelved because of politics and the administration’s focus on tax cuts and terrorism.
Bush envisions a framework that would partially privatize Social Security with personal investment accounts similar to 401(k) plans.
A starting point is a plan proposed by a presidential commission in 2001 that would divert 2 percent of workers’ payroll taxes into private accounts. The remaining 4.2 percent -- and the Social Security taxes employers pay -- would go into the system, helping fund benefits for current retirees. That leaves a shortfall of at least $2 trillion to continue funding benefits for those current retirees.
Bush said his commission, headed by the late Democratic Sen. Patrick Moynihan of New York, provided "a good blueprint."
For future retirees, base benefits would be cut by tying them to inflation instead of wage growth, with stock market gains assumed to make up any shortfall. The concept gained support in the stock market boom of the late 1990s.
Some thoughts from Arnold Kling, Alex Tabarrok, Tyler Cowen, Max Sawicky, Brad DeLong and Andrew Samwick (see also here). Enjoy!
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11/11/2004
Chain of command
Maybe Seymour Hersh could write a book about this too?
U.S. forces found and freed an Iraqi who had been chained to a wall and beaten by his captors in a building in Fallujah, the military said Thursday. The man told Marines he was a taxi driver held for 10 days.
The man was bruised and starving when troops came across him Wednesday afternoon in the building in a northeastern district of the city, where U.S. and Iraqi forces have launched a huge assault against Sunni insurgents.
Marines spokesman Maj. Francis Piccoli said that U.S. troops had found the man chained to a wall and shackled by his wrists and ankles. The man had been beaten by his captors and was very malnourished, according to medical assessments.
And:
An Iraqi general said Wednesday that troops had uncovered buildings where foreign hostages had been held and possibly killed, finding CDs of beheadings and documents of foreign captives.
Abu Ghraib was indeed awful, and Hersh did a public service by exposing the "chain of command" that led to it. Now it’s time he put the spotlight onto the Sunni "insurgents", who are torturing and killing many innocent Iraqi’s and foreigners, and to the fact that Americans are now trying to save many of these people from the hands of the terrorists.
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11/11/2004
The search engine battle heats up
And that’s a good thing:
Microsoft’s first search technology went live on Wednesday. The software giant claims that the preliminary or "beta" version of its MSN Search stands out from other search engines because it offers "more useful" answers to questions and more control over searches.
Of course, Microsoft bashers will be hardly convinced. But never mind. The important fact is not that MSN Search is better or worse than Google. What is important is that there is fierce competition, and that Google needs to raise it’s game. It already has:
Microsoft also claims to have indexed five billion pages - more than any other search engine. But in a cleverly timed counter-attack that demonstrates how the search battle is heating up, Google also announced on Wednesday that it has increased its index from 4.2 billion to 8 billion pages. The number of pages directly reflects the size of the pool of information from which the engine will draw its results.
More information and better features to shift through that information. Keep it up, guys!
On a sidenote, Microsoft’s attitude towards "open source" remains ambivalent. On the one hand Microsoft is not revealing the core algorithms that MSN Search uses. On the other Microsoft will make the content of it’s online encyclopedia, MSN Encarta, available for free. It has too, to make it’s own search engine work better and more customer friendly.
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11/11/2004
Bad and good news on global warming
On global warming the situation doesn’t seem to be very good. The Progressive Policy Institute notes the latest Arctic Climate Impact Assessment reporting that the temperature of the far north is rising much faster than world averages. Nevertheless PPI also suggests that economic growth, efficiency and lower carbon emissions can go hand in hand:
Chinese emissions growth, for example,
was much slower than mid-90s modelers predicted: China’s economy
doubled in size but its emissions grew by only 17 percent, as Maoist-
era heavy industry plants were replaced by more efficient foreign-
investment projects. In more concrete terms, China put out a kilo and
a half of carbon for each dollar of GDP in 1990, but only six-tenths
of a kilo (same as the United States) today. Likewise as Poland
retooled and prepared for EU membership, its economy grew about twice
as fast as the European average; but its emissions actually fell from
350 million to 300 million tons a year, due to a drop in carbon
dioxide production from 1.9 to 0.9 kilos per dollar of GDP. Albania
and Latvia, though smaller, had even sharper drops.
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10/11/2004
Fallujah and uncertainty
Johann Hari talks to an Iraqi friend who provides two important facts about the Sunni "resistance" and Fallujah - a town that looks more like Taliban Afghanistan than Iraq:
First, there hasn’t been a single Shia suicide bomber in Iraq so far. That tells you something about who is trying to destroy security and why. Second, there have been just three weeks this year when there were no suicide bombs in Iraq. They were the three weeks the US forces had Fallujah surrounded. Doesn’t that suggest it is the base of the Sunni resistance? Doesn’t that suggest it is right to deprive them of their base by force if necessary?
Yet, Hari remains ambivalent, understandably so:
In the absence of a clear Iraqi majority to side with, it is tempting to break the rules of the Columnists’ Trade Union and confess uncertainty. I cannot see any way to hold an election unless Fallujah is reclaimed; Zarqawi is not going to agree to set up polling booths any time soon. Yet it is possible that crashing into Fallujah will enrage Sunnis across Iraq and fuel dozens of other smaller insurgencies. We just don’t know. The incursion into Fallujah is - in truth - a massive, bloody risk. So how do I tell Abdul that his grandparents might be about to die for a gamble?
We see here a big gap between facts and values, i suppose. The facts lead Hari to conclude that rooting out al-Zarqawi and the Sunni resistance in Fallujah may well be necessary. But innocent people will die in that attempt, people who could well be alive if the U.S. hadn’t invaded Iraq, an invation which Hari supported. Hari obviously values the lives of the innocent so he cannot get himself to support the attack on Fallujah. Then again, the U.S. did invade Iraq, and by toppling a murderous tyrant, it saved many innocent lives. That’s a fact. And by eliminating al-Zarqawi and his gang - who by the way also killed many innocent Iraqi’s - it can again save lives in the future. And that’s a fact too. But all these facts cannot by themselves close the gap....
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10/11/2004
Bush: the secularist president
Another certainty going down the drain:
George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he—and the U.S. armed forces—have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al-Qaida network, and the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries. The "antiwar" faction even recognizes this achievement, if only indirectly, by complaining about the way in which it has infuriated the Islamic religious extremists around the world. But does it accept the apparent corollary—that we should have been pursuing a policy to which the fanatics had no objection?
Yes, but you also have to take domestic policy into account, before "judging" Bush’s secularism. Abroad Bush has indeed battled the forces of theocracy and jihad. But hasn’t Bush at home supported the same, if less violent, forces, only from another religion? I’m probably exaggerating, but Bush defenitely has pushed, or tried to push, the U.S. into a non-secularist direction. On the other hand, maybe, just maybe, this era is coming to an end.
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10/11/2004
Another certainty is going down the drain....
Vitamin E is not good for you, according to a new study:
Vitamin E supplements, which millions take in the hope of longer, healthier lives, may do more harm than good, researchers reported on Wednesday.
In fact, people taking high doses of vitamin E may in some cases be more likely to die earlier, although the reasons are not clear, said Dr. Edgar Miller of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who led the study.
But another certainty is still in force: too much of a good thing can be bad for you.
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9/11/2004
Less liberal
Even Beverly Hills appears to be dramatically shifting to the right:
Here is the breakdown for Beverly Hills:
2004 UNOFFICIAL
BUSH 42.38% KERRY 56.98% OTHER .64%
2000 OFFICIAL
BUSH 20.47% GORE 76.51% OTHER 3.02%
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9/11/2004
Bush has a mandate, from the Iraqi Kurds...
In Sulaimaniyah, Iraq, Bush would have won with a landslide:
As the United States presidential election approached, George Bush and John Kerry were still neck and neck in the polls – unless, of course, you count those carried out in Sulaimaniyah, in the Kurdish area of north-eastern Iraq. Here Bush would be assured of a runaway victory.
Are these people dumb?
(Via Norman Geras)
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6/11/2004
Interesting election news
This is interesting:
The President narrowed his popular vote loss or widened his popular vote win in the other 35 contests. Interestingly, he improved relative to the Democrat in Texas by only 1.7 percentage points. Several other states made large contributions to his improvement in the relative share of the popular vote, including New York (+7.0), Florida (+5.0), New Jersey (+8.8), California (+2.2), Tennessee (+10.1), Georgia (+6.3), and Alabama (+10.8).
New York and California seem like unusual places for the President to have narrowed his popular vote deficit. Doxagora presents some calculations based on exit poll data that suggest significant pickups in big and small cities, with smaller improvements in suburbs and no improvements in small towns and rural areas. This pattern is contrary to what we might have expected.
So Bush won the popular vote because he increased his share of votes the most in places one can consider as Democratic strongholds (New York, California, cities...) and not so much in places tradionally considered to be Republican (rural Redneck America..). Evangelical Christians thus seem to appear to play a less important role in the victory of Bush than generally thought. A possible explanation is that the issue of terrorism played a much more important role in the election of the president than moral values. Or is there a more profound trend here? Are places like New York shifting to the right too? Are we trending towards an emerging Republican majority? Any other explanations?
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5/11/2004
Mia rules!
Luc Van Braekel, overigens kandidaat voor het VLD-partijbureau (veel succes Luc, zeker ook indien je verkozen zou zijn), citeert uit de column van Mia Doornaert vandaag in De Standaard. Mocht je het nog niet weten, Mia Doornaert is met gemak de beste columniste van Vlaanderen. Vandaag werd de alomtegenwoordige anti-Amerikaanse academicus Rik Coolsaet netjes doorprikt:
Feitenkennis en analyse zijn wat dat laatste betreft een vrijwel overbodige ballast, de schema’s zitten klaar in de hoofden en de feiten worden daar wel in gewrongen. Dat demonstreerde woensdagavond in het VRT-journaal de onvermijdelijke Rik Coolsaet. Er hadden, zei hij, drie grote thema’s gespeeld in de Amerikaanse verkiezingen: Irak, de economie en de veiligheid tegen het terrorisme. Wie inzat met de twee eerste had voor Kerry gekozen, wie voorrang gaf aan het laatste voor Bush. Academici mogen natuurlijk op grote hoogten zweven, maar de geleerde hoogleraar gaf de indruk dat hij van de maan kwam. Want vulgaire instellingen als de pers, die een minimaal respect moeten opbrengen voor de feiten, wisten toen al uren en uren uit zeer serieuze bronnen dat ,,morele waarden’’ de vaakst opgegeven reden was voor de keuze van de kiezers.
Coolsaet werd uiteraard niet tegengesproken, zoals ook niet gebeurde toen hij in een ander VRT-optreden het Amerika-vriendelijke beleid van de toenmalige Spaanse premier José Maria Aznar toeschreef aan de traditionele dankbaarheid van een vroegere generatie van politici voor de bevrijding na de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Dat het Spanje van Franco niet aan de oorlog deelnam en dus ook niet bevrijd werd, dat Aznar heel duidelijk tot de naoorlogse generaties behoort, wie valt daar nu over? Een Europeaan die niet anti-Amerikaans is, kan alleen maar door overjaarse sentimenten gedreven zijn.
Luc heeft meer. En laat Reynebeau maar jury spelen in De Slimste Mens. Daar hoort hij thuis.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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5/11/2004
Water: a commodity
AdamSmithee points to research on water privatization. The conclusion is that the results are mixed. It’s not altogether as bad as portrayed by some (most?) NGO’s. On the other hand until now it neither didn’t match the high expectations. In a comment Abiola Lapite points to the role of competition, which can be more important than the issue of ownership. I think there is much research to support this (Abiola himself points to Joseph Stiglitz). Nevertheless, many NGO’s keep portraying water privatization as an unmitigated evil (they almost sound like Bush, no, they sound like Bush), contrary to the facts. More than that, not only privatization but also competition is suspect. Having said that, introducing competition in water is obviously not straightforward. You need to have transparant rules and honest regulation to be sure that the benefits accrue to the poor. And i’m not sure that governments in Latin America are up to the task. Privatization often is tainted by corruption. For governments it is mostly considered as a source of income and not a way to lower prices, to improve quality or to increase connection rates. This is a pity i think because privatization, properly designed, can have good results.
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5/11/2004
Dumb and dumber
But it’s not 59,054,087 people who are dumb. It’s many millions more:
Millions of Iranians expressed their satisfaction on the outcome of the US Presidential elections and George W. Bush’s victory by calling and congratulating each other. Many were seen walking in the streets and shaking each others hands or showing a discret V sign.
Those people aren’t dumb however (and they don’t sound shrill), they just want to live in a democracy and read newspapers like The Mirror. Apperantly they believe Bush can deliver it to them. Will they get support from Europe?
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4/11/2004
Windenergie: een ramp?
Er valt heel wat te zeggen voor alternatieve energie. Biomassa, waterkracht of warmtekrachtkoppeling (WKK) lijken de investeringen en subsidies waard, al moet je bij biomassa en WKK rekening houden met een verhoging van de CO2-uitstoot. Maar dit is wellicht nog beheersbaar.
Windenergie aan de andere kant lijkt een ramp. Neem Denemarken. Dat land produceert de meeste windenergie in de hele wereld, en het betaalt daar een enorme prijs voor. Als het te hard waait en de vraag is laag, moet men de overtollige energie exporteren of het net valt uit. Door het grote verschil tussen vraag en aanbod daalt de prijs echter tot vrijwel nul. De gesubsidieerde energie brengt dus niets op. Omgekeerd bij periodes van weinig wind, moet windenergie worden geïmporteerd tegen hoger prijzen. Als gevolg van deze hoge energiekost worden bedrijven gedwongen de productie stil te leggen. Zonder subsidies zou windenergie overigens sowieso te duur zijn: in Nederland bedraagt de subsidie voor windenergie 200% van de prijs van (grijze) energie op traditionele wijze opgewekt. Zonder die subsidie zou groene energie dus drie keer zo duur zijn als grijze energie. Komt daarbij dat geen enkel klassieke centrale gesloten kan worden. Wanneer er geen windenergie wordt geproduceerd moet het tekort door die centrales worden opgevangen. Windparken in zee zijn verder zeer onbetrouwbaar. De Nederlandse televisie toont beelden van een windpark aan de Deense kust: van de 80 molens werken er maar 5. De rest is in reparatie. Het park is twee jaar oud...Hoe meer windenergie, hoe labieler het electriciteitsnet en dus hoe groter de kans op black-outs, met alle maatschappelijke gevolgen vandien. Kortom, het sop is de kool niet waard.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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4/11/2004
Outsourcing within India
It’s easy to attract companies, even communist governments can do it; it’s much less easy to keep them. Tyler Cowen on Bangalore:
Apparently production costs are rising out of control in a city that accounts for a third of India’s software exports. The major culprit is congestion; a seven-kilometer commute can now take ninety minutes. Population has grown by a third since 1995, and the new metro and airport are badly behind schedule. Bombay has had similar problems.
The remedy? Madras (Chennai) is rising in popularity as is Calcutta, despite its propensity to elect communist governments.
The bottom line: Indian infrastructure is chaos. This economy has only a limited ability to absord outsourcing ventures. For instance it is common for current enterprises to supply their own electricity and other public services.
The Indian government made some admirable reforms in the past decade. The result was higher growth. But to make it sustainable more is needed. I think that the government have to make it’s priorities right: less defense expenditures for instance and more for infrastructure. Maybe with the new government there is a chance India can have the best of both worlds: keeping liberalising the economy while at the same time repairing it’s defunct infrastructure. In that case of course companies will keep on moving to India.
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4/11/2004
Theo Van Gogh killed by a state of mind?
Of course some say that Al Qaeda is nothing more than a "state of mind". But now the Dutch police is investigating possible links between the killer of Theo Van Gogh and Al Qaeda. Whatever Al Qaeda is, a network, a centralised organisation or a state of mind, if true, it shows once again that Al Qaeda is an enemy of Civilization (with capital C, i’m not just talking about Western civilization, this has nothing to do with Huntington’s clash) and we have to destroy it.
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1/11/2004
Why not a better press corps indeed!
Gene at Harry’s place observes:
The people of Ramallah didn’t seem to care much, but BBC correspondent Barbara Plett broke down in tears as the helicopter carrying Yasser Arafat lifted off from his compound.
It’s hard being objective. Maybe it is even impossible to achieve. But nevertheless it seems totally inappropriate to let emotions overwhelm your reporting.
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30/10/2004
Telecom dogma’s
Andrew Odlyzko demolishes some wide-held telecom dogma’s:
1. carriers can develop innovative new services
There is no serious evidence to support this myth. In spite of many attempts, the established
service providers and their suppliers have an abysmal record in innovation in user services.
They have done very well in terms of improving the basic transport technologies, as with
dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA),
DSL, and cellular (which was adding mobility to the traditional voice service). But in
terms of services as perceived by users or that require user involvement, the record is
dismal. ATM, QoS, RSVP, multicasting, congestion pricing, active networks, WAP, and
3G, have all been duds, not because they failed to work, but because they failed to satisfy
user demands. The real "killer apps," such as email, the Web, browsers, search engines,
IM, and Napster, have all come from users. Is there any reason to expect the future to be
any different?
2. content is king
Content (defined here as material prepared by professionals for consumption by large au-
diences, in particular movies, recorded music, and professional sports team play) is a large
and prosperous business. However, it has never been as large or as important as connectivity, person-to-person communication. Basic person-to-person connectivity dominates. That is how it has been historically. New telecommunications services, when first placed into non-government
service, were typically dominated by commercial traffic.
3. voice is irrelevant
Voice is still what provides well over 70% of telecom service revenues. In particular, the real
telecom success story of the 1990s, whether measured in terms of revenue growth or number
of subscribers, was in wireless voice, not on the Internet. In their infatuation with data
and especially with content, carriers appear to have given up on doing anything innovative
with voice.
4. streaming real-time multimedia traffic will dominate
The future of multimedia trffic is not just in file transfers, but also in faster-than-real-
time file transfers. This seems to be almost completely missed by the telecom industry. I
have started asking audiences at my telecom-related lectures whether they see any sense
for carriers or consumers in faster-than-real-time multimedia transmission. Typically at
most 10% raise their hands in the affirmative. Yet such transfers already dominate many
networks. P2P music files are typically transmitted at 500 Kbps or faster, while the under-
lying MP3 encoding is usually something like 100-200 Kbps. Moreover, in U.S. backbones
(and we do have some data, for example for Sprint), P2P file transfers are far bigger, by
factors of 5 to 10 and higher, than streaming.
5. "killer applications" are needed
(O)ne of the key lessons of the Internet is that
with control in the hands of users, demand continues to grow vigorously. U.S. Internet
backbone traffic grew very close to 100% a year throughout the 1990s and early 2000s,
with the exception of that manic growth period of 1995-96, when it grew about 1,000% a
year. As of this writing, in June 2004, that growth still seems to be around 70%
a year, while in Korea (which experienced its own brief period of about 1,000% annual
growth around 2000, when broadband was deployed very widely in a short period of time)
growth seems to be close to 100% a year. One of the key historical lessons (...) is
that in places that were already using the Internet widely in the early 1990s (primarily
universities and research institutes), growth rates were not much affected even by the
arrival of such "killer apps" as the browser and Napster.
6. death of distance
In general, the interplay between locality and globalization is a complicated one. But
while long haul transport over fiber is pretty much a solved problem, there is much more
to be done locally. That is why WiFi is booming, not necessarily as a paid service, but for
improving local communications, whether within homes, or hospitals, or factories. With
convergence of consumer electronics, business information technology, telecommunications,
and content, the action will be at the edges, in homes and businesses, melding all these
elements together. It will be local communication that will need to provided in profusion,
in order to allow for easy implementations of new services.
Not quite a telecom dogma, but related:
One picture is worth a thousands words.
That has to be:
One picture is worth a thousand words, provided one uses another thousand words
to justify the picture.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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30/10/2004
More on the link between poverty, political freedom and terrorism
The paper to which AdamSmithee referred to can be found here. The author uses country-level terrorist risk ratings from an international risk agency. Domestic terrorism, which occurs many times more than international terrorism, is taken into account.
Now what are the results? First, the level of terrorism is not determined by poverty, economic development nor inequality.
Second, countries with intermediate levels of political freedom are more prone to terrorism than either highly autoritarian regimes or highly democratic countries.
Third, geographic factors, like mountains, jungles or even the size of a country are powerful determinants of the level of terrorism.
These results make sense to me. Terrorism is more the result of resentment or anger than of poverty. When you have a country with intermediate levels of political freedom there probably will be much resentment or grievances that can lead to acts of terrorism. On the other hand those same limited political freedoms can give opportunities for terrorists. One can see an anology here with geographical factors. Like mountains and jungles, political freedoms, even if limited, can provide terrorists a kind of "safe haven" where they can plot their schemes. It is probably not a coïncidence that in countries like Saudi-Arabia, where there are some (but very limited!) political reforms, we see an increase in domestic terrorism. If Saudi-Arabia would stay a highly autoritarian, even totalitarian, state it could probably deny the terrorists any room for illegal activities. It can also explain the increase in domestic terrorism in countries like Irak. Instead of the totalitarian regime of Saddam we now have a flawed pseudo-democratic state that grants some freedoms and rights but denies others.
This is not to say of course that we have to turn the clock back. In totalitarian states the resentment does not disappear, it is just repressed. In fact, highly authoritarian states probably are more prone to support international terrorism than other countries. See Libya, Iran, Afghanistan under the Taliban and of course Saudi-Arabia. So i think there is only one way: more and than still more democracy and political freedom, even if that means that in the transition a rise in domestic forms of terrorims seems to be very likely.
Finaly, maybe we have a link here with the so-called happines research which apperantly showes that higher incomes doesn’t make people more happy. In fact some, like George Monbiot, point out that the poor people in Somalia are probably happier than the rich in the West and elsewhere. And of course we almost see no acts of terrorism from the poor people in Africa, but only from spoiled rich kids as Osama Bin Laden, or, earlier in the West, the Bader-Meinhoff group. So poor is happy is less terrorism? No, i wouldn’t make too much out of that, as happines surveys are a very "poor" instrument to measure happiness. And don’t forget that the study shows there is NO correlation between terrorism and income levels. It’s not proven either that higher income levels make terrorism more likely.
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29/10/2004
Ware, spitse en domme uitspraken
De ware uitspraak komt van de voormalige Tjechische president Vaclav Havel:
Het is gek, maar het sterkste anti-Amerikanisme vindt men net in die landen waar de Amerikanen het meeste hebben geholpen.
Zou het omgekeerde ook gelden? Misschien wel. Zo schijnt de bevolking van Iran, vooral de jongeren, redelijke pro-Amerikaans te zijn. En de Iraakse Koerden, die weliswaar nu door de Amerikanen bevrijd zijn, maar toch ook al méér dan een keer door de V.S. in de steek werden gelaten, zijn dat ook.
De spitse uitspraak is van Marc Coecke van medicijnenproducent Omega Pharma:
Zonder medicijnen waren onze critici al lang dood.
Aan de andere kant, zonder medicijnenproducenten waren er geen critici nodig.
De domme is van Pater Luc Versteylen:
Graafmachines hebben geen eerbied.
Tuurlijk niet. Een graafmachine is een ding. Men moet het dus geen menselijke eigenschappen toewijzen. Kwestie is dat de man of vrouw die de graafmachine bestuurd dat op een eerbiedwaardige manier doet.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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29/10/2004
De diensten zijn de toekomst
Patricia Ceysens, VLD-fractieleidster in het Vlaams Parlement, beklemtoont in een persmededeling het belang van de diensten als motor van economische groei en als bron van werkgelegenheid. Ze pleit voor het "ontgrendelen" van de gezondheids- en welzijnssectoren en voor het terugdringen van de rol van de overheid. Het private initiatief moet, zoals in de buurlanden, meer kansen krijgen om zo het potentieel van deze sectoren beter aan te kunnen boren. Dit betekent, aldus Ceysens, een minder defensieve houding ten aanzien van publiek-private partnerschappen en het verlaten van de egelstelling ten aanzien van de richtlijn Bolkestijn. Hier komen we natuurlijk op het terrein van de vele belangengroepen die deze richtlijn eerder als een bedreiging dan als een opportuniteit aanzien. De bekommernissen van deze groepen kunnen soms gerechtvaardigd zijn. Toch is het duidelijk dat we het globaal beeld niet uit het oog mogen verliezen. Een recente studie van het Nederlandse Planbureau, waar Patricia Ceysens naar verwijst, toont immers het belang aan van vrije dienstverlening in Europa:
De conclusie is dat door toepassing van de EU richtlijn de handel in commerciële diensten met 15% à 30% kan stijgen en dat de bilaterale directe investeringen in diensten met 20 à 35% kunnen toenemen.
Het resultaat is meer groei en meer werkgelegenheid. Het resultaat is ook dat Europa gemakkelijker haar doelstelling zal kunnen halen om in 2010 de meest welvarende en meest competitieve regio van de wereld te worden. Het algemeen belang vereist dan ook dat hiermee rekening wordt gehouden en dat niet te ver wordt gegaan in het uithollen van de richtlijn door allerlei uitzonderingen op de regels te voorzien. Dat zou een gemiste kans zijn, zeker in het licht van opkomende heel competitieve dienstenverleners als India.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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29/10/2004
Africa and foreign capital
Scepticism towards foreign capital is quite unjustified, even in Africa and in extractive industries as oil, concludes a working paper from the Center for Global Development. Alas, as a consequence of bad historical experiences, African governments still impose many barriers to foreign capital and investments. For this they are applauded by many Western NGO’s who support this kind of economic nationalism. Too bad, according to the study:
- foreign firms invest a greater share of profits back into the firm than local firms;
- foreign firms report a higher percentage of revenue for tax purposes than local firms;
- foreign firms are substantially larger, as a result they are a significant source of employment;
- foreign firms are more productive, value addes is significantly higher due to greater managerial skills and experience. Besides experience in foreign firms is associated with higher productivity in new local firms started by managers who left the foreign firm;
- foreign firms are nearly twice as likely to have formal training programs. This has spillover effects for the rest of the economy;
- foreign firms invest more in infrastructure. Of course an important reason for this, is that the government is not investing. For the economy as a whole it would be better if the government would take the lead in investing in infrastructure like roads and the supply of electricity. Nevertheless, absent this, a country is better off with foreign companies;
- foreign firms are more likely to provide health-care benefits.
Already many African countries fail to connect with the global economy. As a result they are getting poorer. But foreign capial itself can help those countries to re-establish the necessary links with the world economy, and so ending this vicious circle. To do this they have to end economic nationalism and to eliminate barriers for foreign investment. And they should stop listening to the advice of some NGO’s.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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28/10/2004
Castro to the Cuban people: get lost!
The fall of Castro was world news. Castro’s decision concerning the use of U.S. dollars in Cuba was not. But for the Cuban people that decision has much more dire consequences than Castro’s broken bones. Here is leftie Marc Cooper:
Cuba’s Fidel Castro announced today that the U.S. dollar -- which has been legal tender in Cuba for the last decade-- will no longer be accepted for consumer purchases. Cubans will now have to trade their dollars for funny money scrip issued by the state. The exchange is one to one MINUS A 10% "fee."
Let me translate: Castro has just imposed a highly regressive 10% flat sales tax on an already impoverished population. For those among you who have never been to Cuba let me tell you that ALL consumer goods are accessible only in dollars. And so are most foodstuffs beyond the minimal rice and beans on the ration card.
A huge percentage of the Cuban population is wholly dependent on the $1 billion a year in hard currency sent them by relatives living abroad. The average wage in Cuba is the equivalent of $15-$20 a month. Prices on most consumer goods, meanwhile, are about 25% higher than in the U.S.
You can do the math. This is a massive transfer of scarce hard currency from the pockets of ordinary and threadbare people into the coffers of a bankrupt state at the cost of everyone’s standard of living. All Cubans who have been saving up dollars -- the ONLY form of savings in Cuba-- just lost 10% of their wealth [sic].
Cooper also notes that Castro blamed HIS decision on America and the imperialists. Castro is right of course to do that. It appears that the Americans and imperialists are doing everything they can to give Castro the opportunities to further suppress the Cuban people. This they should not do.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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25/10/2004
Terrorism and it’s causes
What determines terrorism? No it’s not poverty, or unequality...it’s mountains.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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25/10/2004
Leadership Council without leaders....
Steve Landsburg isn’t too much impressed by the Democratic Leadership Council, rightly so:
Al From, head of the Democratic Leadership Council, quoted in the New York Times: "If we lose, we are going to have to find an answer to the question of how we are going to keep this country secure." I was kind of hoping they would give that question some thought if they win.
By the way, i saw something quite funny on the news this evening. Jan Balliauw, a Belgian journalist, is touring the U.S., to give an impression of the American election to Belgian viewers. Today he encountered a unemployed worker (his company moved to India) in Ohio who voted for Bush in 2000, but will now vote Kerry, because he lost his job. And he doesn’t like a president who doesn’t protect jobs. Still, he has some sympathy for Bush. He is not 100% for Kerry. No, he said, "i’m 45% for Bush, and 65% for Kerry, so i will vote Kerry". At least here is someone who has much faith in both candidates, he’s for both of them 110%! I don’t know however. Can you trust politicians who seem to be unable to provide decent education for the people?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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25/10/2004
Polls, polls...(UPDATED)
Time:
President Bush has opened a 5 point lead against Senator John Kerry, according the latest TIME poll. If the 2004 election for President were held today, 51% of likely voters surveyed would vote for President George W. Bush, 46% would vote for Senator John Kerry, and 2% would vote for Ralph Nader, according to the TIME poll conducted by telephone from Oct. 19 – 21. Among all registered voters surveyed, Bush leads Kerry 50% to 43%.
Zogby:
With just ten days until the general election, President Bush and Senator Kerry are still locked in a two-point standoff, though the President has turned in a second day of strong polling, according to a new Reuters/Zogby daily tracking poll. Another good single day of polling for President Bush. In today’s sample alone, he leads 50% to 43%—the first time we’ve seen either candidate hit 50%. Each candidate continues to tighten his own constituency, and Undecided voters are now at only 4%.
In Ohio, Bush leads Kerry 47% to 42%. It indeed does seem the letters from The Guardian to swing the voters towards Kerry were counterproductive.
UPDATE
CNN/Gallup/USA Today also puts Bush five points ahead. With a margin of error of 3% this means, according to CNN, that the race still is very tight. Yes, but while it means that Kerry can still win with a small difference (plus 3 for Kerry, minus 3 for Bush), there is equal chance that Bush will win in a landslide. So while tight, Bush’s lead is getting rather comfortable. The catch i guess is that his lead is comfortable among likely voters. There could of course be a major difference with the Americans who will actually going to vote.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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21/10/2004
Guevara’s grandson to Fidel Castro: get lost!
Marc Cooper points us to an interview with the grandson of Che Guevara:
The Cuban Revolution died some years ago: it had to be killed off by those who act in its name to make sure it didn’t turn against them; it was institutionalized and smothered by its own bureaucracy, by corruption, nepotism and the rigidity of the much-celebrated Cuban ‘revolutionary’ state.
All of my criticism of Fidel Castro come from his walking away from the ideals of liberty, from his betrayal of his own people and his frightening zeal to place the interests of the state above those of his people.
Let’s be honest, a young rebel like Fidel Castro in today’s Cuba wouldn’t be sent into exile. He’(d) be shot.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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21/10/2004
Economic history
The secret history of the industrial revolution in ten arguments:
1. Growth of real output per capita, and of productivity was much slower in the Industrial
Revolution than previous estimates have suggested. Even moderate rates of growth of output per
person, by modern standards, did not appear till the 1870s.
2. Output per capita grew as rapidly in the bad old days of the Stuart monarchs and the Civil
War in the seventeenth century as in the Industrial Revolution.
3. Pre-industrial England was a much wealthier economy than has previously been realized.
Per capita real GDP in the 1760s, for example, was similar to that of Egypt and Indonesia in
1992. English per capita income was double that of Nigeria and Kenya, and four times that of
Chad or Malawi.
4. Since per capita income in England in the late eighteenth century was more than half its level
in the 1900s, when English per capita incomes are estimated by some scholars to have been
nearly ten times those of India and China, Ken Pomeranz must be wrong to conjecture that
incomes per capita were equivalent in the advanced parts of Asia with those of Europe in 1800.
5. The modest productivity growth rates of the Industrial Revolution owed mostly to
productivity gains in one sector, textile manufacture.
6. It was accidents of demand, demography, and trade that allowed innovations in this sector to
have a much bigger impact than previous innovations of similar magnitude in terms of
productivity gains.
made in 1768 and 1769. These were the spinning jenny, and the water frame.
7. The southern two thirds of England saw almost no growth in output per capita or productivity
growth in the Industrial Revolution.
8. Manual worker’s real incomes in the Industrial Revolution period rose much more than did
real output per capita, because of the consumption bundle they consumed, and because of the
decline in real property incomes per person.
9. Other places in Europe in the years 1200 to 1760 saw similar episodes of productivity growth
that were as substantial as those in England from 1760 to 1860. Thus between 1550 and 1650
the Netherlands saw significant productivity advance.
10. The appearance that the Industrial Revolution in England represented a decisive break from
the past is largely a product of the unusual demographic experience of England in the Industrial
Revolution years. This demographic growth would have spurred industrialization absent any
productivity advance. This demographic growth, by driving up land rentals and creating
urbanization, spurred a number of changes in the economy, such as the enclosure of common
lands, improvements in transportation, the expansion of coal mining, and perhaps also the fall in
interest rates in the eighteenth century.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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21/10/2004
Quote of the day
Cordell Hull, secretary of state under Franklin Roosevelt:
When trade crosses borders, armies don’t.
Want prove of that? See here.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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21/10/2004
What to do with North-Korea?
Nicholas Eberstadt wonders why the economy of North Korea did not collapse in the wake of the demise of the Soviet block. That collapse seemed to be imminent and for years the Korean economy was spiralling down, leading to a famine that killed probably a million people between 1995 and 1998. But after those horrible years economic furtunes seemed to improve somewhat and the collapse was averted. Why? The answer to that, in fact, is quite shocking: the North Korean regime managed to survive thanks to the financial support of it’s biggest enemy: the U.S. This is not the whole story of course, but as Eberstadt shows, it is a major part of it. North Korea managed to import much needed goods because the resulting trade deficit was financed by the West, and especially the United States. The figures themselves are mind-boggling: between 1996 and 2002 (two years into the presidency of G.W.Bush!) Washington gave over $ 1 billion. That aid exceeded the export revenues of North Korea for the year 2000. In fact, according to this benchmark the U.S. gave more to North-Korea than to crucial allies as Israel and Egypt! So the U.S. seems to have prime responsibility in the survival of the North-Korean state. And while the Clinton administration started the whole policy, for the first two years there was no break under Bush. Was there another option? There was a major famine of course and a big part of the aid was under the form of the provision of food. And it could also be used by the U.S. as a carrott to convince North-Korea not to develop nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, Eberstadt also shows that North-Korea is the ultimate rogue state: exporting strategic insecurity to the rest of the world is for that state the means of survival:
In most of the world today, a country’s defense outlays are regarded as a weight that must be shouldered by the value-adding sectors of the national economy (hence the phrase "military burden"). North Korea’s leadership, however, evidently entertains the concept of a "self-sustaining" defense sector — implying that Pyongyang views its military activities as generating resources rather than absorbing them. In the enunciated view of Pyongyang’s leadership, the dprk’s military sector is the key to financing the recovery of the national economy.
It does not require a great deal of imagination to spell out the operational details of this approach. While forswearing any appreciable export revenues from legitimate commerce with advanced market economies, North Korean policy today seems to be banking on the possibility of financing state survival by exporting strategic insecurity to the rest of the world. In part, such dividends are derived from exports of merchandise (e.g., missile sales, international transfer of wmd technology). But these revenues also depend heavily on what might be described as an export of services: in this case, military extortion services (or, perhaps better yet, "revenue-sensitive threat reduction services") based upon Pyongyang’s nuclear development and ballistic missile programs.
The export of strategic insecurity arguably accounts for much of the upsurge in North Korea’s unexplained surfeit of imports over commercial export revenues since 1998 — especially to the extent that Western aid policies in recent years can be described as appeasement-motivated.8 In an important tactical sense, that approach has enjoyed success — it has facilitated state survival under imposing constraints. But the territory demarcated by "ideological and cultural infiltration" on one side and "military-first politics" on the other is also, quite clearly, a sort of no-man’s-land: an inherently unstable niche in which survival is utterly contingent and sustained development utterly unlikely. North Korea’s current strategic policy, in short, may be deferring the question of economic collapse — but it has not yet answered it.
If Eberstadt is right, keeping that regime in power seems to be a really terrifying prospect.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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21/10/2004
Schwarzenegger for president
Arnold Schwarzenegger on the consequences of endorsing Bush:
There was no sex for 14 days. Everything comes with side effects.
Schwarzenegger without sex? That should have been an ordeal. His wife, a Democrat, surely knows how to hurt him. Probably the worst 14 days of his life.
And on the Bush-Kerry debates:
They were lucky. They only had to do it three times. I have to do it every morning over breakfast.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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19/10/2004
Against city planning
From The Voluntary City: Choice, Community and Civil Society:
The use of land is not a "special case" exempt from the power of markets to fashion
orderly and efficient outcomes. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Just as Nobel prize-winner
Friedrich Hayek (1988) and fellow Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises demonstrated the folly
of top-down economic planning, Jane Jacobs (1963) exposed the problems of top-down city
planning. Top-down planners of all stripes are fatally hobbled by their inability to tap local
knowledge, the sheer magnitude of which would in any event overwhelm them. In a
competitive market, local knowledge reappears, lessening the dependence on politics and
increasing flexibility; "public" goods (and spaces) in CIDs (Common Interest Developments) and in shopping centers are provided more optimally; the capitalization of benefits in land rents more efficiently finances public goods
provision; and market-tested rules of governance are developed. Private developers now
routinely supply what had been thought to be “public” goods -- without the widely presumed
market failure. Just as many people presume the inevitability of top-down planning because of
external effects and information problems, events show the opposite: the inevitability of
bottom-up approaches to these problems exactly as the Hayekian critique makes clear. It takes
decentralized markets to generate the required information through trial-and-error learning. In the process, market participants are far more productive than central planners can ever be.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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19/10/2004
A Democrat against Kerry
A Democrat for Bush? No, much more than that. A former political editor of the far left-wing New Statesman for Bush. Sarah Baxter writes:
I also had a formative experience in 1989. I was a cub reporter at the London magazine Time Out when I covered the campaign by Yusuf Islam — Cat Stevens — to gain state funding for his Islamia school in Brent, north London. I was ambitious to seek out foreign stories as a freelance and had heard that an obscure group called Hamas was becoming a force to be reckoned with in the occupied territories.
I was sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and wanted to know more about these upstart challengers to Israel and the PLO. But how could I possibly gain access to Hamas? I rang my contacts at the Islamia school and bingo! I was immediately put in touch with their leaders in Gaza, whom Cat Stevens was flying off to see that very month.
I took two weeks’ holiday from Time Out and set off for the occupied territories with a black chiffon scarf over my head. On arrival in Gaza I was disturbed that the Hamas leaders I met would never look me in the eye. To them, it was indecent even to glance at a member of the inferior sex. All their answers were directed at my boyfriend, who was taking pictures. But they were co-operative and eager for publicity.
We were taken upstairs in a mosque and, to my shock, were introduced to a dozen or more would-be suicide bombers in their mid-teens, who declared their fervent wish to martyr themselves for their cause.
At the time, there had been no suicide bombs in Israel. Some Hezbollah members in Lebanon had blown themselves up, but they were Shi’ite Muslims: Palestinian Sunnis were not supposed to go in for that sort of thing. Yet here I was, looking at a bunch of boys with kaffirs masking their faces, brandishing knives and practising karate in a place of worship. These weren’t boy scouts in a church hall; they were being trained to become fanatical killers by their religious elders.
When I heard the other week that Cat Stevens had been refused entry to America, I thought good riddance.
When mosques are raided by US forces, I am not surprised. I know mosques are used as terrorist bases. I expect most of the young men I talked to are now either dead or sitting in an Israeli jail. They were triumphalist about the global spread of Islam and confident that it would one day dominate the planet. They hated the West, they wanted to kill Jews, and none of them had ever heard of George W Bush.
So has Bush inflamed hatred in the Arab world? Yes and no: he certainly did not start it. One of the most unconvincing arguments advanced by the Democrats is that the jihadists favour a Bush-Cheney victory. I don’t buy it. Their leaders are on the run and no government will afford them safe haven. They have not yet managed to pull off another attack on America. It is hard for Bush to boast about this, lest he tempt fate, but he deserves some credit.
On September 11, 2001, a global wave of anti-Americanism was unleashed. At worst, Bush’s “you are either with us or with the terrorists” rhetoric has allowed people all over the world, from western intellectuals to the so-called Arab street, to give voice to a latent but virulent pre-existing hostility.
At best, he is advancing the cause of freedom and democracy. I was very moved by the long line of Afghans queueing to vote for the first time in their lives last weekend. Overwhelmingly, they were proud and happy to cast their ballots.
And boy, does she sound shrill about Kerry. Just one example:
Kerry has nothing to say about Afghan democracy. His official campaign website still whines that the Afghan presidential elections are "seriously threatened by the prospect of warlord intimidation", despite the fact that they have already taken place peacefully.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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19/10/2004
Schwarzenegger does the right thing...
Governor Schwarzenegger is supporting a measure to fund stem cell research. A good idea, as it can help fight important diseases like Alzheimer. On the other hand, the budget of California isn’t in good health either, and this proposal will make the situation worse. Still the benefits of the research in my view are overwhelming. Besides, in the long run it could be good for California’s economy also. So cutting other expenditures along with funding stem cell research seems to be a very good idea. And, Arnold, never mind what the Republican party and Bush think on this. They are wrong.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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18/10/2004
Wrong priorities
Alex Tabarrok has the numbers:
Annual U.S. Deaths Due to the Flu: approx 36,000.
Annual U.S. Deaths Due to Anthrax: ~1.
Spending on R&D to fight Flu: $283 million.
Spending on R&D to fight Anthrax and other biological agents: $5.6 billion.
As with global warming, nature can be a bigger enemy of man than man himself. And as with global warming, we may be spending the money the wrong way.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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18/10/2004
Steve en Fidel: twee dikke vrienden
Steve Stevaert is in Cuba. Hij werd er naar verluidt hartelijk onthaald. De Cubaanse pers meent te weten dat de grote Vlaamse socialistische leider in Cuba is aangekomen om "de vriendschapsbanden met de PCC, de (enige toegestane) communistische partij van president Fidel Castro" aan te halen. Als dat zo is dan is dat eigenlijk wel redelijk erg. Is het wel normaal de vriendschapsbanden aan te halen met de partij van een president die nog niet zo lang geleden talloze dissidenten liet oppakken? En is het normaal de vriendschapsbanden aan te halen met een president niet het niet zo begrepen heeft op ondernemers? Toegegeven, als het zou gaan om multinationale ondernemingen als pakweg DHL, zou ik Stevaert nog begrijpen. Maar het gaat hier wel degelijk niet om dat soort ondernemingen. Neen. Het gaat om de zaakjes van de kleine man: Cubanen die wat geld durven bij te verdienen door kamers te verhuren aan toeristen of door een klein restaurant (max. twaalf plaatsen) te openen. Zij worden nu door Castro op alle mogelijke manieren aangevallen en, ja laat ik het maar zo zeggen, geterroriseerd. Een echte kampioen van de gewone man die Castro! En laat ik het maar niet hebben over de onderbrekingen in de water- en energievoorziening.
Wat er ook van zij, slechts weinigen vallen een onthaal als Stevaert te beurt. Twee Nederlandse politici, waaronder de fractieleider van het links-liberale D66, werden in Cuba zelfs opgepakt en teruggestuurd. Ik vermoed dat zij er niet waren om vriendschapsbanden aan te halen.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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18/10/2004
Hot news concerning global warming
A pillar of global warming theory has now crashed completely : there is no "hockey stick", it’s just a mathematical error, reports Technology Review:
Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.
But it wasn’t so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.
Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called “Monte Carlo” analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!
That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.
However, global warming sceptics must not cheer too soon:
It certainly does not negate the threat of a long-term global temperature increase. In fact, McIntyre and McKitrick are careful to point out that it is hard to draw conclusions from these data, even with their corrections. Did medieval global warming take place? Last month the consensus was that it did not; now the correct answer is that nobody really knows. Uncovering errors in the Mann analysis doesn’t settle the debate; it just reopens it. We now know less about the history of climate, and its natural fluctuations over century-scale time frames, than we thought we knew.
If you are concerned about global warming (as I am) and think that human-created carbon dioxide may contribute (as I do), then you still should agree that we are much better off having broken the hockey stick. Misinformation can do real harm, because it distorts predictions. Suppose, for example, that future measurements in the years 2005-2015 show a clear and distinct global cooling trend. (It could happen.) If we mistakenly took the hockey stick seriously--that is, if we believed that natural fluctuations in climate are small--then we might conclude (mistakenly) that the cooling could not be just a random fluctuation on top of a long-term warming trend, since according to the hockey stick, such fluctuations are negligible. And that might lead in turn to the mistaken conclusion that global warming predictions are a lot of hooey. If, on the other hand, we reject the hockey stick, and recognize that natural fluctuations can be large, then we will not be misled by a few years of random cooling.
Nevertheless, two additional points can be made i think:
1. it certainly does show that what is happening now is not unusual and that there is no evidence of the assertion that we now have the highest temperatures ever;
2. it certainly does put some doubt into the link between carbon dioxide and global warming. I’m not saying there is no link (for the case against such a link, see here), and the fact that the hocky stick doesn’t exist is no evidence against such a link. But an imporant piece of evidence that such a link does exist has now been discarded.
Whatever may be, the most disturbing part of it all is that a flagship of science, the magazine Nature, refused to publish the paper. The impression that Nature refused it because the results of the paper were a little bit inconvenient doesn’t go away:
McIntyre and McKitrick sent their detailed analysis to Nature magazine for publication, and it was extensively refereed. But their paper was finally rejected. In frustration, McIntyre and McKitrick put the entire record of their submission and the referee reports on a Web page for all to see.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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16/10/2004
Partisan Paul, part II
Well, Paul Krugman wanted to check the facts with Bush, but failed to get the facts straight himself. From Andrew Samwick:
Krugman begins his column with the statement:
"It’s not hard to predict what President Bush, who sounds increasingly desperate, will say tomorrow. Here are eight lies or distortions you’ll hear, and the truth about each:"
I don’t have time to go through each of his points individually, but I will simply point out the key error in his second point on unemployment. He writes:
"Mr. Bush will boast about the decline in the unemployment rate from its June 2003 peak. But the employed fraction of the population didn’t rise at all; unemployment declined only because some of those without jobs stopped actively looking for work, and therefore dropped out of the unemployment statistics. The labor force participation rate - the fraction of the population either working or actively looking for work - has fallen sharply under Mr. Bush; if it had stayed at its January 2001 level, the official unemployment rate would be 7.4 percent."
First, let’s identify the part that Krugman gets right. The employment-population ratio is unchanged between June 2003 and September 2004: 62.3 percent of the population over age 16 is employed. The labor force participation rate has fallen over that period of time from 66.5 percent to 65.9 percent, and the unemployment rate has fallen from 6.3 to 5.4 percent of the labor force.
Next, consider the part that Krugman gets wrong. The BLS keeps track of information on several different types of unemployment rate, precisely to make sure that changes in the unemployment rate are not driven by changes in discouraged workers. The BLS uses the following concepts:
Marginally attached workers are persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past.
Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for a job.
Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.
How have the unemployment rates including these groups as unemployed members of the labor force changed? According to the data at the BLS:
Unemployment Rate: Fell from 6.3 to 5.4 percent between 6/2003 and 9/2004
UR, Incl. discouraged workers: Fell from 6.6 to 5.7 percent
UR, Incl. discouraged and marginally attached workers: Fell from 7.2 to 6.4 percent
UR, Incl. marginally attached workers and those employed part-time for economic reasons: Fell from 10.3 to 9.4 percent
In no case is Krugman’s statement, "unemployment declined only because some of those without jobs stopped actively looking for work, and therefore dropped out of the unemployment statistics" supported by the data. When those workers are included, we still get about a 0.9 percentage point drop in the unemployment rate, however it is measured.
What, then, is the explanation for how the labor force participation rate dropped, if it is not due to people becoming dissatisfied with the labor market? Consider more people voluntarily taking time out of the labor force--whether to retire, raise a family, or go back to school--as just three possibilities.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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16/10/2004
Oliver Kamm sounds shrill
In his liberal case for Bush, Oliver Kamm sounds shrill, about John Edwards:
My doubts were allayed this week when considering the views of his running-mate, as reported by Reuters:
Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards on Sunday disputed a White House assertion that it was right to topple Saddam Hussein even if he had no illegal weapons because he posed a future threat.. The North Carolina senator, appearing on several television news programs, said Saddam’s intention to eventually gather weapons of mass destruction was one of dozens of such threats. "There are lots of threats waiting to happen all over the world," Edwards said. "That doesn’t mean that that justifies invading a country."
Because Edwards doesn’t spell out his objection to regime change (or if he did, the report does not quote it), we have to interpolate it. It appears from that extraordinary phrase about “invading a country” that he is making a point about the sovereignty of states. I can understand why a rational conservative would elevate that principle in his foreign policy, but would expect a different view on the liberal side of the argument. Saddam Hussein’s regime was not Iraq: it was the oppressor of Iraq. When Coalition forces overthrew that regime, they were doing something entirely admirable: protecting a people (or rather, peoples) from arbitrary violence and despotism. Iraqis could not rely on their own government for that protection, because of course their own government was the wielder of that violence. A professed liberal who, in considering that task, is more exercised by the violation of sovereignty or – as Charles Kennedy protested about in the Independent yesterday – the illegality of regime change than the liberty of an oppressed people is a perplexing phenomenon.
Still more perplexing in those complaints is the absence of context. There is no mention by Edwards – or Kennedy – of the fact that the Coalition did not launch war on Saddam Hussein’s regime: Saddam Hussein was the initiator of hostilities. The Gulf War of 1991 was never formally concluded: a ceasefire was put in place contingent on Saddam’s accepting the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 687. He never complied – and compliance, rather than an absence of weaponry, was the explicit requirement – and thereby was in breach of the terms of the ceasefire. This was what made Iraq under Saddam’s despotism a different case from other countries who are in breach of UNSC resolutions and different from other tyrannies. Saddam’s compliance with UNSC resolutions was a prerequisite of his not facing renewed hostilities. After 9/11 no responsible government could allow this continued flouting of international law by a despot with a longstanding record of launching war (three between 1974 and 1990) and supporting terrorism.
Edwards’s definition of responsible government is clearly different:
The first-term senator also noted that of the three countries singled out by Bush as part of an "axis of evil" -- Iraq, North Korea and Iran -- "you know, we invaded the one of those three that doesn’t have nuclear weapons."
I assume the aspirant Vice-President is accusing the Bush administration of inconsistency rather than complaining that it has not invaded Iran and North Korea. It is a staggeringly stupid remark, nonetheless. The reason we do not overthrow tyranny in those countries as we did in Iraq is precisely that they are nuclear-armed tyrannies: we are too late to stop that development. We must now practise containment, as we did with the Soviet Union, and hope for the eventual crumbling of those regimes if we demonstrate sufficient resolve. (I believe there are good reasons for expecting that to happen in Iran at least.) In the case of Saddam Hussein, we were not too late; we got to him first, to the immeasurable benefit of the people of Iraq, and us as well.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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16/10/2004
Michael Totten sounds shrill
In his liberal case for Bush, Michael Totten sounds shrill, about Kerry:
Conventional wisdom says Kerry has taken every possible position on the Iraq war. But it’s not true. He hasn’t. There is one he has ignored all along, the very position he should have championed from the beginning: the liberal case for war, the one that gave Operation Iraqi Freedom its name.
Maybe it never occurred to him to take the liberal position. Perhaps he considered it and shrugged or thought it was stupid. In any case, he won’t touch it. And that’s a serious problem. It stands as a de-facto repudiation of his great party’s tradition.
He did mention democracy in his speech, though. "Our purpose now is to reclaim democracy itself." But he wasn’t talking about democracy in the Middle East. He was talking about America as if it were ruled by a dissent-smashing dictatorship. Democracy plainly exists in the United States. The proof of that, as if any should even be needed, is that Kerry suggested otherwise while he was running for president.
Democracy needs to be claimed alright, but not in this country. Our liberal system of government is older, deeper, and stronger than any other on Earth. To speak of democracy as if ours must be "reclaimed" while poor oppressed masses -- who are desperate to come to America -- suffer under cold-hearted brutal regimes in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, is about as blinkered and provincial a whine imaginable.
Democracy doesn’t exist in Iraq. It doesn’t exist in any Middle Eastern country other than Israel. Bush makes this the lynchpin of his foreign policy. Kerry can hardly be bothered to give it lip service.
He has a hard time in our own hemisphere, too. Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer, no Bush supporter, was disappointed when he asked Kerry about the peaceful citizen’s revolt in Cuba:
"Kerry showed little enthusiasm when I asked him if he would seek greater international backing for the Varela Project, the petition signed by more than 30,000 Cubans on the island to hold a referendum on whether to hold free elections.
"While he has supported the Varela Project in the past, Kerry told me that it ’has gotten a lot of people in trouble, ... and it brought down the hammer in a way that I think wound up being counterproductive.’"
It was counterproductive? Is Kerry actually saying the architects of the Varela Project should not even have tried? Clearly the project wasn’t effective. But that’s hardly the fault of the people who backed it. Cuba lacks democracy because a half century of absolute power isn’t enough for Fidel Castro. Yet Kerry has the nerve to suggest "counterproductive" Cuban liberals are somehow partly to blame.
Iraq’s Ayatollah Sistani does a much better job promoting Islamic democracy than the supposedly liberal Democrats.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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16/10/2004
Kerry won the debates, but Bush still leads....
Andrew Sullivan links to a very recent poll by Zogby showing a four procent lead for G.W. Bush over his opponent: 48% - 44%. The good news for Bush is that he gains among the undecided voters. And Zogby apperantly has a good track record: in 1996, Zogby came within one-tenth of 1 percent of the presidential result. Surprisingly (at least i find it surprising), more Democrats support Bush than Republicans support Kerry, by a big margin: 14% versus 5%. The gender gap on the other hand has been narrowing. Al Gore had vastly more support under women voters than Bush, while Bush had a big lead under men. With Kerry and Bush that gap has schrunk considerably.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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16/10/2004
Comrades in arms?
Defense Tech reports on the "e-bom" a new kind of weapon of mass sizzling probably ready to use by the...U.S. in Iraq and made in part by...Germany. All’s well in this case between the two countries:
On the eve of the Iraq invasion, it was being hailed as America’s next "wonder weapon." The "e-bomb" -- a munition using high-powered microwaves to fry circuits and computers -- was about to be dropped on Baghdad, we were told. And the press could hardly keep from quivering at the thought of the big, electromagnetic strike, which would sizzle everything from anti-aircraft radars to Iraqi phone systems. But then... well, what happened next is unclear. Some say a prototype e-bomb was used to knock out Saddam’s broadcast facilities. Others aren’t so sure.
Now, Aviation Week reports, there are a pair of efforts underway at the Pentagon to use high-powered microwaves -- the core of the e-bomb -- for real.
The German manufacturer Diehl is "supplying U.S. forces in Iraq with 10 ’prototype’ HPM [high-powered microwave] devices in trials, where they will be used for convoy protection, according to a company source. They will be employed to jam detonation commands for improvised explosive devices."
Meanwhile, the American military is looking at a British program to pack cruise missiles with HPM warheads. American tests of the project -- code-named Virus -- "will likely be carried out at [Naval Air System Command’s] China Lake, Calif. range against a target set of foreign systems, including radars and weaponry."
The Pentagon won’t immediately make a purchase based on the tests, Aviation Week says. But it could "trigger a process resulting in a purchase." The Defense Department is also looking to load HPMs onto other weapons, including the satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munition, used so often in the early days of the Iraq war.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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16/10/2004
The way to higher economic growth...
Higher economic growth reduces poverty in developing countries, and makes it easier to pay for future liabilities (like pensions) and so protect welfare in developed countries. Investment is an important element in creating economic growth and poverty reduction (investment climate improvements in China drove poverty reduction: 400 million people were lifted out of poverty in 20 years). But what are the elements of a succesfull strategy? Maybe the new World Development Report of the World Bank can provide some answers. Here also are some of the questions:
How to create more investment?
- secure property rights: firms who believe there property rights are secure reinvest 14 tot 40 - percent more in there business;
- improve policy predictability: it increases the likelyhood of new investment by as much as 30%;
- reduce barriers to competition.
How to make investment more productive?
- lower barriers to the diffusion of new ideas;
- lower barriers that hamper the import of modern equipment;
- make market entry easier, it can account for more than 30% of productivity growth;
- increase competitive pressure for firms: is makes it 50% more likely that they will innovate more.
Possible consequences of a good investment climate:
- job creation by the private sector, creating better job opportunities leading towards more investment in education and skills
- more productive firms that pay better wages and invest more in training
- increasing incentives to become part of the formal economy, increasing income for millions of microentrepreneurs and allowing them to expand
- expansion of variety in goods and services at lower prices
- expansion, through taxes, of government resources to fund public services.
By improving it’s investment climate, Uganda saw it’s economy grow at 4% per year during 1993-2004, that is EIGHT times the average in Sub-Saharan Africa! The share of the population living below the poverty linen was reduced from 56% tot 35%. So even for Sub-Saharan Africa nothing is lost, development and poverty reduction is possible.
Some more figures from other development stories:
China: poverty (less than $ 1 a day) down from 64% tot 17%;
India: poverty down from 54% to 35%.
That’s a lot of people we are talking about here. Globalization is working right under our very noses.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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16/10/2004
Always low prices in America....and higher wages in China
From Dave over at Always Low Prices:
As I travel in China and find factories in more and more remote areas every time I go back, it is always astounding to see how rapidly an area can change from one with no phones and few bikes and no refrigeration to one in which people have healthful diets, better schooling, and great opportunities for children to grow in mind and body and spirit.
There are huge problems, and still about eighty-million Chinese who live on $75 a year or less... but the progress is unbelievable. It is the purchasing agents for Wal-mart and Target and Home Depot who are pushing incessantly for lower and lower costs that are central to the process. If they weren’t pushing so hard for lower prices they wouldn’t need to bother with getting new factories on line, back in the boonies where unpredictable problems will arise. We wouldn’t see millions of Chinese migrate from the poor areas to the richer areas and then later returning to manage the new plant back home.
If you’ve never experienced the physical sensation of enduring hunger, or had to decide if you can feed both your children tonight, think carefully before you attack Wal-mart... they may well be the real revolutionaries of our time.
Of course, few are suggesting that we ban big-box stores entirely. Suppose an anti-Wal-Mart campaign were able to slow their growth to a trickle. For the really poor who live in remote areas of China, India, or the Dominican Republic.... their children’s hope to live in the opportunity society that now predominates in much of China may be greatly delayed but not necessarily ruined.
The notion that those who care must oppose the companies who cut costs, like Dell or Wal-Mart is only possible if you ignore the vision of a billion people who still live on a dollar a day. We found that singing "We are the World" with Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen didn’t end the suffering in Africa. Meanwhile we see much of Asia has banished hunger and privation. The hope of those still suffering in dire poverty lies not with the followers of Mother Theresa but with the cost-cutting purchasing agents of Kiichiro Toyoda, Sam Walton, and Michael Dell.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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16/10/2004
The second (and healthy) life of McDonalds
McDonalds is trying hard to make itself less American. More diversity, food prepared in accordance to local tasts, inroads into high cuisine, courting health-fanatics. And not without success:
(F)or the first half of this year sales were up 13% to $9.1 billion, and net profits rose 38% to $1.1 billion, compared with the same period a year earlier. On October 13th McDonald’s announced stunning third-quarter preliminary results. Its earnings per share jumped by 42% and sales again grew strongly.
Still, much of McDonald’s growth has come from America, not Europe. At least not yet. But the company shows that is takes health and other concerns very serious indeed. Bravo.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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16/10/2004
Broadband goes broader....
According to the new Global Competitiveness report of the World Economic Forum, the United States still are the leader in technological innovation. That’s unlikely to change in the near future. This evolution in the broadband market can offer some clues:
Clearing the way for homes and businesses to receive high-speed Internet services through their electrical outlets, the Federal Communications Commission adopted rules this week that would enable the utility companies to offer an alternative to the broadband communications services now provided by cable and phone companies.
(...)
The new broadband Internet service is more than a year away from becoming widely available. But the FCC’s ruling is expected to significantly increase the level of investment and interest by the utilities, which had been stymied in previous attempts to offer new services over power lines. They reach more American homes than either telephone lines or television cables.
(...)
"Today is a banner day, and I think years from now we will look back and see it as an historical day for us," FCC Chairman Michael Powell said. "This is groundbreaking stuff."
Indeed. Increasing competition by creating a new broadband-network, while at the same time injecting some new dynamism in the stagnating electricity sector. A landmark decision.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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15/10/2004
Is al-Zarkawi een rebellenleider?
Waarom toch noemt Het Laatste Nieuws, Abu Mussab al-Zarkawi een "rebellenleider", terwijl ze toch donders goed weten dat het een terrorist is? Al-Zarkawi is op zijn minst de leider van een rivaliserende terreurgroep van Al Qaeda, en waarschijnlijk is hij een leider van Al Qaeda zelf. Hoe dan ook, van een rebellenleider zou je toch op zijn minst verwachten dat hij zich vooral richt op de "bezetter" niet? Maar veruit de meeste slachtoffers van de terreur van al-Zarkawi zijn Irakezen. Wat een rebellenleider!
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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15/10/2004
Partisan Paul
Yep. It’s about Paul Krugman of course:
Paul Krugman reached a milestone a couple of weeks ago -- he’s now written over 400 columns for The New York Times, yet not a single one of them has been a "crossover column", consisting primarily of substantive praise of Republicans or criticism of Democrats. The award-winning economist and leading columnist has never written an entire column praising the Republican Party or any individual Republicans on any issue. He’s never written an entire column criticizing the Democratic Party or any individual Democrats on any issue. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that a liberal columnist such as Mr. Krugman would be stingy with praise for Republicans, but even the most strident ideologues will tend to criticize members of their own party for failing to live up the party’s principles, or for being too willing to compromise with the other side. Yet Paul Krugman has managed to write two columns per week for the last four years (including the final year of the Clinton administration) without finding a single occasion to substantively take issue with the Democratic Party. How is that possible?
An important part of the answer is that Mr. Krugman has chosen to systematically avoid issues or persons in the news which reflect negatively on his own party. Mr. Krugman has never mentioned in one of his columns the universally-condemned 2001 pardon of Marc Rich by President Clinton. Despite living in New Jersey, he has never mentioned former Senator Robert Torricelli, who withdrew late in his 2002 reelection campaign because of a fundraising scandal. He has never mentioned former Democratic kingmaker and still-active presidential candidate Al Sharpton. He has criticized controversial Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe on only one occasion in four years.
Here at Lying in Ponds, a crossover column is defined as one which leans the opposite way of a pundit’s usual party orientation. As an attempt to exclude non-substantive efforts (accidental or offhand references), a crossover column is arbitrarily required to contain at least five non-neutral party references. So if a pundit writes a column with three negative but only two positive references to their own party, that would count as a crossover column -- certainly an extremely lenient standard. Is Mr. Krugman’s lack of crossover columns unusual? How often do other columnists cross party lines by writing an entire column contrary to their normal orientation? Might there be an explanation for 400 one-sided columns other than the obvious one -- partisanship?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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14/10/2004
If i’m right, Bush will be re-elected...
I predicted that Bush would lose all three debates (after seeing the first one). I was right. But that was the easy part. I also predicted he still would win the elections. That’s the hard part. However, Kerry wouldn’t have stand a chance against the G.W.Bush of ten years ago. Go here and watch the video. Amazing.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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14/10/2004
Privatising Europe
Privatly built and runned prisons, hospitals, rail-lines, toll-systems and roads...even the outsourcing of tax-collection, this is America right? Wrong, it’s Europe. It’s called public-private partnerships. Of course corruption is possible and some partnerships will crash, but when properly carried out is has muchos benefits. Investment in public services is guaranteed, while governments can keep their budgets in order.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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14/10/2004
The outsourcers outsourced....
Via AdamSmithee:
Interestingly, India and China—two countries that have been portrayed as major recipients of outsourcing in the media—are themselves significant outsourcers of business services, with a value of US$11 billion for India and US$8 billion for China...Who are the biggest insourcers or recipients of global outsourcing? In dollar terms, the top recipient in 2002 [is] the United States (US$59 billion)...
Many companies want to be in the America. It has an attractive business climate and after all if you want to sell anything the U.S. still is the place to be (but for how long?). On the other hand this is a sign that India and China, still two developing countries, seem to have some very vibrant companies searching their way into the world.
MORE
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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13/10/2004
Quiz time (the state of the left)
Who said this?
A marvellous thing is happening in Afghanistan... Freedom is powerful. Think about a society in which young girls couldn’t go to school and their mothers were whipped in the public square and today they’re holding a presidential election.
A right-wing president or a left-wing journalist?
And who said this?
Right now an election is the last thing Afghanistan needs
A right-wing president or a left-wing journalist?
(Hat tip: Left-wing professor Norman Geras)
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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13/10/2004
Graves of mass destruction
Why not a 1.600 pages long CIA-report about this?
Investigators in Iraq have begun exhuming bodies from a mass grave in the northern part of the country, seeking evidence they hope will help in a future trial of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.
Investigators say nine trenches located in a dry riverbed near the village of Hatra contain at least 300 bodies, possibly thousands, including children.
The victims are believed to be Iraqi Kurds killed during Saddam’s crackdown on the minority community in 1987-88.
Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry has identified 40 possible mass grave sites throughout the country.
Internationals organizations estimate more than 300,000 people were killed during Saddam’s 24-year rule. He is expected to stand trial for crimes against humanity and other offenses.
At least we can be relatively sure that Saddam won’t start a new program of graves of mass destruction either.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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12/10/2004
My feelings exactly
I’m in deep agreement with some people on the left. Here is Gene from Harry’s place:
Last week’s release of the Duelfer report-- concluding that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction at the time of the US invasion-- has stirred debate here and elsewhere about the justification for the war.
(...) I believed (and still believe) that the WMD issue was secondary to the urgent need to rescue the Iraqi people from one of the world’s most brutal and murderous tyrants.
Why, then, go after Saddam Hussein and not Mugabe, Kim Jong Il, the Iranian mullahs, the Burmese generals or others from a depressingly long list of oppressive rulers?
It’s a legitimate and difficult question. For me the clincher was my belief that US behaved criminally in 1991 when it encouraged Iraqis to revolt against their regime, only to stand aside and allow Saddam to slaughter them. We owed those brave people and their survivors-- big time.
On the other hand, I agree that the Bush administration deliberately exaggerated the thin evidence on WMD to win support for the war (though I’m quite sure they believed Iraq had such weapons). If Bush and company had been scrupulously honest, it’s unlikely they would have won enough support in Congress to authorize the war. The truth is that making a case for the intervention on purely humanitarian grounds would not have been enough. Those of us who supported the war on those grounds were essentially "going along for the ride."
Does this make me (hopeless liberal that I am) feel uncomfortable and morally conflicted? Am I angry about subsequent mismanagement of the reconstruction effort? Yes to both questions.
But I also have to face what is to me an even more unpleasant fact: that if the Bush administration had been straight with the American people, Saddam Hussein and his legion of thugs might still be in power and continuing their atrocities.
I don’t pretend to like it, but there it is. I wish I could feel as pure and righteous as some on both sides of the debate.
And we owe it to the Iraqi people because of the devestation wrought on the country by the international sanctions. If sanctions would have been lifted, while leaving Saddam in place, we would have to face serious consequences. It would have given Saddam new opportunities to acquire again nuclear weapons. Regime change still was the right thing to do.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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11/10/2004
The war on terror
George Friedman, from Stratfor, writes about the big mistakes the Bush administration made by calling the war on terror ... the war on terror. Still, this doesn’t mean the war hasn’t been successfull:
Al Qaeda uses terrorism. This group pursues counterpopulation operations designed to generate political evolutions that benefit its goals. By calling the war against al Qaeda a war on terrorism, the Bush administration committed two massive mistakes.
First, it lumped al Qaeda in with Mark Rudd and ETA. The latter two are not serious; the former is very serious. Both use the same tactics, but one has a strategic mission. In using this label, it became much more difficult for the administration itself to take al Qaeda seriously. How can you take something seriously that is part of such a collection of dunderheads? The Bush administration underestimated its enemy -- always dangerous in war.
Second, it confused the question of who the enemy was. If the war is against terrorism, then everyone who uses terrorism is the enemy. That’s a lot of groups -- including on occasion, the United States. If one is waging a war against terrorism, one is at war against a tactic, not a personifiable enemy. Alternatively, the war must be waged against hundreds or thousands of enemy groups. The concept of terrorism is a wonderful way to get lost.
The most important problem is that if al Qaeda is simply part of a broader spectrum of groups using terror operations, then the unique strategic interests of al Qaeda disappear. Al Qaeda has clear strategic goals: It wants to foment a rising in the Islamic world that will topple one or more governments, and replace them with regimes around which the reborn caliphate can be based. The Sept. 11 attacks were designed to trigger that rising. That has not happened, but al Qaeda is still there.
By ignoring the strategic goals of the attacks -- and this is critically important -- the Bush administration lost its ability to measure success in the war. The issue is not merely whether al Qaeda has lost the ability to carry out terrorist attacks; the more important question is whether al Qaeda has achieved its strategic goals through the use of terrorist attacks. The answer to that is an emphatic no. Al Qaeda not only has not come close to achieving its goal, but has actually moved to a weaker position since 9/11 -- having lost its Afghan base and having had Saudi Arabia turn against it. By focusing on the tactic -- terrorism -- rather than on the strategy, the Bush administration has actually managed to confuse the issue so much that its own successes are invisible. The terror tactics remain, but al Qaeda’s strategic goal is as far away as ever.
And Pakistan turned against it also, which is why the first voter in the Afghan election saturday was not only a women, but a women who voted in Pakistan, making it possible for thousands of refugees to participate in the first presidential election ever. What a break for Pakistan that not so long ago financed and supported the rise of Al Quada and the Taliban.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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11/10/2004
Downsizing big governments
According to a paper from the European Central Bank smaller governments perform better than big governments. To be sure, there are methodological problems with the study but the results are highly suggestive. The authors developed indicators of public sector performance for 23 industrialized countries. Differences between countries are rather modest, but countries with small public sectors perform better in economic terms, while countries with large governments have a more equal income distribution. As the authors note, this probably will surprise no one. Perhaps more surprising is that small governments are better at stabilizing the economy than bigger governments.
Differences are becoming more important when efficiency comes into play. Small governments uses resources more efficiently than big governments. In fact, on average, big governments could attain the same public sector performance, with 35% less spending. Apparently there is a lot of waste in countries with a large public sector (i.e. where government expenditure is above 50% of GDP). Here is an important lesson for Europe. Most European countries have a higher ratio of public expenditure to GDP than the U.S., but still they report lower public sector performance indicators. Downsizing big government not only can increase the efficiency of the public sector, but can also lead to a better economic performance.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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11/10/2004
Hahahaha...
The Gadhafi price for human rights? Yes, it exists. It must be something like the Bush price for peace. This years price winner: Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. I don’t know: is this sad or just hilarious?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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9/10/2004
No wmd in Iraq, and no Saddam either: thank god (and Bush) for that!
Well, it’s final then: Saddam didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction anymore. The important question then becomes, were we pro-regime change types wrong? Should we have left Saddam alone? I don’t think so, and so doesn’t Christopher Hitchens, basing himself on a new book from a certain Mahdi Obeidi, who was part of Saddam’s nuclear weapons program. Now apparently there are two interpretations of the Duelfer-report (see previous post). And the book strengthens those who hold the view that, left alone (and without regime change that was bound to happen), Saddam would have restarted the program. If that is the case, than the world indeed is a safer place now, and the war was just and right. As Hitchens concludes:
Libya and Iran turned out to be even more dangerous than we had thought, and the A.Q. Khan network of "Nukes ’R’ Us" even more widespread. But now Iraq can be certified as disarmed, instead of wishfully assumed to be so, Libya’s fissile materials are all under lock and key in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the traces "walked back" from Qaddafi’s capitulation helped expose A.Q. Khan. Of course, we could always have left Iraq alone, and brought nearer the day when the charming Qusai could have called for Dr. Obeidi and said: "That barrel of yours. It’s time to dig it up."
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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8/10/2004
Everyone’s report
The Economist on the new Duelfer report:
Critics of the Iraq war will feel vindicated by a new report, concluding that Saddam Hussein had no illicit weapons. But the war’s backers will feel equally vindicated by its findings that he was readying to restart his weapons programmes at the first opportunity
Take your pick. The debate continues....
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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8/10/2004
De VRT en Afghanistan
Historische verkiezingen in Afghanistan. Belangrijk nieuws zou je denken. Maar niet voor onze VRT. Die vindt het belangrijker te berichten dat er toenemende onrust is. Eigenlijk zou je dat verwachten: geslaagde verkiezingen is wel het laatste dat de islamitische fascisten van de Taliban en Al Quada willen. In feite is dat dus geen nieuws. De VRT vindt echter van wel. Tot daar nog aan toe. Maar dan lezen we dit:
Morgen trekken de Afghanen voor het
eerst sinds de val van het Taliban-
regime naar de stembus.
Pardon? Sinds de val van het Taliban? Was het Taliban-regime een democratisch regime dan, waar verkiezingen werden georganiseerd? Zijn het morgen niet de eerste presidentsverkiezingen OOIT?
Bovendien zijn deze verkiezigen ook nog in een andere zin historisch te noemen. Er dingt ook een vrouwelijke presidentskandidaat mee. En dat in een land waar vrouwen tot aan de val van de Taliban nog gesluierd moesten rondlopen, zich moesten laten vernederen in een arena, gestenigd werden of onthoofd. Nu hebben vier miljoen vrouwen zich als kiezer laten registreren. Dat is pas nieuws. Maar waarom bericht de VRT daar dan niet over?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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8/10/2004
Some parts from the Duelfer report
Kindly provided by Dan Darling:
Since May 2004, ISG has recovered dozens of additional chemical munitions, including artillery rounds, rockets and a binary Sarin artillery projectile (see Figure 5). In each case, the recovered munitions appear to have been part of the pre-1991 Gulf war stocks, but we can neither determine if the munitions
were declared to the UN or if, as required by the UN SCR 687, Iraq attempted to destroy them. (See Annex F.)
A group of insurgents began a nascent CW effort without CW scientists or industrial-scale chemical supplies. After OIF, a group of insurgents—referred to as the al-Abud network—assembled key supplies and relevant expertise from community resources to develop a program for weaponizing CW agents for use against Coalition Forces. The al-Abud network in late 2003 recruited a Baghdad chemist—who lacked
the relevant CW expertise—to develop chemical agents. The group sought and easily acquired from farmers and local shops chemicals and equipment to conduct CW experiments. An investigation of these CW attempts suggests that the al-Abud network failed to produce desired CW agents, however it remains unclear whether these failures derive from a lack of available precursors or insufficient CW expertise.
ISG has also recovered 155mm chemical rounds and 122mm artillery rockets which we judge came from abandoned Regime stocks.
ISG has obtained no evidence that contradicts our assessment that the Iraqis destroyed most of their hidden stockpile, although we recovered a small
number of pre-1991 chemical munitions in early to mid 2004.
• These remaining pre-1991 weapons either escaped destruction in 1991 or suffered only partial damage. More may be found in the months and years ahead.
The destruction years ago of the bulk of Iraq’s CW munitions not withstanding, ISG remains concerned about the status and whereabouts of hundreds of
CW artillery rounds. Previous assertions that the munitions were all destroyed have been undermined by reporting that the munitions remain intact in an unknown location.
In a 7 August 2003 debriefing, Huwaysh said that as of early 2003, all 550 mustard rounds were kept by the SRG at Suwayrah, probably the former location
of the II RG Corps Headquarters, just north of the Shaykh-Mazar ammunition depot.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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8/10/2004
Please provide the answers
Matt Welch asks some pertinent questions:
If, as the report has indicated, Saddam’s weapons programs were basically kaput since 1991, why not allow inspectors to come in and see that, apply their stamp of approval, and get the oil revenues flowing ASAP, rather than waiting until 1997? And, why didn’t he resume weapons programs after 1998, considering that the oil-for-food billions were flowing, and the weapons inspectors had been successfully kicked out of the country?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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8/10/2004
The birth of plenty
In the online world non-hits are as profitable than hits (CD’s, DVD’s, movies, books....). Because of low or non-existent fixed costs profit margins are the same for both. And although for every single non-hit sales are much less than for a hit, the market of non-hits in global can and often is bigger than that of hits. There are just many more of them. So in the online world is makes sense to sell those non-hits, while it often does not in physical places like a video store or a super market. Because of that consumers in the online world get a much more choice, against a lower price. But because of low fixed costs and increased demand, the producers and makers of those non-hits still can make a profit.
MORE
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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7/10/2004
Hoogste tijd voor een week van de vrije handel
Met al dat gedoe rond "fair trade" de laatste tijd, stel ik voor dat mensen van dezelfde gezindheid eens samenkomen om iets gelijkaardigs op te zetten rond vrije handel. Een week dus van de "free trade". Want in tegenstelling tot "fair trade" zijn er studies genoeg die aantonen dat meer vrije handel op zijn minst een noodzakelijke voorwaarde is voor economische groei en vooruitgang. Geïnteresseerden?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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6/10/2004
Wordt Michael Moore met de dood "bedreigd"?
De Republikeinen "bedreigen" Michael Moore, meldt Het Laatste Nieuws. Bedreigen? Gaan ze hem vermoorden of wat? Valt nog wel mee hoor, bij nader inzien. Ze onderzoeken of ze een proces kunnen inspannen; omdat hij iets doet wat in een land als bijvoorbeeld België verboden is: stemmen kopen. Logisch dus wat de Republikeinen doen. En de hoogste tijd ook, gezien Moore’s leugens en verdraaiingen in zijn populaire documentaire. Maar om dat onder de noemer "bedreigen" te plaatsen.
PS. Wat een hypocriet is die Michael Moore toch, de grote strijder tegen het kapitalisme en het grote geld...en dan maar stemmen afkopen. Je moet maar durven. Maar dat is het probleem niet voor onze pers, wel dat hij "bedreigd" wordt.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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4/10/2004
Software wars
In 1991 Bill Gates wrote:
If people had understood how patents
would be granted when most of today’s ideas were
invented and had taken out patents, the industry would
be at a complete standstill today.
Twelve years later the same Bill Gates observed:
last year we applied for 1,500 patents, and that’s a
number that’s been going up at a pretty steep ramp
That’s for Microsoft alone. The U.S. Patent and Trademark office issues more than 20.000 new software patents every year. So is the industry at a complete standstill today? Nothing could be further from the truth. Each revolution has it’s counterrevolution. In software the steep rise of patents (or intellectual property rights in general) is countered by the open source movement. In fact one can argue that without patents we wouldn’t have Linux. And while patents in fact are a public state sponsored system to protect new inventions and innovations from competition (at least for some years), the open source movement is an increasingly private system to bring much software back into the public domain. Here is a list of private enterprises providing support for open source software:
Acer has launched a PC with a Linux option for the
home PC segment.
BEA Systems, Inc. offers an application server
platform and Java Virtual Machine optimized for
a variety of Linux versions.
BMC Software, Inc. provides varied infrastructure
and service management needs for Linux.
Borland Software Corp. released a Linux version of
their Delphi application development tool.
Computer Associates, Inc. provides over 50 products
addressing the Linux market. Through its ACCPAC
subsidiary, it provides an accounting application
for Linux servers and desktops.
Hewlett-Packard Company has established a Linux
division which pursues and coordinates a variety of
OSS initiatives.
IBM Corp. has a variety of Linux initiatives including
work with the Brazilian Government to develop technology
based on open standards and with the
Russian government to establish a Linux
Competency Center in Moscow.
LG Electronics launched a Linux based desktop
computer, called MY PC, for the Indian market.
Novell, Inc. continues to expand its OSS support
with its acquisition of Ximian, Inc., and SUSE, both
providers of solutions for Linux desktops and
servers.
Oracle Corp. provides Linux support for its database,
application server and E-Business Suite. It also
worked with Red Hat in the development of their
Advanced Server offering.
SAP AG established the LinuxLab to focus on the
development and release of mySAP, their core proprietary
solution platform, on Linux and address
related support considerations. They are also working
with MySQL to support OSS database technology.
Sun Microsytems, Inc. introduced a Linux desktop
offering which includes Mozilla Web browser,
StarOffice (a commercial version of OpenOffice),
Evolution and support for Java.
Veritas Software, Inc. provides storage management
software for Linux and MySQL databases.
And that’s just for Linux. By doing this competition is restored and the industry standstill avoided. In fact the end result is a refound dynamism in the private economy and in the public domain. No wonder we hear so much about browser wars lately and about the fact that Microsoft, with all it’s patents, can’t take it’s lead of Internet Explorer for granted (see here for a lively, although technical, debate, in dutch). The same mechanism works at the biotechnology sector, although a bit different. For mor observations, here is an interesting paper from Robert P. Merges. The abstract:
Many believe intellectual property has overreached, and that policymakers must respond. In this Essay, I argue that the critique may have merit, but private parties are in some cases taking mat-ters into their own hands. Firms and individuals are increasingly injecting information into the public domain with the explicit goal of preempting or undermining the potential property rights of economic adversaries. Biotechnology firms invest millions of dollars in public domain gene sequence databases, to prevent hold-ups by firms with patents on short gene sequences. Major software firms fight en-trenched rivals by investing millions of dollars, contributing to open source operating systems. In both cases, property-preempting investments (PPIs) are made to offset the effects of competitors’ property rights. Individuals and nonprofits are joining in too, with initiatives such as the Creative Commons project. All of these major private investments in the public domain reveal a self-correcting feature of the intellectual property system that has been overlooked until now, and signal that public lawmaking is not the only arena in which the excesses of intellectual property may be addressed.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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4/10/2004
Evil Empire (UPDATED)
America that is. That nation can be a force for good, but not in this way:
The Bush administration is supporting a provision in the House leadership’s intelligence reform bill that would allow U.S. authorities to deport certain foreigners to countries where they are likely to be tortured or abused, an action prohibited by the international laws against torture the United States signed 20 years ago.
The provision, part of the massive bill introduced Friday by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), would apply to non-U.S. citizens who are suspected of having links to terrorist organizations but have not been tried on or convicted of any charges. Democrats tried to strike the provision in a daylong House Judiciary Committee meeting, but it survived on a party-line vote.
Disgusting. I thought this administration’s policy was to bring democracy to countries like Syria. What they want to do instead is to bring people suspected of terrorism (not convicted!) to Syria, where they can be tortured. It’s not just condoning the practice of torture but effectively encouraging it. And afterwards the Department of State can issue a report condemning Syria for human rights abuses. Nothing more than a disgrace.
(Via Michael Totten)
UPDATE
Via Crooked Timber comes word that president Bush denounces the proposed legislation:
The president did not propose and does not support this provision. He has made clear that the United States stands against and will not tolerate torture and that the United States remains committed to complying with its obligations under the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Consistent with that treaty, the United States does not expel, return or extradite individuals to countries where the United States believes it is likely that they will be tortured.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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1/10/2004
Predictions
Two things seems pretty clear after yesterday’s Bush-Kerry debate. First, Kerry won. Second, Kerry won not because of what he said, but because the way he said it. (And the same goes for Bush, he didn’t look presidential.) Now this last thing is fairly obvious. Debates on television are never about what is being said. One catchy frase (like that one from Reagan on the youth and unexperience of his opponent) or one stupid move (Bush the elder looking at his watch) can tip the balance. Nevertheless, the fact that Bush couldn’t win the debate about his supposed strong point - the war against terror - spells trouble for him. He has to improve his performance and i’m not sure that he will succeed. On top of that he has the bad luck that Kerry is not Al Gore. In 2000 Bush essentially had to do nothing to win the debates, Al Gore did himself in. In the first debate he was too arrogant. After that he changed his tone, but the damage already was done. Besides, the change in tactics itself played out in a negative way for Gore. In every debate Americans saw a different Gore, so nobody knew anymore what to think of him. But this time it is Bush who has to change, while Kerry can sit back and relax (well not really but he definitely has the easy part). Then again, this is no way predicts the result of the election itself. Gore still won the popular vote in 2000. So my predection: Bush will lose the other two debates also, but he still has a big chance to be the next president of the United States.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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29/09/2004
Baby, you can drive my car....
Long and fascinating article in the New York Times magazine exploring and exploding some myths about the automobile. Just when we thought that the car was a machine of death, spoiling nature, the landscape and our cities (or so the critics say) John Tierney, himself no car lover, comes to doubt the conventional wisdom. Take urban sprawl. We in Europrean cities are much better of than in America we think. Are we?
Suppose you have a choice between two similarly priced homes. One is an urban town house within walking distance of stores and mass transit; the other is in the suburbs and requires driving everywhere. Which one would you pick?
If you chose the town house, you’re in a distinct minority. Only 17 percent of Americans chose it in a national survey sponsored by the real-estate agents’ and homebuilders’ trade associations. The other 83 percent preferred the suburbs, which came as no surprise to the real-estate agents or others who spend time in subdivisions. For all the bad press that suburbs get in books like ’’The Geography of Nowhere’’ -- whose author, James Kunstler, calls America a ’’national automobile slum’’ -- polls repeatedly show that the vast majority of suburbanites are happy with their neighborhoods.
You could argue that Americans are deluded because they haven’t been given a reasonable alternative. Smart-growth advocates say that suburbs have flourished at the expense of cities because of government policies promoting cheap gasoline, Interstate highways and new-home construction. What if the government, instead of devastating urban neighborhoods by running expressways through them, instead lavished money on mass transit and imposed high gasoline taxes to discourage driving?
As it happens, that experiment has already been conducted in Europe with surprisingly little effect. To American tourists who ride the subways in the carefully preserved old cities, the policies seem to have worked. But it turns out that the people who live there aren’t so different from Americans. Even with $5-per-gallon gasoline, the number of cars per capita in Europe has been growing faster than in America in recent decades, while the percentage of commuters using mass transit has been falling. As the suburbs expand, Europe’s cities have been losing people, too. Paris is a great place to visit, but in the past half-century it has lost one-quarter of its population.
But isn’t the car resposible for the scarring of the landscape?
(...) if you look at the big picture, America is not paving paradise. More than 90 percent of the continental United States is still open space and farmland. The major change in land use in recent decades has been the gain of 70 million acres of wilderness -- more than all the land currently occupied by cities, suburbs and exurbs, according to Peter Huber, author of ’’Hard Green: Saving the Environment From the Environmentalists.’’ Because agriculture has become so efficient, farmers have abandoned vast tracts of land that have reverted to nature, and rural areas have lost population as young people migrate to cities. You may not like the new homes being built for them at the edge of your town, but if preserving large ecosystems and wildlife habitat is your priority, better to concentrate people in the suburbs and exurbs rather than scatter them in the remote countryside.
Still the car is responsible for traffic congestion, so we need more mass transit as a cure. But the cure maybe worse than the disease:
Since 1970, transit systems have received more than $500 billion in subsidies (in today’s dollars), but people have kept voting with their wheels. Transit has been losing market share to the car and now carries just 3 percent of urban commuters outside New York City. It’s easy to see why from one statistic: the average commute by public transportation takes twice as long as the average commute by car.
(...)
Yes, the government spends a lot more money on highways than transit, but most of that money comes out of the drivers’ pockets. If you add up the costs of driving -- the car owner’s costs as well as the public cost of building and maintaining highways and local streets, the salaries of police patrolling the roads -- it works out to about 20 cents per passenger mile, and drivers pay more than 19 of those cents, according to Cox. A trip on a local bus or commuter train costs nearly four times as much, and taxpayers subsidize three-quarters of that cost.
Drivers do avoid paying some indirect costs of their cars, like the health consequences of the pollution from tailpipes. One of the most thorough attempts to measure these social costs was done by Mark Delucchi, a cost-benefit analyst at the University of California, Davis, who factored in everything from expenditures in the Persian Gulf to the cost of the real estate devoted to free parking lots. Autonomists complain that he overestimated the car’s costs, but even so, his calculations show that when compared with the social costs of transit systems (like taxpayer subsidies and noise from buses), the car is at least twice as cheap per passenger mile as transit.
And no, new freeways don’t make things worse:
A new freeway does indeed attract new drivers, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth building. Besides benefiting those drivers (no small thing), it eases the strain on the road network. This year’s report from the Texas Transportation Institute confirms other research showing that when you take population growth into account, traffic congestion has been increasing more rapidly in the cities that haven’t been building roads. The reason for Los Angeles’s traffic morass is that it didn’t build enough freeways, incredible as that sounds. The great symbol of sprawl is not what it seems when you compare it with other cities using the Census Bureau’s definition of an ’’urbanized area,’’ which extends until the point where there’s open countryside. By this definition, Los Angeles is the most densely populated city in America, with 7,068 persons per square mile of urbanized area. Its traffic is terrible because it built only about half the freeways originally planned, so that it now has fewer miles of freeway per capita than any other major city.
There is much more in the article so i propose you read the whole thing. One part is about how it just could be possible to solve the problem of traffic jams. Another about the aristocratic disdain of intellectuals looking down at those hard working people living in the suburds and standing still in traffic jams before going to work.
Just one quote to end (consider this the quote of the day):
When Communist leaders imported the movie ’’Grapes of Wrath’’ to illustrate the evils of capitalism, audiences took away a different revolutionary lesson. Watching the dispossessed farmers head for California, they were amazed that even unemployed Americans owned cars and could drive wherever they wanted to find work.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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29/09/2004
Americans still backing Bush, right?
Gavin Esler, from the BBC no less, wonders why there are so much Bush-haters around and anti-Bush books on the shelf, while at the same time many American are still backing him. He doesn’t much offer something of an explanation though. For this i think you should read The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, two reporters of The Economist. America is the right nation in two ways. First, on the political spectrum the United States is the most right wing nation on earth. The Democrats, supposed to be on the left side of the spectrum is to the right of the British Labour party and even of many European liberal parties. And Labour in Britain is considered to be the most right wing social-democratic party of Europe. Not all Americans are right-wingers of course. But, and this is the second sense why the U.S. is "the right nation", a large group of them are. And, as Wooldridge and Micklewait show, this group is expanding and pushing America further and further to the right. They have the president, they control Congres and (but only just) the Senate; and a big part of the population consider themselves right-wingers. Is this to change anytime soon? Maybe, if the Republicans screw things up. But this is unlikely as long as Bush stay’s at the helm. True, he has taken steps that enrages real conservatives - like expanding government. On the other hand consider Texas, the most conservative state in America. Nevertheless, traditionally it always has been a Democratic state, untill Bush turned that around. Or take Latinos. Some think that the increasing share of Latinos in the American population will one day lead to a Democratic majority. This could possibly be when anti-immigration politicians as Pat Buchanan would control the Republican party. But as Wooldridge and Micklewaith point out, in fact, many Latinos consider themselves conservatives or at least hold many values in common with conservatives like entrepreneurship, strong family values and so on...So courted in the "right" way, many of those Latinos could be drawn into the Republican party and made part of "the right nation". And when he sees the chance Bush does have a go at it...So America is a right nation, and is becoming ever more so. And for the right nation, Bush is their president. That’s why so many American still are backing Bush.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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29/09/2004
Responsible empire
Michael Mandel, chief economist for Business Week, implores the United States to stay an innovative risk-taking society. That would be good not only for itself, but for the whole world:
The U.S. economy is rich enough and big enough to absorb the risks of innovation. The United States also has a critical mass of educated people — and a financial system able to fund their ideas.
It is our obligation to take risks, to be the trailblazers — and absorb most of the uncertainty.
We are the only country big enough to absorb a failure on the magnitude of the massive telecom and dotcom losses without losing a step.
If the United States does not walk the path of exuberant growth, there is no one else who will.
The fast-growing Asian giants — China and India — do not have the resources or the financial infrastructure to support risky innovation.
Japan and Europe have chosen the path of safe, cautious growth — which is based on the steady accumulation of capital.
If the United States follows suit, the result will be a lower growth rate for the whole world.
And without technological innovations that increase productivity and reduce the use of scarce resources, it is hard to see how the mass of the world’s population can even approach the standard of living of the industrialized nations.
We should be taking on the big risks. That is the right thing for us to do. And even if they do not work out, that is our responsibility to the rest of the world — and to our children.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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28/09/2004
Heh!
What kind of cold-hearted capitalists are these folks?
Hello [ ],
Z has been losing money. Costs are up and revenues down. We must reverse this trend.
Since the Sustainer Program began we have not increased donation rates. To survive and thrive we must now receive more revenues from our most supportive users.
We know you all have busy schedules so that visiting and altering your sustainer page is not something we could reasonably expect everyone, or even most of you, or even more than a small number of you, to quickly do.
So we would like to make the changes ourselves, in one swoop, affecting everyone at once.
Unless you tell us otherwise, that is, for those of you who are now donating less than $10 a month, we will increase your donation by 20%. For those donating $10 or more, we will increase your pledge by 30%.
For some of you money is tight and you cannot afford this generous an increase. To prevent us from altering your donation level, please contact us at sysop@zmag.org asap but by Sept 29th at the latest. Just send an email saying "please don’t change my donation amount."
On the other hand, if you decide that you would like to raise your donation more than we have proposed, that would be wonderful and you can do that yourself, of course, though please wait until after we have made our changes on Sept 30th.
We thank you for your support of all Z’s work up until now and we thank you as well for what we hope will be your willingness to accommodate the new rates we are proposing.
Thanking you in advance,
Michael Albert and Daniel Morduchowicz for ZNet
Lydia Sargent, Eric Sargent, and Andy Dunn for Z Magazine
As a good and sane leftist Marcus over at Harry’s place is right to criticize these exploiters of the working people:
Even Vegan Transhumanist Socialists choked on their tofu when given less than a week’s notice that their bank accounts were going to be plundered unless they were in a position to do something about it.
This sort of action does rather bring to mind top hatted mill owners chuckling cynically at ragged 19th Century workers on pay day just after the proletarian has found out about previously unheard of "deductions" from his wages. All dreams of affording a pound of dripping and a scrap of mutton to see him through the week vanish as he realises he now owes the owner two shillings and there’s nothing he can do about it.
Utterly outrageous. And legally challengeable.
Even in America this behaviour is legally challengeable? In that capitalist paradise? And they don’t know that at Znet and Z Magazine? Wow. Serious now, if Z wants to survive and thrive (what they mean by this i suppose is that they want too be "profitable" but that is probably too dirty a word) they’d better start behaving like real capitalists and start treating their readers like plain old customers instead of "supportive users" they can exploit at will.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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28/09/2004
Today’s reason to not to vote Kerry
Ah. But Kerry has his shrill critics too. Earlier we had Bhagwati, now comes Christopher Hitchens:
There it was at the tail end of Brian Faler’s "Politics" roundup column in last Saturday’s Washington Post. It was headed, simply, "Quotable":
"I wouldn’t be surprised if he appeared in the next month." Teresa Heinz Kerry to the Phoenix Business Journal, referring to a possible capture of Osama bin Laden before Election Day.
As well as being "quotable" (and I wish it had been more widely reported, and I hope that someone will ask the Kerry campaign or the nominee himself to disown it), this is also many other words ending in "-able." Deplorable, detestable, unforgivable. …
The plain implication is that the Bush administration is stashing Bin Laden somewhere, or somehow keeping his arrest in reserve, for an "October surprise." This innuendo would appear, on the face of it, to go a little further than "impugning the patriotism" of the president. It argues, after all, for something like collusion on his part with a man who has murdered thousands of Americans as well as hundreds of Muslim civilians in other countries.
I am not one of those who likes to tease Mrs. Kerry for her "loose cannon" style. This is only the second time I have ever mentioned her in print. But I happen to know that this is not an instance of loose lips. She has heard that very remark being made by senior Democrats, and—which is worse—she has not heard anyone in her circle respond to it by saying, "Don’t be so bloody stupid." I first heard this "October surprise" theory mentioned seriously, by a prominent foreign-policy Democrat, at an open dinner table in Washington about six months ago. Since then, I’ve heard it said seriously or semiseriously, by responsible and liberal people who ought to know better, all over the place. It got even worse when the Democratic establishment decided on an arm’s-length or closer relationship with Michael Moore and his supposedly vote-getting piece of mendacity and paranoia, Fahrenheit 9/11. (The DNC’s boss, Terence McAuliffe, asked outside the Uptown cinema on Connecticut Avenue whether he honestly believed that the administration had invaded Afghanistan for the sake of an oil or perhaps gas pipeline, breezily responded, "I do now.")
What will it take to convince these people that this is not a year, or a time, to be dicking around? Americans are patrolling a front line in Afghanistan, where it would be impossible with 10 times the troop strength to protect all potential voters on Oct. 9 from Taliban/al-Qaida murder and sabotage. We are invited to believe that these hard-pressed soldiers of ours take time off to keep Osama Bin Laden in a secret cave, ready to uncork him when they get a call from Karl Rove? For shame.
The duty of the opposition is to oppose Christopher. But i agree that even this has it’s limits.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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28/09/2004
Bush has a credibility problem
Time to get a little critical on Bush, but not too shrill though. On recieving a memo about the Clinton’s administration’s failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda, Bush apparently wrote in the margins: "Not on my watch". But a genocide nevertheless did happen and is probably still happening on his watch: in Darfur, Sudan. Now if there is one country that tries to do something about it, it is the U.S. and the way this administration is handling the atrocities in Darfur are certainly less shamefull than what Clinton did when confronted with the genocide in Rwanda. Still, the gap between rethoric on the one hand and real action to end the killings on the other remains huge. So when now Bush is saying that Iran will not develop a nuclear weapon "under his watch", he obviously lacks credibility. Certainly if you keep in mind what happened with North-Korea. The essential non-action of the Bush-administration towards that country’s quest to produce nuclear weapons made the world probably a more dangourous place. And it does not bode well for his commitment concerning Iran. Let’s hope i’m wrong. That those mad Ayatolla’s in Iran would one day have nuclear weapons really send shivers through my spine.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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28/09/2004
Kerry, Bush and humor
Well, this is certainly news:
"Heavens to Betsy," it’s hard to believe that the John Kerry of U.S. Senate stiff-speak is out there on the campaign trail tossing off homespun phrases, and even a joke or two.
The article says that he made the audience laugh six times with jokes at Bush’ expense. Of course Bush uses the weapon of humor too, longer and more consistently than Kerry. But where Bush really is superior to Kerry i guess is that Bush can use humor at his own expense too, like at the latest Republican National Convention where he joked about the way he talks and walks. So if it comes to humor my vote still goes to Bush.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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24/09/2004
Quote van de dag
Mia Doornaert:
En de rest van de wereld mag zich afvragen hoe anders Irak er had kunnen uitzien als er maar een duizendste van de mediadrukte over Abu Ghraib had plaatsgevonden over de honderdduizend maal ergere gruwels in de martelgevangenissen van Saddam.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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24/09/2004
Signs that Bush could well win the next election
Here are some signs that Bush will be victorious in the next election:
1° In Florida, ravaged by hurricanes this year, Bush has taken a lead in the opinion polls. If those hurricanes are the result of global warming, then why are the people in Florida prepared to give Bush, the anti-Kyoto president, four more years? (To be sure the race remains within the margin of error, nevertheless one would expect, not just because of global warming, a significant lead for Kerry). By the way, Bush has taken a significant lead in another swing state, where Gore won in 2000, namely Winsconsin.
2° Debating before a heavily anti-Bush crowd, Christopher Hitchens and James Woolsey (what a couple!), convinced more people that Bush had made the world safer, than Juliette Kayyem and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, who argued against. Most of course where not prepared to give Bush the benifit of the doubt (it was a very hostile audience remember), nevertheless most of those who were undecided went towards the Hitchens/Woolsey/Bush camp. Hitchens of course is a very good debater, but this is, given the fact that he by a large part of the left is considered as a traitor, no mean feat. I wonder what the result would be with a pro-Bush crowd, or even a neutral one.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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24/09/2004
Today’s reason to vote for Bush
This was the situation in Kandahar, Afghanistan a few years ago:
Five years ago, the Taliban and its Al Qaeda allies were at the height of their power. They had turned Afghanistan into a terrorist state, with more than a dozen training camps churning out thousands of jihadist graduates every year.
This is the situation now, after the American led ouster of the Taliban:
The scene was very different this time around. The Kandahar airport, where I had once seen Taliban soldiers showing off their antiaircraft missiles, is now a vast American base with thousands of soldiers, as well as a 24-hour coffee shop, a North Face clothing store, a day spa and a PX the size of a Wal-Mart. Next door, what was once a base for Osama bin Laden is now an American shooting range. In downtown Kandahar, the gaudy compound of the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, now houses United States Special Forces units.
Or take Kabul, the capital:
Kabul (...) is now one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, with spectacular traffic jams and booming construction sites.
Afghanistan seems even to give the neoconservatives hope that their vision can be true for at least one part of the world:
If the elections are a success, it will send a powerful signal to neighboring countries like Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, none of which can claim to be representative democracies. If so, the democratic domino effect, which was one of the Bush administration’s arguments for the Iraq war, may be more realistic in Central Asia than it has proved to be in the Middle East.
Besides, i would argue that Iran is rather a part of the Middle East than of Central Asia. So if the events in Afghanistan can push Iran in the right direction, the Middle East also can be changed for the better...Nothing is lost just yet.
Note: I don’t think i took the strongest arguments from the article from Peter Bergen, there is lot’s more in it (the popularity of Karzai, the return of millions of refugees, the enthousiasm of many Afghans for the next election...), giving even more hope and thus reason to vote Bush. So do read the whole article.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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23/09/2004
Immoral Hersh
From an interview with Seymour Hersh:
Jacoby: Is there someone who is the Henry Kissinger in this administration?
Hersh: Oh, believe me, I pray for one [clasps his hands and looks beseechingly upward]. Wouldn’t it be great if the reality was that they were lying about WMD, and they really didn’t believe that democracy would come when they invaded Iraq, and you could go to war with 5,000 troops, a few special forces, a few bombs and a lot of American flags, and Iraq would fold, Saddam would be driven out, a new Baath Party would emerge that’s moderate? Democracy would flow like water out of a fountain. These guys believe it. They believe WMD. There’s no fallback with these guys. These guys are utopians. They’re like Trotskyites. They believe in permanent revolution. They really believe. They believe that they could go in with few forces. They believed that once they went in it would happen quick. Iran would get the message. What they call occupied Lebanon would get the lesson. Even the Saudis would change.
Jacoby: They thought it would happen quickly?
Hersh: Very quickly. I don’t have any empirical basis for it, but if I had to bet, the plan was to go right into Syria. That’s why the fourth division was hanging for so long in the desert out there right on the border with Syria. In the early days of the war, before this government figured out how much trouble they were in -- which took them a long time -- they would drive practice runs... that amounted to the distance from the border to Damascus. It’s my belief... that the real reason [Paul] Wolfowitz and others were mad at [Gen. Eric] Shinseki when he testified before the war about [the need for] 200 or 300 [thousand] troops -- it wasn’t about the numbers -- was, "Didn’t he get it? What had he been listening to in the tank? Didn’t we explain to him...?... Shinseki just didn’t get it! It wasn’t about the numbers. He wasn’t a member of the clan. He didn’t join the utopia crowd....
Jacoby: With Kissinger, there were lies, and he knew exactly what he was doing ...
Hersh: Yes, one of his aides was assigned -- literally assigned on one of the secret flights they made to China -- to keep track of the lies ... But these guys, do you realize how much better off we would be if they really were cynical, and they really were lying about it, because, yes, behind the invasion would be something real, like support for Israel or oil. But it’s not! It’s not about oil. It’s about utopia. I guess you could call it idealism....
Jacoby: So you don’t think that this is some Machiavellian, cynical, manipulative ...
Hersh: I used to pray it was! We’d be in better shape.... I think these guys in their naiveté and single-mindedness have been so completely manipulated by -- not the Israelis -- but the Iranians. The Iranians always wanted us in. I think there’s a lot of evidence that Iran had much to do with [Ahmed] Chalabi’s disinformation [about nonexistent Iraqi WMD].... I think Iran was very interested in getting us involved. We get knocked down a peg; they become the big boys on the block.... I think Chalabi thought he could handle the Iranians. They were helping him all along with disinformation and documents he could give to the White House. Don’t forget, once the neocons decided to go to Iraq in the face of all evidence, they were like a super-reverse suction machine, and anything in the world that furthered the argument that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was hot. I call it stove-piping, because it’s a technical work of art. But it was much more than that. It was anything -- vavoom! -- into the president’s [office]. It was so amateurish, it was comical. How hard was it to get some crapola into the White House about WMD without the CIA looking at it?
Tongue in cheek (I think, or is he really serious?), Hersh prefers Kissinger over Wolfowitz. Apparently the Shrillblog and Brad Delong think this is quite funny, but in fact it’s no laughing matter. Seriously, is the left really gone that mad? To prefer Kissinger over Wolfowitz? Is there blind hatred of this administration that blind?
Let’s see who would agree with this.
Would the Iraqi Kurds?
In the early 1970s, as tensions between Iran and its neighbor Iraq increased, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger agreed to support a plan devised by the Shah of Iran to encourage an uprising by Kurds in Iraq. By 1975, Kissinger had secretly channeled $16 million in military aid to the Kurds, who believed that Washington was finally supporting their right to self-determination.
But the following year, the House Select Committee on Intelligence issued the Pike report, which revealed that the U.S. never had any intention of supporting a Kurdish state. "Documents in the Committee’s possession clearly show that the President [Richard Nixon], Dr. Kissinger and the foreign head of state [the Shah of Iran] hoped that our clients [the Kurds] would not prevail," the report concluded. "They preferred instead that the insurgents simply continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the resources of our ally’s neighboring country [Iraq]. This policy was not imparted to our clients, who were encouraged to continue fighting."
After Iran and Iraq resolved their border dispute at the 1975 OPEC summit, however, the Iraqi government was told that U.S. support for the Kurds would now be withdrawn. The Iraqis immediately launched an aggressive campaign against Kurdish rebels. "The insurgents were clearly taken by surprise," the congressional report recounted. "Their adversaries, knowing of the impending aid cut-off, launched an all-out search-and-destroy campaign the day after the agreement [with Iran] was signed. "The autonomy movement was over, and our former clients scattered before the [Iraqi] central government’s superior forces."
As Iraq wiped out the remaining rebels, the Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani sent a message to Kissinger. "Our movement and people are being destroyed in an unbelievable way, with silence from everyone," Barzani said. "We feel, your excellency, that the United States has a moral and political responsibility towards our people, who have committed themselves to your country’s policy." Kissinger, however, thought otherwise, and sent no reply.
According to the Pike report, "Over 200,000 refugees managed to escape into Iran. Once there however, neither the United States nor Iran extended adequate humanitarian assistance. In fact, Iran was later to forcibly return over 40,000 of the refugees, and the United States government refused to admit even one refugee into the United States by way of political asylum, even though they qualified for such admittance."
As usual, Kissinger had no trouble justifying this cold-hearted behavior. "Covert action," he explained to a congressional staffer, "should not be confused with missionary work." As the Pike report concluded, "Even in the context of covert actions, ours was a cynical enterprise."
America would probably in better shape with a guy like Kissinger, I honestly don’t know. But I’m sure the now liberated Iraqi Kurds would not prefer Kissinger over Wolfowitz. At least thanks to him they don’t have to fear Saddam anymore.
What about the people of East-Timor?
The laying waste of East (Timor), started with a green light from the US. On a visit to Jakarta in December 1975, President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were informed by General Suharto of plans to start next day the invasion of the half of an island that only nine days before won independence from Portugal.
Dr. Kissinger confirmed as much when I asked him about it. He said Suharto brought it up at the airport as he and Mr. Ford were leaving. Kissinger’s reaction was that this was a stage of decolonization like lndia’s absorption of the Portuguese enclave of Goa.
But that wasn’t the whole story. The Indonesian Army was armed with US supplied weapons as an anti-communist ally. The use of these weapons against the Timorese may have violated US law.
One declassified secret paper from that era unearthed by Kissinger’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, was the summary of a staff meeting Kissinger called on his return to Washington. The assault on, East Timor was more brutal than expected, and the Legal Offlce of the State Department, in a cable to the secretary had raised the issue of whether tacit permission to use American arms violated US law.
Kissinger seemed less concerned about legality than about a possible leak. He reprimanded legal advisor Monroe Leigh for putting the question in a cable that circulated to other officers.
(…)
Arms deliveries to Indonesia were suspended, then quietly resumed, opening the way to 24 years of destruction and slaughter in a tiny piece of island never a part of Indonesia. If Kissinger has had any second thoughts about the green light he gave for the operation, he isn’t sharing them.
That’s what “realist” Kissinger did, while good old naïve idealistic Wolfowitz is criticizing the Indonesian government that want’s to prosecute a “brave journalist”. America maybe would in better shape with someone like Kissinger, I’m not sure. But I do now that I prefer a guy who is a little more critical towards anti-democratic behaviour of governments than Kissinger (which is, I assure you, incredible easy).
The Iranian resistance? Who would they prefer?
There is a new liberal-left heroine in the States called Azar Nafisi. Her book ?Reading Lolita in Tehran’ documents an underground feminist resistance movement to the Iranian Mullahs that concentrated on reading great - and banned - works of Western literature. "And who is this book by an icon of the Iranian resistance dedicated to? [US Deputy Secretary of Defence] Paul Wolfowitz, the bogeyman of the left, and the intellectual force behind [the recent war in] Iraq."
And let’s not talk about the Cambodians (Wolfowitz made a lot of mistakes concerning Iraq, but removing Saddam and trying to built a democray was not a crime, what Kissinger did towards Cambodia was, as William Shawcross, a defender of the war in Iraq, documents, not a mistake. It was a crime.) or the Argentines, shall we?. They probably don’t know much about Wolfowitz, but, alas, they do know Kissinger.
People who pray for the second coming of Henry Kissinger, even tongue in cheek, are either stupid, immoral, or blinded by Bush-hatred. Or they could be all three.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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22/09/2004
Today’s reason to vote for Bush
The Saudi’s doesn’t like him:
Once staunch allies and supporters of President Bush, many influential Saudi Arabians -- whose nation the president’s father, George H.W. Bush protected from Saddam Hussein during the 1990-91 Gulf War -- view the prospect of Bush’s reelection as "catastrophic." Indeed, on a trip to the desert kingdom earlier this month, I was hard-pressed to find anyone, at any level of society, in Saudi Arabia who speaks positively of President Bush, or looks favorably on the prospect of another four years of the Bush administration in the White House.
Many fear that a Bush victory in November would only mean more turmoil and violence in the Middle East. They point to the "failed policies" of the Bush administration as cause for their concern: the apparent descent into civil war in Iraq, the stalemate in the Palestinian-Israeli dispute (and the administration’s pro-Israeli tilt), the alienation of the Arab and Islamic world, and the rising tension from U.S. accusations about Iran and Syria concerning their nuclear weapons programs and support of terrorism. Saudis also worry about a suggestion by U.S. neoconservatives inside the Bush administration calling for the breakup of the Saudi kingdom into two or three smaller states.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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17/09/2004
Disgusting quotes of the day
Left-wing loony John Pilger:
On the atrocity at Beslan, Blair is allowed to say, without irony or challenge, that "this international terrorism will not prevail". These are the same words spoken by Mussolini soon after he had bombed civilians in Abyssinia.
Now Pilger writes of course for the New Statesman, a flagship for the British left. Yet another sign of the sorry state of a big part of today’s left.
UPDATE
Comparing Bush with Hitler is not passé however, as Harry seems to think. Look at this website and this quote:
George W. Bush is the face of the ruling elite who couldn’t care less about the masses, especially if the masses get in the way of their greed. The evil that was present in Nazi Germany is present in his heritage, and now present in America. God help us all.
(Hat Tip: John Micklewait and Adrian Wooldridge)
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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17/09/2004
Now Bhagwati really does sounds shrill....
Daniel Drenzer points to an interview with economist Jagdish Bhagwati in Der Spiegel. Bhagwati, a Democrat, sounds shrill, not so much about Bush though:
SPIEGEL ONLINE: New York may be atypical - recent figures suggest that job creation in the US overall has slowed to a trickle. The Bush team seems genuinely worried by that.
Bhagwati: The unemployment rate still went down a bit, according to last month’s figures. To look at figures month by month is ridiculous anyway - but that’s the way politicians behave before an election. I actually think the economy in Bush’s term has done reasonably well - and I’m a Democrat, you see.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Bush himself is hardly a model free-trader. He imposed highly protectionist tariffs on steel imports right at the beginning of his term.
Bhagwati: He tried to win over voters in crucial industrial states. But he later punched holes into the safeguards, exempting all kinds of products and countries. Once the WTO declared them illegal, he quickly lifted the tariffs. Bush really believes in the capacity of American firms to compete successfully. During the campaign, he keeps stressing that free trade is good for us. He even got a member of his cabinet to say there’s nothing wrong with outsourcing. I’m afraid Bush looks very presidential on trade, unlike my own party.
Mmmmm. Now he comes to Kerry and Edwards:
SPIEGEL ONLINE: In your recent book, you argue that a fear of globalization, of international competition, once restricted to the developing world, has now reached rich countries like the US. Is this fear playing a role in this year’s election?
Bhagwati: The Democratic party is moving towards a kind of anti-globalization attitude, an anti-free trade attitude in particular. I think this is dangerous. Since I finished my book, there has been this debate about outsourcing. Kerry and Edwards are clearly trying to use scare tactics here. At the convention, they got lots of applause whenever they spoke about American jobs being shipped overseas.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: If those arguments resonate at the convention, they might convince voters, too.
Bhagwati: But Kerry and Edwards don’t know what they’re talking about. If we look at the offshoring of online services like call centers or basic accounting, we’re talking about a maximum loss of 100.000 jobs a year to countries like India. That is nothing for an economy this size. The US is a major hyperpower, and yet every time it gets into competition with Mexico, China and India, we work ourselves into a panic. It’s like a rottweiler getting scared because a French poodle is coming down the road.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Kerry and Edwards are not just speaking about call centers. Especially in industrial swing states like Ohio, they promise to stop the loss of manufacturing jobs to lower-wage countries like China or Malaysia.
Bhagwati: Here we’re not talking about outsourcing but good old foreign investment. There is a huge amount of academic work that shows that this is beneficial to the US. On average, low-value jobs are going out and high-value investment is coming in. In North Carolina, where Mr. Edwards comes from, we have the I95. Along the way, there used be textile firms that have gone out since they can’t produce efficiently there. Now the workers are employed by Siemens and several other German companies, with far better salaries. That section of I95, in fact, is now known as the autobahn.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Rhetoric is one thing - but do you think Kerry will actually implement detrimental economic policies if he’s elected? For instance, he proposes to give tax credits to companies that create jobs in the US instead of abroad. That can’t do any harm, can it?
Bhagwati: It boils down to subsidizing companies when they stay and penalizing them when they go out. If we start doing that, other countries can follow. Everybody will be worse off. Our firms lose comparative advantage if they’re stopped from saving costs. A dead firm can only employ dead souls. So we may save 10 jobs by not outsourcing but we will lose the entire 100. Keep in mind, too, that investment from multinationals helps countries like India and Mexico fight poverty. Some sections of Africa sorely need foreign investment. If we Democrats crack down on this, it’s not compatible with our notion that Bush and his friends are the nasty guys.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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15/09/2004
Where cronies meet...
After reading Ann Louise Bardach’s Cuba Confidential I’m more opposed than ever to the American embargo against Cuba. This is not just because I’m a free trader. Generally, I see three big reasons to eliminate this forty year old international scandal.
First it strengthens Castro’s regime while it hurts the people. Senator Torricelli, one of the main current sponsors of the anti-Cuba legislation openly admits it. It’s main purpose is “to wreak havoc on that Island”, not just to overthrow Castro’s regime.
Second, it lead and leads to the worst kind of crony capitalism on the other side of the shore, in Florida and particularly Miami, with tentacles stretching into the White House. A system beneficial to wealthy Cuban exiles but bad for the people of Miami.
And third by wreaking havoc on the Island one cannot say what will happen when Castro’s regime end. It could be the same as in post-war Iraq, or as in some of the former parts of the Soviet Union. Is that what we want? The U.S should instead take the lead in seeking ways to improve democracy and the market economy in Cuba. This is not possible with an embargo.
Unfortunately the Bush-administration is doing exactly the opposite. There are two reasons for this. First is the role of Karl Rove who always puts votes before principles. More importantly the Bush-family and especially current Florida governor Jeb Bush are part of the system. So no change from them is to be expected. In this case I think we have a reason not to vote Bush, although I’m totally in the dark here concerning the position of John Kerry.
Nevertheless, one have to say it’s not only Bush’s fault. Clintons ties with important Cuban exiles in Miami for instance lead to the strengthening of the embargo against Cuba in the nineties. In fact, in the past, only two important politicians supported lifting the embargo: Jimmy Carter and, perhaps surprisingly, Henry Kissinger (oh no, no surprise, a cynic would say, it’s typical Kissinger, always choosing the side of and making deals with the dictator).
Both Castro in Cuba and the oligarchs in Florida have there stake in continuing the embargo. It keeps them in power. Crony communism meets crony capitalism. But ordinary Cuban’s living in Cuba or in Florida are the victims. It’s time to break this vicious circle. End the embargo.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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15/09/2004
Depressing news from Russia
David Remnick of the New Yorker explains why the people of Beslan and of Russia in general still are held hostage. On the one hand by their autocratic president’s undemocratic grab for power (criticized by Colin Powell) and on the other hand by the terrorists:
Putin is an increasingly autocratic leader. He has neutered state-controlled television, compromised the rise of an independent judiciary, and impeded independent political movements and parties. L’état, c’est Putin. And yet he has no choice but to go after Basayev. The demands of the Chechen jihadists now extend beyond Chechen independence. As Basayev made plain with his incursion into the neighboring republic of Dagestan five years ago, he is interested in pure vengeance and in extending his reach throughout the northern Caucasus. (…)And so the Russian people, who live in dread of further violence, find themselves at the mercy of well-trained terrorists in the south and a paranoid President in the Kremlin who refuses the burdens of democratic accountability and the need to reshape a policy that is good for little but more bloodshed. It requires no tragic sense to suppose that things are likely to turn out as always before they turn out otherwise.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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15/09/2004
Globalization, current anxiety in the West and the long-term future of our planet
At Project Syndicate Robert J. Shiller tries to understand the fear for and loathing of free trade, globalization and outsourcing in the developed world. It’s not just that jobs are shifted to third world countries (this already has happened for over fifty years without any net loss of jobs in the developed world, on the contrary), it’s the increasing awareness of this that makes people concerned. And of course there is the collapse of the stock market, erasing an important source of income for many people. In a nutshell, competition from the third world is increasing, we are more aware of it, and we feel less protected against it. In this world it is more important than ever to learn people that free trade is a positieve sum-game, and that the West is rich enough (in fact it is getting richer thanks to the same forces that shapes our concernes) to compensate the losers. Besides, there are other reasons to keep our borders open. The third world deserves it:
This sudden fear of emerging countries presents a major dilemma. The fear is real and visceral, and politicians ignore it at their peril. Its further increase could lead to counterproductive protectionist measures. We must not let this happen. The emerging countries are doing nothing more blameworthy than working towards their place as equals alongside advanced countries. It is morally and practically vital that they succeed.
In fact, the new technologies (not just ICT, but biotechnology and, in the future, nanotechnology) that are the main cause of our smaller getting world that gives us so much anxiety now, are also the driving force of an increase in productivity which leads Brad DeLong to think that somewhere in the mid of the twenty-first century we could have a world free from want:
How long this boom in productivity growth will continue is anyone’s guess: optimists point to the fact that waiting behind the information technology revolution, ready for takeoff, is the biotechnology revolution, and behind that is a looming nanotechnology revolution. If such improvements in productivity do last, the vistas this will open are amazing: an America 50 years from now in which the average full-time worker earns not $40,000 a year, but the equivalent of today’s $160,000 a year.
The US is at one pole of the world economy. China - even with its economic miracle since Deng Xiaoping went on his Southern Expedition - is at the other. But China’s labor productivity is now growing at roughly 6% per year. If that rate can be sustained - and if the Chinese economy becomes and remains integrated enough for us to be able to speak of it as a single entity - China’s labor productivity will be comparable to today’s America sometime before 2050. And India? If the growth rates of the past 15 years continue, and if India remains united, its labor productivity in 2050 will be comparable to that of Spain today.
Now the world of 2050 will not be a paradise. There will still be some regions where failed states do not protect property, enforce the law, encourage commerce, educate their citizens, or construct the physical, social, and organizational infrastructure necessary for people to make use of the magical technologies we have developed since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Similarly, there will still be wars, fought with ever more brutal and destructive weapons. But we have good reason to hope that there will be fewer of them. Next winter, it will be sixty years since an army crossed the Rhine River bringing death and destruction- the longest such period since at least the late second century B.C., when the Cimbri and Teutones challenged the army of the Roman Consul Gaius Marius in the Rhone Valley.
The world of 2050 will not have "solved the economic problem." The economy is the realm of things that have value. Things have value when they are both desirable and scarce.
We humans are very good at figuring out ways to make scarce things desirable. But we do have an opportunity - and hence a duty - shared by no previous human generation: to make a world by 2050 in which nearly everyone has enough food to avoid hunger, enough clothing to keep warm, and enough shelter to remain dry - plus a super-broadband Internet connection. The stakes in this round of humanity’s poker game are huge.
This is a world i’d hate to miss. So let’s put our anxiety behind us.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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15/09/2004
A message
Message for all those who despair about the modern world (like this one). You are wrong.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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15/09/2004
Breaking news
I saw it in a very small article buried inside local Belgian newspaper De Morgen for the first time. It’s a claim to be made in Die Welt today. Passion of the Present asks the blog community to pick it up and to try to verify it. I’m prepared to make my contribution to the first part. It’s important enough:
Syria tested chemical weapons on civilians in Sudan’s troubled western Darfur region in June and killed dozens of people, the German daily Die Welt claimed in an advance release of its Wednesday edition.
The newspaper, citing unnamed western security sources, said that injuries apparently caused by chemical arms were found on the bodies of the victims.
It said that witnesses quoted by an Arabic news website called ILAF [www.elaph.com] in an article on August 2 had said that several frozen bodies arrived suddenly at the "Al-Fashr Hospital" in the Sudanese capital Khartoum in June.
Die Welt said the sources had indicated that the weapons tests were undertaken following a military exercise between Syria and Sudan.
Syrian officers were reported to have met in May with Sudanese military leaders in a Khartoum suburb to discuss the possibility of improving cooperation between their armies.
According to Die Welt, the Syrians had suggested close cooperation on developing chemical weapons, and it was proposed that the arms be tested on the rebel SPLA, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, in the south.
But given that the rebels were involved in peace talks, the newspaper continued, the Sudanese government proposed testing the arms on people in Darfur.
Details of what were in the weapons were not disclosed.
The Sudanese government has been accused of arming and backing Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, which have rampaged through the western Darfur region for the past 19 months.
An estimated 50,000 people have been killed and 1.4 million more uprooted in a campaign against Darfur’s black African population, which began in February 2003 when Khartoum and the Janjaweed cracked down on a rebel uprising.
The United States has accused Syria of trying to acquire materials and the know-how to develop chemical weapons and claims that Sudan has been seeking to improve its capability to produce them for many years.
True or not? And if so, what to do about it? If so, doesn’t make it a strong case for regime change in Sudan and Syria?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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14/09/2004
Worrying about health-care costs
Why is American health-care the most expensive of all developing countries? Peter G. Peterson, chairman of The Blakstone group, and author of "Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It", provides an hypothesis:
We spend a lot more money on the last few months of life than any other
developed country, at least that I’ve been able to see. And I asked, for the last book, (...) Fred Plum, that brilliant head of neurology at New York Hospital,
who is perhaps the country’s leading expert on strokes, "What is it Fred, that other
countries do with regard to the cases you deal with, where people have a very severe
stroke and their quality of life is absolutely de minimus?" And if you don’t believe me, I
suggest you go into an intensive care unit some time, and just look at the scene you will
see. If it’s like the ones I’ve been to, an astonishing percentage of the people are in their
80s or early 90s, with tubes in them, the quality of life absolutely de minimus, but it’s
extraordinarily expensive. And I said, "Fred, what is it they do in other countries?" He
said, "I want you to go into intensive care units in Europe and in Great Britain." I said,
"Well, let’s take Great Britain. What is it about how they handle people with a minimal
quality of life who’ve suffered a totally debilitating shock?" He said, "They handle it
very differently. The neurologist turns the patient over to the general practitioner, who
sends the patient home, and they die the way people used to die, the so-called old man’s
death from pneumonia."
Now I’ve probably been responsible for more people losing elections than
anybody in the world, and I had a long discussion with Richard Lamm, (...) the person who ran for governor of Colorado—and this is why I don’t
think you can approach this problem in a partisan way—and he became convinced that
we ought to really focus on the enormous amounts of money we spend on the last few
months of life, with a very minimal effect on quality of life. (...) What in hell
do we think we’re talking about here? We’re going to have to give up some marginal
benefit that has some small effect but costs a lot? Look at the American health care
system and at every high-tech high-cost development. People start talking to me about
how wonderful the Canadian system is. Do you know that we have eight times the MRI
units that Canada does per capita? You all know what happens with regard to long delays
in Canada for certain kinds of surgery.
So one of the reasons that problem is so difficult, (...)
this has become a notion, that Americans are entitled to any high-tech high-cost system,
however small or marginal the benefit might be. And it’s going to be a very tough
proposition to sell the idea that we’re going to have to give up some medical care in some
cases.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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14/09/2004
Two cheers for Rupert Murdock
America’s media is more divers and competitive than ever. Credit goes to business tycoon and right-wing partisan hack Rupert Murdock, writes Matt Welch:
OutFoxed (a documentary about Murdock’s supposed war on journalism) would have you react to this world by petitioning the Federal Communications Commission to "take back our media" (which, judging by its long and gaseous interview with former CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, perhaps means a return to 90 minutes a day of broadcast news). But the documentary’s very existence suggests that a hands-off FCC -- one whose relaxation of ownership restrictions allowed Murdoch to create a fourth national network in the first place -- is one that will allow media activists’ treasured goal of "diversity" to actually flourish. Last year in The Atlantic Monthly the media commentator James Fallows predicted "there will be liberal papers, radio shows, TV programs, and Web sites for liberals, and conservative ones for conservatives."
Such an environment may make journalists sweat about the future of their profession. But even the most jaded critic should recognize that fretting about a new newspaper’s motives is a considerable improvement over 40 years of not having any new newspapers to complain about.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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14/09/2004
Weg met de suikersubsidies
Dirk Verhofstadt schreef een goede column over de Europese suikersubsidies. Het opiniestuk werd gisteren gepubliceerd in De Tijd en is ook te vinden op de website van Liberales. Hij schrijft:
Vorige week betoogden enkele honderden boeren in Ieper tegen het voornemen van de Europese Commissaris Franz Fishler om de steun aan de Europese suikerbietentelers te verminderen. Minister-president Yves Leterme, die zelf ook bevoegd is voor landbouw, sloot zich onmiddellijk aan bij hun eisen en verklaarde dat ons land zich zou verzetten tegen het voornemen van de Commissie. Daarmee toont hij aan dat hij de belangen van de suikerlobby belangrijker vindt dan het lot van miljoenen landbouwers in de Derde Wereld. Daarmee schrapt hij ook de volgende passage uit zijn regeerakkoord: "We streven er naar om in onze samenwerking met de ontwikkelingslanden de markttoegang van de producten uit die landen te bevorderen."
Wat de Europese Commissie voorstelt is niets meer dan een (te) langzame afbouw van het protectionistisch landbouwbeleid waar ondermeer suikerboeren al vier decennia profiteren. Jaarlijks ontvangen ze immers overheidssteun in de vorm van restituties, exportsubsidies en productiequota. De productie van één ton witte suiker in Europa kost ongeveer 675 euro, in minder ontwikkelde landen bedraagt de kostprijs slechts 285 euro. Toch beheerst Europa de wereldmarkt van witte suiker. Het produceert jaarlijks meer dan 20 miljoen ton, importeert bijna 2 miljoen ton en consumeert zelf 16 miljoen ton. Het overschot van 6 miljoen ton wordt deels met exportsubsidies en deels met dumpingpraktijken op de wereldmarkt gebracht. Goedkopere suiker uit andere landen zou in Europa gemakkelijk afgenomen worden maar de Europese Unie verhindert dit door het opleggen van invoertarieven die tot 140 procent kunnen bedragen. Dit alles zorgt ervoor dat de internationale prijzen nog meer naar beneden geduwd worden, dat landbouwers uit de ontwikkelingslanden geen enkele kans maken en dat Europese consumenten meer moeten betalen voor hun suiker en producten waarin witte suiker verwerkt wordt.
Tegen deze oneerlijke Europese subsidiepolitiek dienden Brazilië, Australië en Thailand een klacht in bij de Wereldhandelsorganisatie. Die veroordeelde de bestaande praktijken wegens concurrentievervalsend en bijzonder nadelig voor de arme landen. Protectionisme is zowel economisch als moreel verwerpelijk. Het is een vorm van egoïsme van de rijke landen die hun politieke en economische macht misbruiken door producten uit arme landen de toegang tot hun markten te weigeren en door hun eigen producenten met overheidssteun te bevoordelen. Het belemmert echte vrijhandel en veroordeelt miljoenen boeren in de Derde Wereld tot armoede. In plaats van zich te verzetten tegen de afbouw van de protectionistische suikerpolitiek in Europa zou Yves Leterme, overeenkomstig zijn eigen regeerakkoord, eerder moeten pleiten voor de volledige afschaffing van de importheffingen, productiesteun en exportsubsidies rond suiker. Alleen op die manier ontstaat eerlijke concurrentie, zullen boeren in de ontwikkelingslanden kansen krijgen, zullen Europese consumenten minder betalen en zal ook het milieu - door de afbouw van de intensieve suikerbietenteelt - er beter van worden. De Europese landbouwpolitiek moet stoppen met het ondersteunen van de suikerbaronnen en haar middelen besteden aan de reconversie van kleine landbouwbedrijven.
Het gebrek aan een echte vrijhandel is één van de belangrijkste redenen voor armoede en de leiders van de rijke landen hebben dan ook de plicht om elke vorm van protectionisme te bestrijden. Binnen een geglobaliseerde wereld moeten alle invoerrechten en subsidies worden afgeschaft om honderden miljoenen mensen uit de armoede te halen. En het moet snel gaan want ‘honger kan niet wachten’, zoals de Braziliaanse president Lula da Silva terecht stelt. De Peruaanse president Alejandro Toledo eist van de rijke landen dat ze consequent zijn: ‘Doe wat jullie van ons vragen: open uw markten’. Ook Nelson Mandela is niet gekant tegen de globalisering maar dan alleen ‘als iedereen er baat bij heeft’. Economisch sterke landen mogen de arme niet domineren en uitbuiten. Het is dan ook moreel bedenkelijk dat men nu drukkingsgroepen achterna holt die er alleen op uit zijn om hun privileges te beschermen ten koste van de armen in de wereld.
Dirk Verhofstadt stelt ook vast dat Oxfam België en Oxfam International in deze er tegengestelde meningen op na houden:
Opmerkelijk was ook de openlijke steun van Oxfam Solidariteit aan de actie van de suikerboeren. Daarmee kant de Belgische afdeling van Oxfam zich regelrecht tegen het standpunt van haar eigen overkoepelende organisatie. Op 9 september 2004 juichte Oxfam International de beslissing van de Wereldhandelsorganisatie, die de Europese suikerpolitiek had veroordeeld, volmondig toe. Oxfam was zelfs de drijvende kracht achter de ‘Make Trade Fair’ campagne waarbij het op korte termijn pleitte voor de volledige afschaffing van exportsubsidies, het verminderen van de Europese productiequota, het afbouwen van de invoerbeperkingen en het stimuleren van een duurzame suikerproductie. Uit hun studies blijkt dat door de Europese importbeperkingen landen als Mozambique, Malawi en Ethiopië tientallen miljoenen euro’s verliezen. Heel vreemd dat een organisatie als Oxfam, die zou moeten opkomen voor solidariteit tussen volkeren, zich voor de kar van de suikerlobby spant door zich te verzetten tegen een eerste, in feite nog onvoldoende, stap naar de afbouw van protectionisme.
Eigenlijk was dat wel te verwachten. Het is het gevolg van een soort taalgebruik die heel onprecies is en die een feitelijk analyse onmogelijk maakt. Taalgebruik waar - helaas - ook Dirk Verhofstadt zich wel eens aan bezondigd. Ik bedoel het gebruik van termen als eerlijk, fair, rechtvaardig, solidariteit. De pamfletten van Oxfam staan er bol van, maar nooit wordt uitgelegd wat er precies mee wordt bedoeld. Wat betekent zoiets als "eerlijke concurrentie" of "eerlijke handel" in internationaal verband? Tuurlijk het feit dat de prijs die landbouwers in Europa krijgen voor suiker 675 euro bedraagt, terwijl dit voor boeren in ontwikkelingslanden maar 285 euro is, is oneerlijk en onrechtvaardig, zegt Oxfam Internationaal. Ja maar, zegt Oxfam België, als boeren in België zonder die subsidies over de kop gaan is dat ook oneerlijk. Zegt Oxfam Internationaal: maar met subsidies, komen de boeren in Brazilië om van de honger... De volgende vraag wordt dan: Wat is nu het meest oneerlijke? En zo gaat het maar door, zodat men er zelfs binnen Oxfam niet meer uitgeraakt.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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14/09/2004
Bush does a despicable thing
To be sure, turning a blind eye by the U.S. governement towards the use of violence by Cuban exiles in and outside Miami is nothing new. In there struggle against the regime of Fidel Castro, much is allowed for. Condoning acts of terrorism by Cuban exiles is politics as usual, you can read all about it in Cuba Confidential by Ann Louise Bardach. But of course now the situation is different, we are in a war against terror, and finally principles shoud take precedence over everyday politics. At least that is what one should expect from our war-time president. But not in Miami:
A little-noticed but chilling scene at Opa-locka Airport outside Miami last month demonstrates that the Bush administration’s commitment to fighting international terrorism can be overtaken by presidential politics -- even if that means admitting known terrorists onto U.S. soil.
That’s what happened when outgoing Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso inexplicably pardoned four Cuban exiles convicted of "endangering public safety" for their role in an assassination plot against Fidel Castro during a 2000 international summit in Panama.
After their release, three of the four immediately flew via private jet to Miami, where they were greeted with a cheering fiesta organized by the hard-line anti-Castro community. Federal officials briefly interviewed the pardoned men -- all holders of U.S. passports -- and then let them go their way.
The fourth man, Luis Posada Carriles, was the most notorious member of this anti-Castro cell. He is an escapee from a prison in Venezuela, where he was incarcerated for blowing up an Air Cubana passenger plane in 1976, killing 73. He also admitted plotting six hotel bombings in Havana that killed one tourist and injured 11 others in 1997. Posada has gone into hiding in Honduras while seeking a Central American country that will harbor him, prompting Honduran President Ricardo Maduro to demand an explanation from the Bush administration on how a renowned terrorist could enter his country using a false U.S. passport.
The terrorist backgrounds of Posada’s three comrades-in-arms are as well documented as their leader’s. Guillermo Novo once fired a bazooka at the U.N. building; in February 1979, he was convicted and sentenced to 40 years for conspiracy in the 1976 assassination of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his American colleague, Ronni Moffitt, in Washington. (His conviction was subsequently vacated on a legal technicality.) Gaspar Jimenez was convicted and imprisoned in Mexico in 1977 for murdering a Cuban consulate official; he was released by authorities in 1983. Pedro Remon received a 10-year sentence in 1986 for conspiring to kill Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations in 1980. These are violent men. Panamanian prosecutors said they had planned to detonate 33 pounds of explosives while Castro was speaking at a university in Panama. Had they not been intercepted by the authorities, the blast not only would have killed the Cuban president but quite possibly hundreds of others gathered to hear him speak during the inter-American summit.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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13/09/2004
Bhagwati sounds shrill...
Economist Jagdish Bhagwati, a Democrat, joins the ranks of the shrill:
Can Kerry Turn Free Trader? In the end, Sen. Kerry cannot totally jilt his constituencies. He will have to claw his way to freer trade, making him a greater hero in a war more bloody than Vietnam. The unions, in particular, are going to insist on their reward. This is forgotten by the many pro-trade policy advisers and op-ed columnists who argue privately that we should not worry -- because Sen. Kerry is a free trader who has merely mounted the protectionist Trojan Horse to get into the White House. The irony of this last position is that it is, in fact, too simplistic. Besides, it suggests that when President Bush does the same thing, he’s lying, but that when Sen. Kerry does it, it’s strategic behavior! Is it not better, instead, for us to tell Sen. Kerry that his trade policy positions are the pits -- before he digs himself deeper into a pit from which there is no dignified exit?
I myself, partly convinced by Kerry’s advisors and his past record, was prepared to give Kerry the benefit of the doubt, at least untill his acceptence speech at the Democratis National Convention where he talked about everything (level playing field, fair trade etc...) but real free trade. Strategic behavior maybe....but Bhagwati’s article makes gives me reason to doubt about giving Kerry the benefit of the doubt...
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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13/09/2004
The shrill
The ranks of the shrill grows. Here is leftie Marc Cooper:
I refused to get drawn into the "debate" over Bush’s National Guard records. I just don’t care. This election campaign continues to be about nothing. And this records stuff is a whole lot more about that nothingness.
We ought to talking about, say, today’s gruesome body count of 80 or more dead coming out of Iraq. And who’s paying for that? And at what social cost to most Americans? And what does it mean that today’s fighting lapped right into Baghdad’s Green Zone?
I wouldn’t expect to hear any pronouncements about that from the Kerry campaign.
Whether Kerry squeaks by or not, the Democrats just don’t have much of a proactive message for average Americans. The message certainly should not be that Bush ducked guard duty.
Legally, of course, the "independent" 527 committees that run the Swift Boat/Texans For Truth ads cannot be "coordinated" with the official presidential campaigns. That, of course, is a fiction. If Kerry isn’t coordinating his message with these groups (covertly) that would be one more reason why he sucks.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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13/09/2004
Chavez won, democracy lost, blame both parties
The Economist runs an article by Jennifer McCoy who directed the Carter Center’s observer mission in Venezuela. No there was no election fraud. Yes Chavez pulled some tricks like spending large sums from record oil revenues on social programmes (a point already made by Daniel Davies over at Crooked Timber). On the one hand we have a cynical Chavez spending the governments recources to it’s own advantage. On the other hand we have an opposition that lacks any credibility. Chavez won by default. The big loser is democracy:
the vote itself was secret and free, but the (...) lack of openness, last-minute changes and internal divisions harmed public confidence in that vital institution both before and after the vote. Divisive rhetoric and intimidating tactics from Chavistas, and the opposition’s still-unsubstantiated claims of fraud, have exacerbated Venezuelans’ cynicism toward elections. It will take a huge effort by both sides to restore trust in this fundamental democratic right before next month’s election for governors and mayors.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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13/09/2004
Outsourcing research
Oeps. Now also research is being outsourced, the New York Times reports. Microsoft and other American companies are setting up research labs in China. There seem to be two reasons for this. First, the wisdom of the crowds effect. By letting more smart people doing research, those companies hope that more innovation and new products will come of it. Second, China is becoming a huge market. It’s still poor, but apparently more and more Chinese are becoming rich enough to buy more and more sophisticated products and services. Companies like Microsoft wants there products tailored to the needs of the Chinese which is why it wants research labs staffed by Chinese wich are familiar with local tastes. Two points are worth emphasizing here. First, neither of both reasons necessarily leads to job loss in America. Microsoft and other companies are ADDING researchers, not shedding them. Of course it can be that they will hire less new researchers in the U.S. So while there will be no job loss, not much research jobs will be created either. Maybe. But if the wisdom of the crowds effect works, then this will benefit those companies which CAN lead to more investment and jobs in the U.S. itself. And for providing the American market, research in the U.S. will still be needed. This makes my second point. Internationalisation (globalization) of research is here leading to more diversity, not less. By setting up Chinese and Indian labs Microsoft and other companies are outsourcing there "core". They will become more Chinese and Indian and less American. Microsoft products will have a Chinese flavor in the future.
So all in all i remain optimistic. But wait a minute. Didn’t Paul Samuelson say that outsourcing could be bad? Yes, he did. But here is a response. (Thanks to Arnold Kling for the links and some commentary).
But still, are those companies not "traitors" and those CEO’s not Benedict Arnold CEO’s? Surely this is true now they are outsourcing reseach and development, the pride of the American economy. Yes, but would you call all those Dutch, German, British, Japanese companies that invest and create jobs in America also traitors? Would you rather want them to only invest at home?
But then still, you are talking about China here. And China is competing unfairly with us. Maybe, but it’s still no reason for closing the borders.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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13/09/2004
Wrong war? Wrong time?
Kevin Drum points to the troubles in Fallujah where the withdrawl of American troops doens’t seem to work and concludes: Wrong war at the wrong time indeed.
I still am unable to see why a war that removed one of the most bloodiest dictators in the Middle East from power is wrong. Saddam: the man who made and used weapons of mass destruction, killed hundreds of thousands of his own people, started the bloodiest war in the Middle East, invaded Kuwait and rewarded the families of Palestinian suicide bombers killing hundreds of innocent Israelis. And the war that changed his regime was wrong? It appears to me that only the timing was wrong. Saddam Hussein should have been removed from power at least a decade earlier. But at that time there were to little neoconservatives around i guess.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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13/09/2004
De (geo)route naar succes
De Post komt met bemoedigende halfjaarresultaten voor de pinnen. Zowel de omzet, de operationele winst en de nettowinst is gestegen tegenover de eerste zes maanden van vorig jaar. Het ziet er dan ook niet naar uit dat De Post projecten als GeoRoute en PostStation, waar het personeel blijkbaar zoveel moeite mee heeft, fundamenteel zal wijzigen aangezien dergelijke projecten beschouwd worden als de basis voor de goede resultaten.
Tegelijk blijft De Post voor belangrijke uitdagingen staan, zoals de concurrentie van e-mail en de liberalisering van de sector. Dat laatste evenwel kan evenwel eerder een oplossing zijn dan een probleem. De Standaard bericht dat De Post de voorbije twee jaar terrein WINT op de markten die geliberaliseerd zijn terwijl de maatschappij terrein verliest daar waar ze nog een monopolie heeft - de klassieke brievenpost met name.
Jarenlang werd in dit land gedacht (en nu nog, zoals in kringen van de PS) dat de liberalisering de doodsteek zou betekenen voor De Post. De sociale en universele dienstverlening - zoals de zgn. sociale rol van de postbode - zou in het gevaar komen. Daarom moesten de klassieke diensten, zoals de brievenpost, voor het grootste deel "gereserveerd" blijven, m.a.w. het monopolie blijven van De Post. De inkomsten daaruit zouden dan gebruikt kunnen worden om de universele dienstverlening te garanderen.
Maar nu blijkt dat ondanks het monopolie die klassieke diensten toch achteruit gaan, niet door concurrentie van andere bedrijven, maar door concurrentie met andere technologieën. De gereserveerde diensten garanderen met andere woorden helemaal niet dat de sociale dienstverlening blijft bestaan, integendeel. Enkel door zich sterk op te stellen in nieuwe, geliberaliseerde markten en daar volop de concurrentieslag aan te aan kan De Post geranderen dat zaken zoals de sociale rol van de postbode behouden kan blijven. Hoe kan men die concurrentieslag aangaan? Door eens strategisch verbond te zoeken met een nieuwe partner, die geld en expertise kan aanbrengen.
De huidige situatie in de postsector is derwijze dat De Post aan een monopolie niets meer heeft. Het garandeert niet langer dat de publieke dienstverlening behouden blijft. Wat wel waar blijft, is dat de consument de klos is van dat monopolie. Door de afschaffing ervan zou de concurrentie kunnen werken, de dienstverlening verbeteren en de prijzen dalen. Waar wacht je nog op, minister Van de Lanotte?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan de postman
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12/09/2004
Abiola Lapite versus Juan Cole
Abiola Lapite tears Juan Cole into schredds:
Speaking more generally now, if one takes Cole’s thesis about colonial aggression as the spur to terrorism at face value, one has to wonder why it is that one has seen no counterpart to Islamist terror amongst the non-Muslim peoples of Africa. Hardly any peoples have suffered greater impositions and survived in numbers large enough to even entertain the dream of revenge, and yet even in South Africa, where harsh, discriminatory overlordship by white Western settlers was the rule less than two decades ago, one sees none of the viciousness towards the West that is taken for granted in vast swathes of the Muslim world. What Cole is doing here smells of apologetics driven by self-hatred.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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10/09/2004
A new trend in spending
Virginia Postrel notes the shift from goods and things towards experiences. A shift with winners and losers. Economies specialising in providing experiences are probably the future winners, those that do not will lose:
In the popular imagination and the political debate, making things is "real" work. Providing experiences is not. Analysts assume that working in a factory is a good job and working in a hotel is not.
This perception is not just a question of relative wages. Even at the top, it’s more prestigious to create stuff than experiences.
Carleton S. Fiorina, the chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, ranks 10th on the new Forbes list of "the world’s most powerful women." (She’s the top-ranked business executive on the list.) Oprah Winfrey ranks a mere 62nd, and isn’t even classified as an executive.
Similarly, the election-year news suggests that the economy is bad all over. But in fact, states like Florida and Nevada, whose economies produce experiences, are booming. States like Ohio and Michigan, whose economies produce stuff, are hurting.
The shift toward intangibles creates geographic winners and losers, redistributing economic and political clout.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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10/09/2004
Libertarian hawks
Can there be something like a libertarian hawk, knowing that interventions abroad often means war and that, pace Randolph Bourne, war is the health of the state? (Liberal interventionists don’t have that problem of course, because contrary to libertarians they are quite happy with a big and healthy state.) Marx Borders, program director of the Institute of Humane Studies has a go at it here. I think he is right in the sense that i do believe that there can be something like a libertarian hawk. If Bourne is right, and war is the health of the state, then, even as a libertarian, we must ask the question, what state? If a democratic state starts a war against a totalitarian state, let’s say Iraq, and the consequence of that war is the elimination of that totalitarian state, then i’m quite happy to support such a war. A democratic state is preferable to a totalitarian state because a democratic state can be reformed towards a more libertarian one without war. Libertarians have quite some instruments, like think thanks, lobbying and so on, to make domestic reforms possible. Of course even a totalitarian state can implode without war, like the former Soviet Union did. But even in this case there was enourmous outside pressure, such as the defense buildup under Reagan, which could have provided the "tipping point", the same way American intervention did in Iraq.
There is a second reason to forget Bourne’s dictum and go for a "hawkish" foreign policy (i.e. intervention). There is something more important than the health of the state, that is, the health of the individual. Removing a dictator, preventing genocide or stopping civil war maybe good for the "health" of the American state-sponsored military-industrial complex, but it is, i think also morally the right thing to do. It prevents that the rights of the individual (foremost life, liberty and property) are violated. Removing Saddam and the Taliban were the right thing to do, so would be the halting of the genocide in Darfur. It saved and an can save lives, and brought and can bring liberty to millions of people. But we need a "state" for that. Let’s hope that that state is a democratic one, that respects individual rights and is based on a free market economy. For that we need libertarians who concentrate on domestic reforms and stop whining about liberal interventions that are bad for the health of foreign states but good for individual rights. Libertarian hawks, in two words.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan the libertarian
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10/09/2004
Genocide
Colin Powell has called the atrocities in Darfur a genocide. It’s about time, and hopefully it will now lead to action to prevent further killing, if not from the U.S. itself, than at least from the U.N. And in all fairness to the left, Henry Farell, over at Crooked Timber compares Powell’s behaviour favorably with that of the Clinton-administration over Ruanda. And i agree with Farell, Clinton’s behaviour towards the genocide in Ruanda was indeed shamefull. But note that we have another genocide here, which according to Powell, is still continuing, and up until now the Bush-administration hasn’t done much to stop it either. It talks about it, to be sure, at home and in the U.N. And at least it appears to try. Alas, not enough. So while this time the policies of Bush do compare favorably with that if Clinton, it still falls far short from what we could and should expect from the most powerfull nation the world has ever seen.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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9/09/2004
More on Beslan
Suppose Putin is to soften his stance towards Chechnya and wants to negotiate then the question becomes, who to talk too? In essence there are two options: president Aslan Maskhadov or Shamil Basayev, the former prime minister and now the leader of the Wahhabi extremists. The last one is the mastermind behind the latest terrorists attack. That makes negiotations of course very difficult, not in the least because Basayev doesn’t give a damn about Chechnya. He wants a caliphate stretching from the Black see to the Caspian. In Russian withdrawl he is not interested, writes Dan Darling:
Basayev’s reasons for selecting North Ossetia in general and Beslan in particular are obvious to one familiar with the warped nature of al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers.
Unlike most of the North Caucasus, most North Ossetians are Eastern Orthodox Christians, so it "makes sense" to target them rather than say Russian Muslim schoolchildren in Ingushetia or Dagestan if you’re a Wahhabi who subscribes to bin Laden’s belief in a Huntingtonian-esque clash of civilizations. In addition to being majority Christian, North Ossetia was also one of the few regions of the North Caucasus that voluntarily joined the Russian Empire and its population formed a lot of the levies that were eventually used to subdue other Caucasus nations that refused to submit to the Tsar. As such, even the murder of innocent schoolchildren can be fit into a warped idea of "vengeance" for actions that their ancestors may have committed.
I should point out that regardless of what one thinks about Russian involvement in Chechnya, the people of Beslan had no power whatsoever to effect Russian policy in region. Basayev is an educated man who is quite familiar with the North Caucasus, so he must have known this when he was planning the attack. Things like this make his decision to target the innocent people of Beslan all that much more inexcuseable.
However, I should point out that Basayev’s ambitions extend far beyond just Chechen independence, so everybody saying that a political solution to the Chechen war or Russian withdrawl from the region is going to solve the issue is going to be sorely disappointed.
So the point remains. Russia’s policy towards Chechnya is bankrupt and is in dire need of change. Talks with president Maskhadov may be a start. But nevertheless no mercy can be shown towards those guilty of the slaughter in Beslan and those fanatics dreaming of a bloody clash of civilizations, irrespective of the number of innocents killed.
(Dan Darling’s article by the way does provide a wealth of links between Basayev’s murderers and al qaeda)
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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9/09/2004
State of the left, part II
With my sincere apologies to Frans Groenendijk and those people on the left (like the folks over at Harry’s place, and yes, Crooked Timber) who are no part of the left i’m talking about, but this does say something about the state of today’s left, at least a big part of it.
Gene from Harry’s place writes:
Speaking of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine-- the unapologetic murderers of 21 Israeli schoolchildren in 1974-- they are among the organizations preparing for an international conference on the antiwar and antiglobalization movements next week in Beirut.
Also involved in preparations for the meeting (...) are two leading Western antiwar groups-- the Stop the War Coalition in the UK and United for Peace and Justice in the US. (I can find no mention of the Beirut conference on either of their web sites. Are they ashamed of something?)
According to a conference web page:
Hosting the meeting is a broad range of political forces in Lebanon and Palestine, including progressives, seculars, and Islamists.
Nice to see everyone getting along so well these days.
Anyway I hope that during a break in the denunciations of Zionist imperialism, some folks from the antiwar Left will have a chance to ask their comrades from the DFLP if they are sorry about massacring those kids back in 1974.
Another world indeed is possible, but not desirable, if it comes from these "left-wingers". I’ll stick to capitalist globalization thank you very much.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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8/09/2004
The state of the left
The phenomenom of left-wing fellow travelers is not a phenomenom of the past. Just substitute communism with fascism, and here we are:
The antiwar isolationist "left" started by being merely "status quo": opposing regime change and hinting at moral equivalence between Bush’s "terrorism" and the other sort. This conservative position didn’t take very long to metastasize into a flat-out reactionary one, with Michael Moore saying that the Iraqi "resistance" was the equivalent of the Revolutionary Minutemen, Tariq Ali calling for solidarity with the "insurgents," and now Ms. Klein, among many others, wanting to bring the war home because any kind of anti-Americanism is better than none at all. These fellow-travelers with fascism are also changing ships on a falling tide: Their applause for the holy warriors comes at a time when wide swathes of the Arab and Muslim world are sickening of the mindless blasphemy and the sectarian bigotry. It took an effort for American pseudo-radicals to be outflanked on the left by Ayatollah Sistani, but they managed it somehow.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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8/09/2004
More extreme weather events?
Are we having more extreme weather events because of global warming? Well, this table here gives the number of hurricane strikes in the U.S. since 1900. Try to find a connection with climate change. I have been unable to find any (if anything can be said the number of hurrican strikes seems to be RECEDING the last few decades, but not in a significant way).
(Hat tip: Philip Stott)
Gepost door/Posted by: Hurricane Ivan
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6/09/2004
To be or to do? That is the question
Is America hated because for what it is, or for what it does? A tough question, if you ask me. But for Pat Buchanan, a representative from the far right, but echoing here the far left, the answer is simple: America is hated because for what is does. Look at the Middle East, Buchanan says in Meet the Press. Osama Bin Laden doesn’t hate America for what it is, but because it does support Israel, to take just one example. Well indeed Pat, let’s look at the Middle East. The U.S. did something else: it overthrew the government of Afghanistan. But is it hated for it? Let’s listen to Jason Burke:
in the many months I have spent in the country in the past three years, I have found surprisingly little animosity towards the west. Though there are grave problems throughout the country, and particularly in the southeast, the Taliban are not about to sweep back into power. They are limited to raids launched from the mountains of the interior and would collapse without support from religio-political networks in Pakistan.
Like I said: a tough question.
(Hat tip: Norman Geras)
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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5/09/2004
Never again!
Harry over at Harry’s place has it exactly right:
The Beslan atrocity takes its place among the most evil and the images of the slaughtered children and the bloodstained victims will long be etched in our minds.
Just as we have all travelled on trains like the one in Madrid on March 11 of this year, so we have all entered school gates. And it is not only the fact that we can place ourselves, or our children, in these scenes of horror. This atrocity did not reach us a day later via the foreign pages of the newspapers - we saw it live on television in our homes and workplaces.
After the horror comes the attempt at analysis and what some in the media call “the search for blame”. But there is no need for any search, no need for experts or analysts to wonder what may have caused this.
It is abundantly clear - we saw the work of the enemy again in Beslan.
That enemy is not, of course, the ordinary people of Chechnya, whose demands and rights have been trampled upon and then exploited by these evil killers. The enemy, whatever particular name it may choose to carry, whatever cause it deceitfully claims as its own, is the same one that slaughtered office workers in New York, backpackers in Bali and murdered the Nepalese in Iraq this week.
We have not seen mass murders of children in Europe since the Nazi era. The validity or otherwise of the claims that Arabs were among the slaughterers is in many ways irrelevant – their birthplace is incidental.
Their ideology, their aims and their method are not.
The idea that we are in a war with this enemy, is mocked in many circles. The slogan “War on Terror” may not be the best that could have been created, those who use it may not appeal to us for other reasons and there are indeed other ways of describing the struggle against Islamist fanatics and killers. But anyone who remains committed to the most basic human values and the defence of all that has been achieved so far, must surely accept that, whatever we call it, this struggle has to be carried out and has to be won.
None of us wanted to live in an era of such conflict. 1989 was supposed to have heralded a new age of peaceful co-operation and development across the world. We stopped worrying about nuclear weapons, tanks massed on borders, the weight of mutually assured destruction was lifted from our shoulders and we discussed how best to invest the ‘peace dividend’.
Certainly none of us with children wanted to live in a time where we must be careful where we leave newspapers in our homes or check who is in the room when we watch the television news, lest our own children, whose innocence we try to protect, are exposed to these horrors and ask us “why?”
No-one wanted our soilders to be engaged in anything other than keeping the peace and no-one wanted us to reach the situation where we must make such difficult choices about security and civil liberties.
We did not choose this struggle yet there is no escaping from it.
There are some who suggest we can turn away from the world and simply hope that nothing will ever happen to us. Perhaps it could be possible. Perhaps, despite all the lessons of history to the contrary, we could hope that our enemy will leave us alone if we leave them free to act. But even if we ignored that history and took that step it would involve turning our backs on millions and leaving them to face the very real threat of being forced to live with oppression, terror and death.
It would involve shrugging our shoulders at the fate of those who are much nearer the frontline in this war than we are. There may be some who could justify such an approach but no internationalist ever could.
We have been here before. Then, as now, there were some who were unable or unwilling to face the hard choices but some knew then - and we all know now -that the struggle had to be carried out. When it was all finished, the world vowed ‘Never Again’.
The analogy with the enemy that faced Europe and the world in the 1930’s is not an exact one but it remains valid.
Ask yourselves when was the last time gunmen filled with hate fired into the backs of fleeing children? When was the last time that women and children were herded into buildings, treated with callous inhumanity and then slaughtered?
When another generation said ‘Never Again’ they meant it.
So should we.
Let it be known to all the media: you are right to be critical about Russia’s behaviour in Chechnya and about Vladimir Putin, but never forget who the real enemy is.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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4/09/2004
De VRT en het drama in Beslan
Op VRT-Teletekst staat het volgende te lezen over het drama in Beslan:
De actie van de Tsjetsjeense rebellen
is de vierde op een week tijd. De ver-
schillende aanslagen verhogen de druk
op president Poetin om het conflict in
Tsjetsjenië op te lossen.
Toen Poetin president werd in ’99 zei
hij dat hij meteen hard zou optreden
tegen het Tsjetsjeense verzet. Die
republiek had zich 8 jaar eerder
onafhankelijk verklaard. Maar de
repressie van Moskou was hard en leidde
tot internationale kritiek op het
Russische beleid.
Toch werkt de harde houding niet. Met
de al eerdere aanslagen wordt de druk
nu groter om een andere oplossing te
zoeken.
Op vrtnieuws.net staat ongeveer hetzelfde.
Ik zal de laatste zijn om de Russische houding in Tjetjenië goed te praten. Wat Rusland allemaal uitsteekt in Tjetjenië is inderdaad een regelrechte schande. Internationale druk op Poetin om de situatie naar een vreedzame oplossing te leiden is inderdaad nodig. Waar ik wel bezwaar maak is tegen de typering dat de actie in Beslan op touw zou zijn gezet door "Tjetjeense rebellen". Ten eerste zijn het geen rebellen, maar terroristen, en dan nog terroristen van de ergste soort die het blijkbaar niet erg vinden dat er kinderen om het leven komen. Ten tweede kan ook aan het predikaat Tjetjeen getwijfeld worden. Bericht wordt (door de VRT zelf overigens ook, zie het commentaar van Stijn op deze post van Luc Van Braekel) dat bij de gijzelnemers Arabieren waren die banden hebben met Al Quada. Terwijl ik geen voorstander ben van harde acties tegen waarachtige Tjetjeense rebellen en nog minder tegen de gerechtvaardigde eisen van het Tjetjeense volk, zie ik niet in waarom men enige compassie zou moeten hebben voor terroristen die van dit verschrikkelijke conflict misbruik maken om hun eigen fundamentalistische agenda te bevorderen. Maar blijkbaar vindt de VRT de houding van Poetin erger dan het gedrag van de terroristen van Al Quada (zie op vrtnieuws.net de obligate opmerking over de onvrije pers in Rusland, alsof er niets ergers is dan dat). Anders had ze toch ten minste kunnen vermelden dat een oplossing van het conflict ook moet inhouden dat Al Quada uit Tjetjenië wordt verdreven.
UPDATE
De VRT bericht nu dat de gijzelingsactie gefinancieerd zou zijn door Saudi’s. Arabieren, Al Quada, Saudi’s...de paralellen met 9 september worden nu wel overduidelijk. Of is het een verzinsel van de Russische autoriteiten?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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4/09/2004
Beslan
From Regnum Crusis and Crooked Timber comes word that Arabs and probably Al Quaeda are involved in the drama in Beslan. It seems that we really are dealing here with terrorists and Dog of Flanders askshimself why no major news outlet is reporting it as such.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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4/09/2004
Blinded by Bush hatred
Another "liberal", Kevin Drum, is going down the drain with his Bush-hatred. At least he has the honesty to admit he made a mistake. But if he wasn’t so blinded by his hatred of this president he wouldn’t have made the mistake in the first place. Not one thing Bush says or does (or does not) can be good. Pathetic.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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30/08/2004
Douglas Irwin versus Ha-Joong Chang
Ha-Joon Chang has written yet another critique of "the washington consensus" and "neoliberal globalization" with his book "Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective". Now Douglas Irwin has written a devastating review of the book:
Chang’s book is provocative and interesting, but falls short of persuading. Perhaps the biggest disappointment is Chang’s extremely superficial treatment of the historical experience of the now developed countries. He has simply chosen not to engage the work of economic historians on the questions he is raising. For example, chapter one -- "How Did the Rich Countries Really Become Rich?" -- does not contend with the work that economics historians have done on the topic. Given the broad question posed in this chapter, one might have expected Chang to confront such landmark works as Douglass North and Robert Thomas’s The Rise of the Western World (1973) or Nathan Rosenberg’s and L.E. Birdzell’s How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World (1986). These works stress the importance of political systems that provide security to economic transactions and economic systems that allow for competition, broadly construed. But Chang does not explain why the lessons from these works are not relevant to developing countries today.
Rather, in chapter 2, Chang elaborates on his contention that "infant industry promotion (but not just tariff protection, I hasten to add) has been the key to the development of most nations ... Preventing the developing countries from adopting these policies constitutes a serious constraint on their capacity to generate economic development." In my view, this statement is erroneous on two counts -- that infant industries were the key to economic development, and that developing countries are prevented from adopting such policies today.
Just because certain trade and industrial policies were pursued and the economic outcome turned out to be good does not mean that the outcome can be attributed to those specific policies. Yet Chang does not advance our understanding beyond this "correlation therefore attribution" approach. Perhaps the success of developed countries came despite the distortions and inefficiencies created by their earlier policies because the broader institutional context was conducive to growth.
For example, the United States started out as a very wealth country with a high literacy rate, widely distributed land ownership, stable government and competitive political institutions that largely guaranteed the security of private property, a large internal market with free trade in goods and free labor mobility across regions, etc. Given these overwhelmingly favorable conditions, even very inefficient trade policies could not have prevented economic advances from taking place. (As Adam Smith once commented, the effort of individuals to improve their condition "is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things towards improvement, in spite ... of the greatest errors of administration.")
And yet, in Chang’s story, these other things get no credit for America’s economic success; rather, it all comes down to infant industry promotion. Chang writes: "Although some commentators doubt whether the overall national welfare effect of protectionism was positive, the U.S. growth record during the protectionist period makes this scepticism look overly cautious, if not downright biased." But, once again, correlation is not causation. Chang produces no evidence that protectionism was responsible for the growth. He does not investigate the various channels and mechanisms by which trade policy affects growth and compare them to other factors leading to economic expansion. He does not undertake a counterfactual analysis to determine the magnitude of benefits and costs of infant industry policies. In the reasoning style of Paul Bairoch, if tariffs were high and growth was strong, then there must be a causal relationship between the two. There is no need to examine alternative explanations, such as whether any effects of tariff policy were swamped by the advantages of other aspects of the American economy. Instead, Chang makes sweeping statements like "It is also clear that the U.S. economy would not have got where it is today without strong tariff protection at least in some key infant industries."
The implication is that protecting manufacturing industries accounts for the success of rich countries. But Stephen Broadberry (1998) has shown that the United States overtook the United Kingdom in terms of per capita income in the late nineteenth century largely by increasing labor productivity in the service sector, not by raising productivity in the manufacturing sector. Broadberry’s research is not obscure, yet Chang makes no note of it.
Attributing the economic success of various other countries to their trade and industrial policies alone grossly inflates their role. In Europe, Broadberry and others have showed that growth was related to the shifting of resources out of agriculture and into industry and services. Yet trade policies may have slowed this transition for some countries. Britain industrialized with the textile industry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, but the Corn Laws during this period kept more labor and capital resources in agriculture, not industry. Similarly, to the extent that Germany’s tariff code protected agricultural goods (where it was a net importer), it actually slowed that transition and may have retarded growth in the late nineteenth century.
A broader problem afflicts Chang’s approach -- sample selection bias. Chang only looks at countries that developed during the nineteenth century and a small number of the policies they pursued. He did not examine countries that failed to develop in the nineteenth century and see if they pursued the same heterodox policies only more intensively. This is a poor scientific and historical method. Suppose a doctor studied people with long lives and found that some smoked tobacco, but did not study people with shorter lives to see if smoking was even more prevalent. Any conclusions drawn only from the observed relationship would be quite misleading. Chang also overstates the degree to which developing countries today are prevented from pursuing interventionist trade and industrial policies. Trade agreements such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) pose few barriers to countries that wish to pursue activist trade policies, and indeed many countries did so during the years when import substitution was the rage among developing countries in the 1950s and 1960s. Article XVIII of the GATT allows governments to undertake trade measure to promote development, including the promotion of selected industries. Many countries are choosing not to do so because their past experience with such policies has not been successful.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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29/08/2004
Boerkesjogging
Toch ook nog even vermelden. Vorige week zondag voor de eerste keer meegedaan aan een jogging. Hier zijn de resultaten.
Janssens, Ivan vind je terug op de 87ste plaats op 126 deelnemers. Ik deed er 22 minuten en 47 seconden over of een gemiddelde snelheid van 11,061 km/uur. Niet slecht voor de eerste keer en na een paar trainingen. Niet?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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29/08/2004
Some facts about child labor
Here are the (estimated) facts:
* most recent estimates says that 211 million children, aged 5 to 14 years, are economically active. That’s 18% of all the children in that age bracket;
* 60% of those working are active in Azia, 52% are boys;
* 4% work in transition economies, 2% in developed countries, the rest in developing countries;
* most are employed in agriculture (figures go to 85%), then comes domestic service industries, and only then manufacturing;
* the rate of injury of children working in agriculture is higher (12%) than in manufacturing (9%). In agriculture there is also risk of exposure to dangerous chemicals, to bad weather, repetitive work injuries, and threats posed by nature (animals and plants);
* children in manufaturing and construction are least likely to attend school (warning: hasty conclusions concerning human capital accumulation are not justified);
* most children are employed not by greedy corporations but by their (desperate?) parents. It is unusual to find more than 3% children working outside the household for pay. In Bangladesh, home of the garment industry and a poster child (no pun intended) for those calling for economic sanctions against countries that have children working in the export industry, only 1,2% (!) of children work as paid employees;
* more than 8 million childeren are involved in hazardous forms of child labor like trafficking, bonded or forced labor, soldiers, prostitutes, pornography and other illicit activities.
Now how to respond?
Fundamentally, child labor is a symptom of poverty. Low relative returns to education coupled with a high marginal utility of income lead children to work. Policy aimed at improving living standards and raising returns to education or providing financial incentives to poor families to send children to school may then be a more palpable solution to the child labor problem than punitive measures designed to prevent children from earning income.
Trade and aid, i would say. Not economic sanctions.
MORE
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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28/08/2004
Morons, European leaders, and death in the Sudan
Are these guys a bunch of morons:
Friday at about 1,000 demonstrators headed in the direction of the U.S. Embassy in Athens.
Saturday Greek activists hoisted a massive banner saying "Powell Killer Go Home" on the Acropolis hillside towering over Athens to protest against his planned 24-hour visit.
They were protesting against the visit of Colin Powell, because back in the old days, the Olympics were a time of peace, all wars stopped, and well, Powell let continue the war in Iraq. Never mind the fact that there are other parties in Iraq, such as Al Qaeda, spoiling the Olympic spirit. Never mind that in Najaf the holy shrines were not occupied by the Americans, but by the fascist militias of Al-Sadr who never hesitated to use violence. Never mind that there are bigger "wars" going on in the world, like the ethnic cleansing in Darfur. Never mind that it is precisely Colin Powell who is doing as much as he can to stop the genocide in Darfur. And never mind that it is the U.S. that is trying to do something to stop that "humanitarian disaster" in the Sudan, while European leaders are sitting on their you know what:
Europe’s lingering hostility to he Bush Administration over the invasion of Iraq seems to have infected its response to Darfur. In April, at a meeting at the U.N. Human Rights Commission, in Geneva, European diplomats opposed a strong American denunciation of the atrocities, preferring a resolution so watered down that Sudan welcomed it. At a time when America had given twenty-eight million dollars to the U.N.’s Darfur relief program, Germany had given one million dollars, and France nothing.
European officials have also been unduly trusting of Khartoum’s assurances that it intends to solve the crisis. This summer, Renaud Muselier, the French secretary of state for foreign affairs, argued publicly that the Americans were overreacting. He invoked recent comments of Kofi Annan, who said that the killings and purgings in Darfur were only “bordering on ethnic cleansing.” Muselier told Radio France, “Kofi Annan, who is very careful in his choice of words . . . has said very clearly that this was not genocide. That is what I also believe.” When asked if the atrocities in Darfur constituted ethnic cleansing, he said, “No, I firmly believe it is a civil war.” The Sudan Vision, a government-controlled newspaper, hailed the French stand, crediting Paris with “slamming U.S. foreign policy.”
50.000 people dead, millions on the run...but European hostility towards the U.S. gives us reasons to do nothing. Except scanting the slogan: Powell killer go home....Depressing.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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28/08/2004
Towards liberalism in the Middle-East?
Charles Paul Freund points to some encouraging signs in the Middle East:
A pair of Egyptian parliamentarians has formed a new liberal party that stands for "a free-market economy, respect for the rule of law, good governance, women’s empowerment, freedom of expression and an open relationship with the West."
The party is called Hizb al-Ghad, or the Party of Tomorrow, but it is actually reaching back to a past period of Egyptian liberalism. From 1920 until the catastrophic rise of Nasser and his poisonous variety of Pan-Arabism, Egypt enjoyed a period of secular liberalism under the Wafd party. The new party, which features as its general secretary a Harvard-educated woman who is also a Copt, is specifically evoking the Wafd’s tradition. (The social context of the rise of a liberal Egyptian nationalism is the subject of Tawfiq al-Hakim’s classic 1919 novel, Awdat al-Ruh, or The Return of the Spirit.)
Unfortunately, Egypt’s political parties must be licensed by the state. That country has been under "emergency" rule for nearly 25 years, and is not interested in licensing a liberal party. But the point for Egypt’s long-beleaguered liberals (at least for now) is that such a party exists whether the state recognizes it or not.
Some related items dealing with Arab liberalism: Ali Fadhil and Mohammed Fadhil, the brothers who run the Iraqi blog, Iraq the Model, decided earlier this month to take their liberal values into politics, and will run for office.
See the difference? Iraq isn’t safe, is isn’t stable, but Iraq keeps on heading towards some kind of democracy. In Iraq, people with liberal values and opinions can run for office. In Egypt, where everything is stable, they can not. Egypt keeps on heading to a full-blown dictatorship. Time for regime change in Egypt.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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27/08/2004
Powell did it all right...
Michael Powell that is, son of...Reporting from the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s 10th annual Aspen conference, Dan Gillmor writes about the tenure of Michael Powell as head of the Federal Communications Commission. All in all, Powell’s tenure can be described as a success i think. Powell has chosen for experimentation and innovation over regulation and that certainly was the right thing to do. Especially in the wireless area and in respect to new technologies as VOIP Powell did what he had to to: releashing creativity and competition and searching for new and innovative ways to let the market do it’s work. Good chairman. And one of the more capable members of the Bush-administration.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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27/08/2004
Why oh why is California ruled by these idiots?
Democrats in California have send governor Schwarzenegger a bill limiting offshoring:
California lawmakers Thursday sent a bill to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that would bar state agencies from hiring service job contractors unless they certify their work is done within the United States. The bill is an effort to limit the "offshoring" of state service jobs to countries where workers earn lower wages than U.S. workers, and it underscores a national dialogue in labor circles about U.S. jobs being sent to foreign countries.
"We can’t ignore the offshoring trend as Californians continue to watch high-paying, stable jobs get shipped overseas," the bill’s author, Democratic Assembly Member Carol Liu, said in a statement. "This is about where we want to invest our taxpayer dollars -- overseas or here at home."
The bill passed on thursday in the state Assemly, after it was voted on monday in the Senate. The vote in the Assembly came just ONE day after the release of a study showing offshoring creates jobs in California! In fact, limits on offshoring could increase income-inequality in California:
Another part of the sensibility test derives from the fact that government resources are scarce. Helping one group of people comes at the expense of others. It is therefore important to ask whom restrictions on offshoring will help and whether recipients of other government programs might be in greater need of assistance. At a time when California is considering decreases in help to the poorest Californians and making other difficult spending choices, limits on offshoring will aid above-average wage earners. Workers in at-risk occupations earned an average of almost $49,000 in wages in 2003. All other workers in California earned an average of almost $38,000, a difference of about $11,000. This difference was far wider in California than in the United States as a whole, where workers in at-risk occupations earned less than $4,000 more than other workers. This difference in wages suggests that policymakers should carefully consider whether policies other than contracting restrictions might provide needed assistance at less cost.
The report mentiones more negative consequences of measures to limit or prohibit offshoring, but this one should be enough to show that Californians are not ruled by Democrats who have the best in mind for there supposed constituancy, low-wage workers.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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27/08/2004
Jose Ramos Horta
Norman Geras points to this interesting piece by Jose Ramos Horta, minister of foreign affairs in East-Timor, a man who knows a thing or two about genocide, and about raw superpower politics. Giving lectures together with Noam Chomsky on East-Timor and together with Chomsky supporting an organisation called ISPO that wants zero-tolerance for terrorism "state terror and domestic tyranny included", Horta’s views since then evidently have been evolved somewhat. For him 9/11 and the war in Iraq has been a watershed. And he rightly can’t stand the UN’s inaction towards "domestic tyranny", be it in Iraq or the Sudan. Knowing American’s role as enabler of Indonesian state terror in East-Timor, Horta’s view of the sole superpower is refreshingly nuanced:
Much has been written and said, always in the language of frustration and regret, about the world we live in today being a unipolar one based on the unchallenged American economic and military power. But I dare to say, is this so bad?
The alternative, the past bipolar world built on two rival ideological systems, gave us a fragmented world with many wars that resulted in tens of millions of dead and the ever-present nuclear nightmare. The counter-force to the US was the USSR with its Stalinist brutality and expansionist doctrine; it was not a rival benign superpower democracy. Hence there was jubilation and celebration by tens of millions when the rotten Soviet totalitarian system imploded.
The US was the winner, but so was Europe and so was all humanity. However, while Europe remained divided along individual national interests without a real political unity and a strong economy and defence, the US harvested the fruits of the collapse of the Soviet empire.
There is no equal or rival to the US today. Whether we like it or not, the US is the world’s unchallenged sole superpower and will remain so for many more years, perhaps as many as 30 years or more, until the emergence maybe of a superpower China or India.
Those who regret the present unipolar world seem to blame the US for its status. The fact is that the US is the sole surviving superpower because of its highly educated people, its ingenuity and creativity, the ability of its industries and commerce to engage in a continuing process of reform and adaptation, its diversity and intellectual and political dynamism, and its investment in research, science and technology. Its universities produce far more Nobel laureates in sciences, medicine and economics than Europe, Japan and Russia combined. It is a superpower partly by default, by the failures of others, and partly by design because it wants and plans to be a superpower.
Many resent the Americans and accuse them of arrogance and insensitivity. But millions of Americans gave their lives for others. They fought with unique bravery and died in Europe and North Africa, throughout Asia, and saved the world from Hitlerian domination.
One wonders, if the US had not entered World War II and had not stayed after the war, what languages the Europeans would be speaking today, and what language Asians would be forced to learn and use. There would be no European Union and no peaceful and democratic Japan.
For 50 years, the US provided the only credible deterrence in Europe against Soviet expansion. It continues to be the only credible security balance, and has thus averted catastrophic wars in the Indian subcontinent, Middle East, Korean Peninsula, China Strait, etc.
An American retreat from Asia would precipitate an uncontrollable arms race between, or among, rival neighbours which would almost inevitably result in open warfare and set back the impressive economic and human development of the past 20 years.
This does not in any way suggest that the US has been a benign power, a sort of a giant Mother Teresa. Its history is also one of conquest, greed and sometimes of barbarism. The Americans are a testimony to US imperial arrogance. Vietnam and Cambodia were carpet-bombed back to the Stone Age. The US cultivated and propped up despotic regimes all over the world. It still does.
The US can be a force for change and good. It can be a benign power. It can turn the world into a much safer, better, common home for all of us - as long as it has the humility of the truly great and walks halfway and meets its other half of fellow human beings, acknowledges its own limits and errors, and shares with the rest of us a more compassionate vision and agenda.
The rest of the world was in shock and mourning after September 11. But some did not fully grasp the American determination to fight an enemy that dared to attack them on their very soil.
Horta has been quite supportive (with reservations) of the military actions against the Taliban and Saddam. Now he warnes against a hasty retreat from Iraq:
While there might never be an agreement among the pacifists and the realists over the dilemma of war and peace, there has to be an agreement now that the forces of fanaticism and terrorism cannot prevail in Iraq. Any retreat from Iraq today would have serious consequences for the stability of the whole region. Where there is a real chance today for democracy in Iraq, a hasty withdrawal would deliver the Iraqi people and the Kurds to a Taliban-style rule that would destabilise the entire region.
Being a liberal interventionist he sees the weaknesses of the UN-system and the strenghts of the U.S. to be a force for good in the world. He apperantly is not ready to condemn "unilateral" action:
If there had been a lone world leader with moral courage, let’s say Mandela of South Africa, who had ordered his country’s armed forces to intervene unilaterally in Rwanda in 1994, would he have been condemned for this unilateral action? Should the Security Council be always, at all times, the only valid source of legitimacy for an armed intervention? If not, then we should deal with the next question: who else - the only existing superpower with enough firepower?
UPDATE
Here is an article by Chomsky’s soulmate Ed Herman which can give some indication about how much the world has changed. Escalating violence of Indonesia against East-Timor throughout 1998 en 1999 was met with a resolution of the Security Council calling "on the Indonesian government alone to guarantee that "a secure environment devoid of violence or other forms of intimidation" be ensured". Horta, according to Herman, likened this arrangement correctly to "asking Saddam Hussein to ensure the safety of the Kurds". Meanwhile, East-Timor is independent and G.W. Bush, not Bill Clinton, nor the U.N., ensured that the safety of the Kurds will be in the hands of themselves and the Americans. Safe to be sure, not from Saddam, but from terrorists like Al Qaeda. You can readily see why Horta is so disappointed in the U.N. and is ready to admit that the U.S., even with Bush at the rudder, can do something good. I’m convinced Ed Herman is not.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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26/08/2004
Saddam, women, and Al-Sistani
We all know of course that in the early day’s Saddam’s regime was one of the most oppressive, pardon, progressive regime’s in the Middle East. Then why is it that we have to wait for more than one year AFTER his removal before we see the first woman to lead a union in the history of Iraq? Surely this is an sign of improvement, if not towards women then at least towards unions?
Meanwhile, both Johann Hari and Frans Groenendijk are urging all of us to get behind Al-Sistani. I doubt that his view towards women and unions is more progressive than that of Saddam, who in 1987 proposed an anti-union law, but he apperantly is a man of peace and he has some democratic credentials, so why not?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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25/08/2004
VOIP
Kevin Werbach explains that VOIP will change the traditional phone call in more than one way. In fact, VOIP is something that will change, or is already changing, the way we communicate:
VOIP represents a change in kind rather than just degree. It’s not just a cheaper way to make phone calls; it undermines the very notion of a phone call. Focusing on the new services that look most familiar may be comforting, but eventually we must accept that we’re entering a new communications world.
Read the whole thing. It seems by the way that Michael Powell, Chairman of the FCC, agrees. He called VOIP a killer application for a change in policy, as reported here.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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25/08/2004
Mmmmmm.....McDonalds
Jacob Sullum observes:
When I saw Morgan Spurlock at the Washington, D.C., International Film Festival last Sunday, the first thing I noticed was that he’s thin again, having shed the 25 pounds he deliberately gained during the month-long McDonald’s eating binge featured in his film Super Size Me. Spurlock’s disappearing gut tends to undermine his argument that we cannot really control how much we weigh because sneaky corporations manipulate us into overeating.
Indeed. The argument is all wrong. McDonalds does not manipulate us into overeating. It does try to sell food of course. But the corporation is very responsive to consumer concerns. As Sullum correctly notes in the article you can eat at McDonalds three times a day and stay below the 2.500 calories a day Spurlock’s doctor said was enough to maintain his weight. In fact the range of choice at McDonalds is wide enough too have three mails a day and LOSE weight. A Dutch journalist is done just that. It happens that McDonalds started as a place that sold big fat hamburgers, so people who went there often became big and fat. The market of fast food has it’s external costs as the health costs associated with those big fat Americans had to be paid by the public. But the market can correct itself. Consumers and consumergroups reacted. McDonalds, eager to keep selling food, responded. And now every responsible consumer can eat at McDonalds, lose weight and become healthier. At least at McDonalds the market of fast food appears to be heading towards a lean equilibrum. The thing is, not government regulation, nor litigation did the trick. No, responsible consumers who said, enough is enough, did it. Resposible consumers like, so it appears, Morgan Spurlock. The question then becomes: why did he make such an irresponsible movie portraying all those fat Americans as the victims of a conspiracy of greedy corporations?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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25/08/2004
Arab and Western hypocracy
Salim Mansur has written an interesting opinion piece about the genocide happening in Darfur and the silence in the Arab world:
The tragedy unfolding in Darfur has been well-documented by reputable international human rights agencies such as Human Rights Watch. There is no disputing in this instance the facts of a state-supported ethnic cleansing being repeated in the heart of Africa.
But Sudan is a member of the Arab League, an organization representing 22 Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa. Hence, the Arab League immediately rallied around Sudan at the UN to ease pressures being placed on Bashir’s regime.
The diplomatic manoeuvres of the Arab League are predictable. It exists to defend the interests of Arab states -- meaning regimes in power -- and not the Arab people.
The one constant in the history of Arab states over the past five decades is the abuse of people by power-holders in a part of the world -- between the Atlantic Ocean and the Persian Gulf -- where regimes rule without popular legitimacy.
It is understandable, though inexcusable, that there are no demonstrations in the streets of Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, Tunis, Algiers or elsewhere in the wider Arab-Muslim world, denouncing the Khartoum regime for its crimes in Darfur.
Freedom and democracy are sorely lacking among the Arab League members, and popular condemnation of an Arab regime would not be tolerated.
Arabs and Muslims, however, now live in growing numbers in cosmopolitan centres of the West, and enjoy freedoms denied their people elsewhere.
Here they came out in unprecedented numbers, protesting American-led wars to liberate Afghans and Iraqis from despots. But in their unconscionable silence over Darfur, they disclose how selective is their outrage.
This silence is also revealing of culturally entrenched bigotry among Arabs, and Muslims from adjoining areas of the Middle East.
Blacks are viewed by Arabs as racially inferior, and Arab violence against blacks has a long, turbulent record. The Arabic word for blacks (’abed) is a derivative of the word slave (’abd), and the role of Arabs in the history of slavery is a subject rarely discussed publicly.
Here, the contrast between the Arab treatment of blacks, irrespective of whether they are Muslims or not, and the Israeli assimilation of black Jews of Ethiopia, known as Falashas, cannot go unnoticed.
The tragedy of Darfurians ironically has exposed to the world the racial dimension of Arab-Muslim culture and the hollowness of rhetoric proclaiming the brotherhood of Muslims.
But what can be said about those Arabs and Muslims living in the West, can be said about Westerners, especially the left-wing part of it, too. They too came out in unprecedented numbers to protest the liberation of Afghans and Iraqi’s. Where are they now?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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25/08/2004
The death of the left
Nick Cohen writes about the death of the left:
Two mementoes that prove, if proof were needed, that the principled left was a 19th and 20th-century phenomenon:
1. The hit of the season is Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, a sort of Fox News for liberals. Among the many clunking contradictions and honking errors, one unforgiveable scene stands out. Moore brushes aside the millions forced into exile and mass graves by Saddam Hussein, and decides to present life in one of the worst tyrannies of the late 20th century as sweet and simple. Boys scamper to barber shops. Merry children fly kites. Blushing lovers get married.
At the end of the film, leftish audiences in America and Europe show they are more than prepared to forgive and forget. They rise to their feet and applaud.
2. Yusuf al-Qaradawi arrives in London to meet the leaders of the Muslim Association of Britain - co-organisers of the great anti-war demonstration of February 2003. Al-Qaradawi’s Islam Online website is available for the world to read. It supports the murder of Israeli civilians and declares that "on the hour of judgement, Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them".
(...)
These are symptoms of a left that has swerved to the right. Saddam Hussein may have slavishly followed Stalin’s methods of dealing with his opponents, but his Baath Party was inspired by Nazi Germany and its program of exterminating impure ethnic minorities was recognisably fascist.
Historians may see the similarities between the slave empires of Nazi Germany, communist Russia and Maoist China as more important than the differences, but the differences meant an enormous amount to millions of people at the time.
However selective their condemnations and hypocritical their double-standards, the old left knew they were against the far right in its political or clerical guise.
The solidity of the conviction imposed constraints - however critical the old left was of capitalist democracies, there were alternatives to democracy that it would never tolerate. The constraints also brought honour because they instilled the ideal of fraternity. The victims of far-right regimes were guaranteed support through international backing from the democratic and the totalitarian left.
Ask an Iraqi communist or Kurdish socialist today what support they have had from the liberal left and they won’t detain you for long. Apart from the odd call from the Socialist International, there has been none worthy of the name.
One expects the totalitarian left to be stuffed with creeps, but the collapse of the democratic left strikes me as catastrophic. Why couldn’t it oppose the second Gulf war while promising to do everything possible to advance the cause of Iraqi democrats and socialists once the war was over? Why the sneering, almost racist pretence that Saddam had no honourable opponents?
The ineluctable answer is, I’m afraid, that there no longer is a left with a coherent message of hope for the human race. The audiences at Michael Moore films don’t look at his propaganda images of kite-flying kiddies and pull themselves up short by thinking of what happened to their comrades in Iraq.
They have no comrades. They don’t support Saddam. They don’t support his foes. They have no policy to offer. The noise of their self-righteous anger is merely a cover for an indifference bred by failure.
Marxist-Leninism is as dead as any idea can be - it made the fatal blunder of putting its ideas into practice and died of shame. Fifty years ago, there were revolutionary socialist movements in dozens of countries ready to take power. Today there isn’t one, and the world is a better place for that.
But the nobler traditions of the social-democratic left are also under enormous strain.
Unless you believe that the failure of the world’s peoples to look leftwards is all the result of brainwashing by the corporate media, you have to conclude that the left is dead. The anger that propelled it is still there, and although it won many battles, some of the oppressions it fought against remain as grievous as ever.
The pity of the aftermath is that while the honourable traditions of the left are forgotten, the worst flourish and mutate into aberrations that would have made our predecessors choke.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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25/08/2004
Where are the grown-up Democrats?
Daniel Weintraub writes about a study from the Public Policy Institute of California of wich the publication has been postponed because it’s message is not very congenial to the Democrats who control the Californian Legislature. The message is that - surprise, surprise - outsourcing is good for economic growth in the long run, and that it even created more new jobs in California itself. Why is the message not very congenial to the Democrats? Because they want to make outsourcing their bogeyman, because they think this will deliver them votes from the working people. But their stance against outsourcing would be counter-productive as it would be bad for the workers itself. What a good press corps America has to report on this. And yes, the Republicans have a recent bad record on trade and outsourcing, but see, when the Democrats are in power, as in the Californian legislature, are they doing so much better? Any grown-up Democrats around there?(Via Ben Muse and Virginia Postrel).
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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22/08/2004
Three cheers for Justice Sidney R. Thomas
I have to interrupt my excellent birthday with this important news:
Truly decentralised peer-to-peer (P2P) software can’t be held accountable for its misuse, according to a US federal appeals court.
The decision, by the 9th US Circuit Court in Los Angeles, threw a major brick in the path of entertainment companies which have been trying to have the courts shut down companies running the P2P networks.
And look how the judge explains his decision:
"(W)e live in a quicksilver technological
environment with courts ill-suited to fix the flow of
internet innovation....The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to old markets and particularly to those copyright owners whose works are sold through well-established distribution mechanisms," the court wrote. "Yet history has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karaoke machine or an MP3 player. Thus, it is prudent for courts to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories for the purpose of addressing specific market abuses, despite their apparent present magnitude.
No litigation, no regulation, let the market do it’s work, that’s his main message. A truly wise man, that judge.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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22/08/2004
No blogging today
Het is mijn verjaardag vandaag, dus geen blogactiviteiten. Tot morgen!
Birthday today, so no blogging activities. See ya!
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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20/08/2004
Bush loses, the American press reports....
But Brad, America has a good press corps, it’s at the libertarian side of the spectrum. In Reason for instance Ronald Bailey has an overview of the polls concerning the next elections. And he reports about the deep disappointment of some grown-up Republicans (they are libertarians and conservatives, so i guess Republicans too) in the Bush-administration. Quite a (non-comprehensive!) list:
But now to the Bailey anecdotal poll. Over cocktails earlier this summer some 20 or so of my oldest friends from the University of Virginia were discussing the upcoming election. These friends are well off professionals who live in the DC suburbs who generally tend to hold conservative and libertarian political positions. They also all vote and in 2000 most of them voted for George Bush. Although there were a few holdouts, it is very clear that most of them are now trending strongly away from Bush. Why? This not a comprehensive list and not all agree with every item but it adds up to severe disappointment in the Bush Administration. Their top concerns include diminished civil liberties symbolized by the USA PATRIOT Act, the $530 billion Medicare drug boondoggle, a ballooning budget deficit, mismanaged military adventures overseas, limits on stem cell research and a further politicization of scientific research, and failure by Bush to make even token efforts to keep his campaign promises regarding school choice and privatizing social security.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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20/08/2004
Tyler Cowen has a theory
Tyler Cowen has a theory about what makes for great food. These items:
- competition,
- experimentation,
- pride.
I think that competition is basic here. It encourages experimentation, because without it, you will lose to your competitors. And you can only compete if you take pride in your own product. So what makes for great food? Competition. And in relation to this globalization, through competition, leads to more great food. Indeed:
People say that globalization is making all the world look alike. And there is some truth to this, but think about what this means. If all the world looks alike, it means that you can buy sushi almost anywhere. So I was a student about 20 years ago. I lived in Germany for about a year in 1984, and in 1984 it was very hard to get sushi in Germany. You could get it in Berlin, you could get it in Frankfort, Dusseldorf of course, the Japanese community. But for the most part, mid-sized German cities did not have sushi. Most of France did not have sushi outside of Paris. Today about any mid-size German city, any major city in Asia, Austrasia, North America, now Latin America, you can get sushi. So yes, the world in this way is starting to look more alike. The world is more alike in the sense that you have more choice everywhere. The commonality means the commonality of diversity. Anywhere you go you can get sushi, you can get some version of Mexican food, you can get some version of Chinese food, Indian food and so on. And that in my view is a good thing. So when people say the world is looking more alike, borders don’t matter anymore, it’s not the case that every country all they have is McDonald’s. That is the opposite of what is happening. It’s that every country is offering you more choice. If I think about where I live, Northern Virginia, it’s about an hour from here, that to me is close to a food paradise. I have my choice of regional Bolivian cuisines. So if I want Bolivian food, I just don’t say hey, “do you want Bolivian food” to my wife, I say “ would you like Bolivian food from Cochabamba, or how about a dish from La Paz?”
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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20/08/2004
Is general relativity not true?
The Economist reports:
“ASSUME nothing” is a good motto in science. Even the humble pendulum may spring a surprise on you. In 1954 Maurice Allais, a French economist who would go on to win, in 1988, the Nobel prize in his subject, decided to observe and record the movements of a pendulum over a period of 30 days. Coincidentally, one of his observations took place during a solar eclipse. When the moon passed in front of the sun, the pendulum unexpectedly started moving a bit faster than it should have done.
Since that first observation, the “Allais effect”, as it is now called, has confounded physicists. If the effect is real, it could indicate a hitherto unperceived flaw in General Relativity—the current explanation of how gravity works.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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19/08/2004
Nostalgie
In de jaren zestig, toen kon men nog televisie maken. Toen kon je tenminste nog duidelijk merken wanneer iemand playbackte (schrijf ik dit goed eigenlijk?) of live zong. Zoals toen je de plaat hoorde kraken bij een televisie-optreden van Will Ferdy. Playback en toch echt. Grandioos.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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18/08/2004
Quote of the day
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
From a new weblog called The Technology Liberation Front. Here they have a post about the rise of the Fox Network: by breaking all the rules.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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18/08/2004
Venezuela, cont.
It appears that Chavez, friend of the poor, is more liked by Wall Street these days:
Economic and social conditions have deteriorated dramatically. The number of Venezuelans living in extreme poverty doubled between 1999 and 2003, Chavez’s first five years as president, and nearly 75% of the population lives below the poverty line, according to Catholic University in Caracas. Crime and unemployment, two chief concerns of most Venezuelans, have increased. Further, according to Human Rights Watch, the government is manipulating the judiciary, packing the Supreme Court with pro-Chavez justices and continuing to erode the rule of law.
(...)
…Yet under Chavez’s "revolution," the oil flows freely, and foreign investors in the state-controlled petroleum sector are not complaining too loudly. Though Washington has been the target of unremitting jabs, Wall Street has been enthusiastically embraced…
Still, a well known left-wing critic of America and capitalism manages to write:
But today (past sunday, the day of the referendum), the landless and homeless voted their hopes, knowing that their man may not, against the armed axis of local oligarchs and Dick Cheney, succeed for them. But they are convinced he will never forget them. And that’s a fact.
It seems he already has, Greg (apart from increasing social spending when it suits him, but then of course he his thinking only about himself, not about the landless and homeless). And that’s a fact too.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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17/08/2004
Najaf
In case you still don’t know who the main villains are in Najaf, Norman Geras points to three articles that can provide some clues (tip: in circles like the New Left Review those villains are considered as "resistence"...should be easy now)
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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17/08/2004
Not your everyday ethical consumer
Julian Baggini, not your everyday ethical consumer:
As a fervent advocate of ethical consumerism, I seriously suggest that you consider flying long haul, wearing Levi’s and drinking coffee at Starbucks. The fact that no one else seems willing to give the same advice is a sad indictment of the ethical consumerism movement. For what should be one of the most important moral campaigns of our day has been hijacked by woolly-minded, anti-scientific, eco-narcissists.
Ethical consumerism should be about using our purchasing power to make the world a better place. Instead, it is characterised by three almost religious convictions: that multinationals are inherently bad; that the "natural" and organic are inherently superior; and that science and technology are not to be trusted.
Irrational prejudice against multinationals is connected to incoherent opposition to globalisation. Anti-globalisation campaigners seem blind to the irony that it was precisely the increased interconnectedness of peoples and trade characteristic of globalisation that allowed their worldwide opposition movement to flourish.
The growth of multinationals is just one aspect of globalisation, and the homogeneity it brings is regrettable. Even this can be overstated, however: no one would confuse Madrid’s Puerta del Sol with Piccadilly Circus just because there were MacDonald’s at both. But the erosion of some national differences is neither entirely bad nor a burning ethical issue. And if you care about morality, the multinationals can be a force for good.
I urge you to read the rest, and his proposal for an organic pure drug-free olympics. Everyone else (most of them i guess) can compete in the current one.
(Via Political Theory Daily Review)
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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17/08/2004
The character of the resistence
You can always count on the loony left. Over at the New Left Review Susan Watkins has an editorial called "Vichy on the Tigris", implying that Iraq is no more than a client state of the U.S., like Vichy France was for Nazi-Germany. The comparison as such strikes me as revolting. But the most disgusting thing is how Watkins characterizes the "resistence", portraying them as victims of the occupation and not mentioning once that most victims of that resistence are ordinary Iraqi’s (on pages 9 and 10). At the end she call’s for full support for the Iraqi "maquis" for driving the Americans out, regardless however the loss of life that would bring with it. And if you really want to know who those "maquis" are and what they are doing to Iraq and it’s people, here is a report from Human Rights Watch. I thought people on the left lik Watkins were always so keen on citing human rights organizations. But not this time apparently. A little bit too inconvenient?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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17/08/2004
Venezuela, once again
Daniel Davies makes some pertinent observations on Hugo Chavez and Venezuela:
Part of the reason why Chavez was able to win was that in recent months he’s been throwing around money like water on social programs. He was able to do this because oil was up above $40 a barrel, generating vast profits for the state oil company. A lot of the reason why oil prices were so high was that … there was significant uncertainty about supply from Venezuela because of the impending referendum. Now that some of the uncertainty has been resolved, oil futures have already started tumbling, meaning that it’s going to be that little bit more dfficult to deliver on these promises; if I were a Venezuelan, I wouldn’t be assuming that we were out of the woods yet.
There is another catch-22 situation apparently, that is the fact that the opposition is not much better that then man who won the referendum. And always there is the shadow of the U.S., whose government contests the elections. Venezuela, not the prettiest country to live in right now.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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17/08/2004
Productivity again
The discussion of the causes of the productivity difference between Europe and the U.S. (provided there is any difference and about what kind of productivity are we speaking here?) continues. Over at EconLog Arnold Kling has a nice overview with some comments. And Ben Muse also takes up the tap .
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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16/08/2004
Sachs on India
Jeffrey Sachs is rather optimistic about India:
When the former government lost the vote this past May, and Singh’s government came into office, there were fears that Singh would be hamstrung by left-wing coalition partners, who would demand that market reforms be dismantled as the price of their participation in the new ruling coalition. Chidambaram’s 2004/2005 budget puts those fears to rest. The document is a brilliant lesson in development economics: it shows how to combine a full-speed ahead approach to market reforms with urgently needed attention to poverty. In short, the budget is a model for all developing countries.
At the heart of the budget is the realization that reducing poverty requires both rapid economic growth and targeted investments aimed at the poorest of the poor. Rapid economic growth is to be based on the private sector, including foreign direct investment. Thus, the budget supports critical areas of market reform and growth promotion, including measures aimed at deepening the financial sector, promoting exports, and liberalizing foreign direct investment.
The key, however, is that the budget does not rely simply on "trickle-down" economics to raise living standards. The second pillar of poverty reduction is targeted investments for the poor, particularly for the rural poor. This approach commits India’s national government and state governments to ensuring that all Indians, including the poorest, have access to basic social investments, including health, nutrition, and schooling, and to basic infrastructure, including electricity, information and communications technology, safe drinking water, and inputs for modern agriculture. Every village is to be lifted up in the next few years, empowered with the basic tools to become economically productive.
And he pleads for help from rich countries:
The rich world should not be grudging in its help to India. By providing a few billion dollars per year in assistance now, the donor world would ensure a prosperous, democratic, and stable partner in India for decades to come. In other words, it is time for donors to step up to help reform-minded yet poor countries like India, and, even more urgently, those in Africa that are similarly committed to economic development.
Maybe giving money can help, but probably it won’t (or rather it won’t make much of a difference). What’s absent in professor Sachs’ piece is another possible response from rich countries: reciprocity. If India is prepared to open up further it’s economy for trade and foreign direct investment the West should do the same. This means opening our economies for Indian products (textiles for instance) and accepting the fact that in the future even more companies could move to India, and not just in the ICT-sector. Absent this open attitude from the West i rather doubt that giving some more money to India will be decisive. In any case, with all the good intentions in India’s new budget, the reaction in the rich world matters a great deal. So it there still reason for much optimism? Worth discussing.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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16/08/2004
America redeploys it’s military
From Bloomberg:
U.S. President George W. Bush today will announce plans to withdraw tens of thousands of U.S. troops from Europe and Asia, one the largest military redeployments since the end of the Cold War, the Associated Press reported.
Bush’s plan affects about 70,000 uniformed military personnel who would be moved from such countries as Germany to bases in the U.S. or perhaps posts in Eastern Europe, the AP said, citing unidentified administration officials.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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16/08/2004
Leftie Chavez won, leftie Cooper lost, the market is happy
No recall of Hugo Chavez. And guess what...the market likes it.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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14/08/2004
Venezuela: a contrarian view from the left
Marc Cooper says: recall Hugo Chavez!
The worst kind of politics are those posited on the knee-jerk notion that the "enemy of my enemy is my friend."
And there’s no more vivid symptom of this malaise then the muddle-headed support and “solidarity” that too much of the Left is extending to the semi-literate thug who currently sits in the Presidential chair of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. Reading, for example, leftist ideologue Tariq Ali’s thoughts on this guy, you’d think Chavez was the second coming of Che Guevara.
After two years of jerking around his country, his courts and his constitution trying to forestall a referendum on his authority, Chavez finally faces a recall vote on Sunday.
And if I were a Venezuelan, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment. My vote would be to recall Hugo Chavez.
Let’s be clear: I make no illusions about his opposition. It is led, in great part, by an oil-spoiled oligarchy and by elite right-wing parties. This opposition is also buoyed by Bush administration support. And most likely braced by numerous covert programs, not necessarily excluding the CIA itself.
Further, the traditional Venezuelan political class wallows in corruption and dysfunction, having squandered on itself the vast petroleum-based riches of Venezuela. It was only a matter of time until a populist demagogue would come along to exploit the righteous anger of millions of impoverished Venezuelans. So I’m fully cognizant of the fact that Hugo Chavez is but a Frankenstein created by a failed political system.
But so what? He’s still a Frankenstein. And the sycophantic little minuets that Ali and legions of other Chavez groupies including Mark Weisbrot and Richard Gott perform with this thug are truly appalling. American and British leftists find themselves so inorganic to power, so relegated to the margins, so detached from the “masses” they purport to lead and enlighten, that their politics often becomes little but primitive cheerleading for any tin-pot Third World dictator who strikes an anti-American pose. Truly pathetic.
Venezuelan leftists know much better, because they actually have to live in Venezuela under Chavez’s authoritarian and intellectually-insulting rule. The most important and imaginative of the country’s leftist parties, Movimiento Al Socialismo (MAS) and Causa R, stand in firm opposition to Chavez and along with the country’s central labor federation are supporting his recall. I understand where they’re coming from. Last year I spent a couple of hours in Chavez’ presence during a clumsily arranged “press conference” in Brazil and I found my IQ dropping by the minute. Chavez is but a brutish ego-maniac who blathers on for hours at a time about matters he knows nothing about. Imagine a cheap, cartoonish imitation of Fidel Castro with absolutely not a trace of any of the redeeming qualities one can find in the Cuban lider maximo.
There is no “Bolivarian Revolution” in Venezuela. Instead you find the anti-democratic demagogy of a blow-hard bully who – in the name of “serving the people”—imposes harsh austerity and poco a poco erodes whatever survives of Venezuelan democracy.
(...)
Venezuela, unfortunately, languishes in a lose-lose dilemma. No credible opposition candidate is emerging to win a new election if Chavez loses. And, worse, Chavez seems to be rebounding in the polls, precisely because of the devil-you-know reflex.
But what’s right is right. The right vote on Sunday is – “Si!” Yes! to recall of Hugo Chavez.
Here is more about the referendum sunday, and why the results probably will be rigged in favor of no.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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13/08/2004
In defense of self-interest
Or rather some bad words about altruism. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
A frequently overlooked benefit of material self-interest is that it helps us to keep our noses out of other people’s business.
I overheard a cafeteria discussion recently in which a woman expressed heated hatred of homosexuality. “It’s just wrong!” “It’s disgusting!” “I don’t know why we tolerate it!”
Her lunch partner was silent; I don’t know if he agreed or disagreed with her.
But hearing this woman got me thinking: Why does she care? No one forces her to engage in homosexual acts, or to watch such acts performed. She can ignore them and lead her life as if they never occur.
If this woman were more narrowly self-interested, in a material dimension, she would spend more time thinking about how to improve the furnishings in her home, what school is best for her children, where to vacation next summer, how to raise her income – all sorts of matters that would divert her attention from worrying about affairs that are none of her business.
In fact, though, because this woman does care – and, believe me, her tone of voice suggests that she truly and deeply cares that some people engage in homosexual activity – we can say about her that she is not completely, narrowly, materially self-interested. Part of her is altruistic, other-regarding, not-selfish. She would not materially gain if homosexuality diminished or even stopped.
However, her altruistic, other-regarding, un-selfish wish that homosexuality be eliminated is horrid. It’s an instance of an other-regarding motive that is destructive.
It’s true that the world might be an even better place if each of us were a little less materially selfish and, in consequence, a little more giving to others of things that others genuinely desire and that yield long-term benefits. But it is a teeth-gnashing error to assume that reducing self-interestedness will necessarily make the world a better place. If people’s other-regarding inclinations cause them to intrude into areas that are best left to others, greater altruism will be harmful.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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13/08/2004
Always high prices, always...
Virginia Postrel "thanks" the Bushies:
Each of these trends is exacerbated by protectionism directed at our closest neighbors: a 27 percent tariff on Canadian lumber, dating to May 2002 (thanks, Bushies), and a 40 percent tariff on Mexican cement, dating all the way back to 1990 (thanks, other Bushies). To retaliate against Canadian and Mexican producers for charging low prices, the U.S. government is imposing special taxes on construction, depressing production and reducing employment. Always bad policy, this protectionism is particularly stupid right now.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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13/08/2004
The president versus the people
On stemcell research G.W. Bush is out of touch with the American people:
According to recent poll by the Economist, 65 percent of Americans favor dismantling "potentially viable human embryos" to obtain stem cells for research on possible cures for a host of ailments including diabetes, Parkinson’s, spinal cord injuries and heart disease. Earlier this month, a University of Pennsylvania National Annenberg Election Survey asked 1,345 adults, "Do you favor or oppose Federal funding of research on diseases like Alzheimer’s using stem cells taken from human embryos?" Sixty-four percent said they favored such funding, while 28 percent opposed it.
What’s even more interesting is that Americans have consistently supported federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research. As far back as July 2001, a Harris poll conducted before Bush set his limits on stem cell research found that 61 percent of Americans who had seen or heard something about stem cell research favored using leftover embryos from in vitro fertilization as sources of stem cells.
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13/08/2004
Chinese agriculture, globalization and Western civilization
The Institute of International Economics has a new booklet out extolling the virtues of the Chinese agricultural sector where the market is working, farmers are innovative and diversifiing and the focus is on new technologies. Here is the abstract:
It is a cliché that China is the world’s manufactured goods factory, but most observers are just as certain that China’s farmers are a serious burden on growth. Yet China in fact has the makings of an internationally competitive agricultural sector, with the market setting most prices, farmers shifting quickly toward what they produce best, and significant research and development focused on biotechnology and other promising areas. China’s trade interests are changing as its farmers become more competitive, and this transformation will have major implications for world trade talks and global economic welfare. This study traces the steps China has taken to make agriculture a winning sector, the evidence that its initiatives are working, and the course the country is likely to take.
Quite funny that the Chinese themselves are not convinced of their own strenghts. Belgian professor Louis Baeck has a paper out (in Dutch and not online) citing the views of Chinese "experts" on globalization and Western civilization. Two of them, according to Baeck members of the Chinese "new left", one Yongsin Lu and a Zheng Yongnian, are afraid of the WTO-membership of China. They think that Chinese agriculture for instance will suffer from European and American competition. The reason why it is funny is because, well, they are members of the left, citing government subsidies for agriculture in the West as a threath to the mainly market-driven agriculture in China. I don’t think they mean it that way, but in a certain sense they are defending here market reforms instead of government intervention. Either way, Western civilization has better watch out. China is using it’s best elements; markets, mobility and new technology to beat Western government-infected agriculture. Great!
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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13/08/2004
Liberaal, communicatief en vrouwvriendelijk: perfect!
De nieuwe Europese Commissie is liberaal, commmunicatief en vrouwvriendelijk, zo meldt De Tijd. Economische hervormingen en communicatie met de burger zijn prioritair. Het perfecte tegenwicht dus voor het linkse Europese Parlement. Goed gedaan dus door de voorzitter, Barroso, zelf een gewezen linkse maoïst (worden uiteindelijk nog de beste liberalen).
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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13/08/2004
Het beste van Vlaanderen en Nederland?
Belangrijk ontwikkeling in het medialandschap, zowel het Belgische als het Nederlandse. De Nederlandse publieke omroep TROS wil namelijk het publieke omroepbestel verlaten en samen met het Vlaamse VTM een privé-zender oprichten, zo meldt Het Laatste Nieuws. Veel details zijn er niet bekend, maar het gaat zeker over een belangwekkende ontwikkeling. Het "rare" is dat de Nederlandse publieke omroep in haar strijd met de commerciële zenders niet zonder enige bewondering naar de prestaties van onze publieke omroep kijken, de VRT. Quid dat de VRT daarbij niet weinig hulp krijgt van de Vlaamse overheid terwijl in Nederland elke euro méér dan eens wordt omgedraaid vooraleer uitgegeven. Dat de TROS nu naar VTM kijkt, een zender die het moeilijk heeft om de slag met de VRT te winnen (oneerlijke concurrentie?) om het publieke bestel in Nederland een slag toe te brengen is dan ook op meerdere vlakken ironisch te noemen. Maar interessant is het zeker.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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12/08/2004
African opinion
GlobeScan Research Partners has held an 8 nation poll on attitutes towards globalization in Africa. The eight countries are Cote d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. In some questions Egypt has been left out. The poll has some suprising results:
- on average the attitute towards "globalization" is overwhelmingly positive;
- global companies are trusted more than the U.S. and Europe;
- the attitute is more positive towards the U.S. than Europe (!);
- people like and want democracy;
- people like and want more foreign companies (!);
- the rich world is seen as hypocritical as concerned to trade and development.
So the conclusion is clear i think. Africa is not a victim of too much globalization but of too little, and the Africans, at least in those eight countries, know it. They want to be part of globalization (trade, foreign investment, democracy....) and not shut out of it. And apperantly they blame the rich world that they keep shutting them out. They are right.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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12/08/2004
De domme Amerikaan en de slimme Nederlander
Twee effecten van McDonalds:
Morgan Spurlock, een domme Amerikaan (vindt een portie frieten bij McDonalds onvoorstelbaar veel, nog nooit in een Belgische frituur geweest blijkbaar), ging een maand eten bij de fastfoodketen, kwam 12 kilo aan en werd ziek. Zijn lotgevallen kan je volgen in de documentaire "Supersize Me".
In Het Laatste Nieuws (sorry, geen link) staat nu het verhaal van een slimme Nederlander die ook een maand ging eten bij McDonalds. Resultaat: zes kilo minder en veel gezonder.
Dit zegt toch wel wat denk ik over vrijheid en verantwoordelijkheid. McDonalds wordt vaak afgschilderd als de nietsontziende multinational gericht op het domineren van de voedselketen in de hele wereld, en nog meer dan dat (McWorld in de terminologie van Benjamin Barber). In elk geval wordt McDonalds met de vinger gewezen als het om de zwaarlijvigheidsepidemie gaat. Misschien is het niet de schuld, dan wel de verantwoordelijkheid van de keten dat we allemaal zo dik worden.
Maar blijkbaar gaat deze redenering niet helemaal op. McDonalds wordt algemeen gezien als de "hamburgerketen". Vet eten waar je alleen maar dik van kan worden. Maar de multinational heeft bewezen dat ze in staat is om tegemoet te komen aan de wensen van de consument. De keuze is er al bij al relatief groot én vaak aangepast aan locale noden en behoeften. In elk geval is de keuzevrijheid er groot genoeg om NIET bij te komen. Integendeel. Als je wil kan je perfect afvallen met een dieet van McDonalds. Je moet gewoon de juiste keuze maken. Een deel van de verantwoordelijkheid voor de dikheidsrage leggen bij de mensen zelf en niet enkel bij de "grote slechte multinational" lijkt me dan ook een gezonde zaak te zijn.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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12/08/2004
Ik ga een klinker kopen: de i
Gelezen vandaag in de krant. Onderzoek wijst uit dat mannen met een i of e in de voornaam er beter uit zien dan mannen met een a of een u. Ah. Dat is goed, mijn voornaam begint met een i! Maar er bevindt zich ook een a in mijn naam. Wat nu? Heeft de letter die eerst komt - in dit geval dan de i - dan voorrang? En zo ja, klopt de redenering dan in mijn geval?
Overigens wat met mannen met een o in de voornaam? En ten slotte: hoe kan dit nu in godsnaam wetenschappelijk zijn?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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12/08/2004
Atkins versus a real diet
The Atkins diet: it’s democratic, it’s nature’s way, it’s anti-capitalism, it’s salvation, it’s revolutionary , and if it works, it works fast. Sounds great isn’t it? So try it and become another person.
Here is another way though. It works (although much slower) and it’s less hazardous for your health. And it’s quite simple: walk and eat less. Because one thing is for sure: calories in < calories out = weightloss. But of course it’s not romantic or revolutionary.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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11/08/2004
Yes! Real liberal Republicans!
Brad DeLong, a Democrat, points to this website from a group of Republicans, called the New Majority. It’s main goal looks very promising:
The New Majority PAC is steering the Republican Party in a direction that emphasizes discourse and creates an environment that encourages any person who believes in the power of the individual over government - regardless of race, gender or religion - that their opinion is welcome and needed in the GOP.
And their programme even more:
Promotes public policy and conducts research that supports our organization’s fiscally conservative values.
Identifies and supports non-profit programs and activities, which benefit women and minorities as well as other under-served communities.
Expands understanding of markets in the new economy and promotes economic freedom in the information age.
Demands a smaller, more efficient government.
Promotes individual liberty.
Ah yes. These are the kind of people and idea’s i was looking for in the GOP. These are real Republicans and real classical liberals, if you ask me. Hopefully they indeed will become the new majority. Move over G.W. Bush. And just stay a senator J.F. Kerry.
UPDATE
And they are being endorsed by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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10/08/2004
Kill Bill
Michael Totten wants al-Sadr dead:
It’s long past time to remove the gun from Iraqi politics. The irony is that you have to use guns to do it. If Iraqi liberals (ie, those who wish to replace bullets with ballots) are not willing to kill those who take up arms against them, Iraq will be ruled once again by the ruthless.
Moqtada al-Sadr cranked up his "revolution" and says he wants to fight to his "last drop of blood." Fine, then. Give the man what he wants.
It’s one thing to let him throw a gigantic fit and then cut him a deal. It’s another thing altogether to let him get away with it twice. Once is excusable. Twice is a pattern. If he gets away with this every crank with a grievance will be encouraged to kill people, too. Hey, if it works it works. Civil society cannot be built if the law of the jungle prevails.
Moqtada al-Sadr is an enemy of the United States and an enemy of the Iraqi government. He and his goons make peace, stability, and democracy impossible. Today’s non-violent Iraqis will be a lot more encouraged to pick up guns of their own if al-Sadr and his Mahdi militia run rampant.
I say we go to the infinitely more reasonable Ayatollah Sistani and tell him what time it is. Either Sistani and the other Shi’ite clerics find a way to reign in the insurgency or Moqtada al-Sadr gets toe-tagged.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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7/08/2004
Bad economic news
If this trend continues G.W. Bush chances for re-election are very low indeed:
I think it is pretty clear that the economy is now slowing. The July Employment Report is out from the BLS and it is rather grim. While the unemployment rate has dropped a tenth of a percent to 5.5% the payroll survey recorded only 32,000 new jobs. Far less than necessary to keep up with population growth and also lower than the approximately 200,000 many analysts were expecting to see. Add to this downward revisions to the May and June numbers and the picture is indeed not good.
The Conference Board is reporting that the U.S. Leading Indicator Index is also down 2 tenths of a percent as well. Also there is ECRI’s Weekly Leading Index which has been trending down for months now, although last week it edged up a bit.
It seems like the handwriting is on the wall: the economy is slowing.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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7/08/2004
Organic bread and the joys of civilization
Alex Tabarrok contemplates the unmixed blessings of civilization, by bying and eating organic bread:
I’ve been buying this organic bread recently. I’m not a big organic guy (could you guess?) but it’s low-carb and yet doesn’t taste like cardboard. Several times, however, the bread has gone moldy within a day or two. Yuck. So I took some back to the store all indignant about how I only just bought this bread and now its moldy. The clerk explained it to me - heh, it’s organic - no preservatives, get it? Oh, that’s what preservatives do. I will never question civilization again.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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6/08/2004
Verspreking van het jaar
In tegenstelling tot vele anderen ben ik geen Bush-hater. Maar allé kom, deze is toch te mooi om te laten liggen:
Onze vijanden zijn vindingrijk. Maar dat zijn wij evenzeer. Ze zullen ook blijven nadenken over nieuwe manieren om ons land schade toe te brengen. Maar dat doen wij ook.
Oeps.
UPDATE
Overdrijven hoeft nu ook weer niet.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ikan, eh, ivan
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6/08/2004
Science helping nature with nature
Genetically modified trees are coming, the New York Times report. Science journalist Chris Mooney thinks this is a good idea, because these trees will be used to solve some major environmental problems like global warming, mercury poisoning of the soil and shopping wild forests.
So something for the Greens to support? Let’s hope so. Chris say there is reason for optimism. Read his post. I think here we have something the rational left and right can unite around, no?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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5/08/2004
Against the happiness police
Arnold Kling makes a nice argument against "happiness surveys" and against the fact that they only are used as an instrument by the happiness police:
Let me offer a final thought experiment. Suppose that you could choose to live either in our society with its current choice of lifestyles or in a society where "happiness police" tell you how many hours you can work, what kind of job you can have, and what kinds of goods and services you can buy. Which society would make you happier?
The first! The first!
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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5/08/2004
The end of quota’s in textile
The Christian Science Monitor highlights some aspects of the end of the quota system in clothing and apparel. In general the removal of this system is a good thing, it brings us closer to real free trade in this area. Consumers will be the big winners: clothing prices could fall 20 percent.
Nevertheless there are some disturbing elements. First, apart from consumers, China will be another big winner. And this gives vested interest in the U.S. (and Europe) another chance to implement protectionist measures. Of course jobs could be lost in the American textile industry but many jobs will be created in sectors that imports textiles. And because prices will fall, consumers have higher real incomes, which could lead to higher demand and new jobs. So-called strategic considerations, like that fact that the army could well order more berets from China, are almost laughable. Nevertheless, there is no doubt the U.S. textile industry will have a sympathetic ear with the current administration, and i’m far from sure if a Kerry presidency would be any better.
Second, current exporters of clothing and apparel are generally poor countries. If, what seems to be highly likely, the end of the system results in a shift towards China many jobs in those poor countries will be lost. Of course they were only jobs in sweatshops, but now becomes clear how important those jobs are for countries like Bangladesh. It seems that organizations like this one could well get what they wish for, but the fact remains that because of this, those poor countries are panicking now. Another prove that the interests of the poor in the third world does not always coincide with the so-called "fair traders" in the rich world.
So what could be the result of the end of the system? Instead of free trade, we could get protectionism and fair trade. We could get more poverty in a dozen poor countries because the sweatshops will go away and we could get higher, instead of lower, prices for consumers over here. A lose-lose situation. The annoying fact in all this however is that the solution is not difficult. In fact most of the problem is not the result of the end of the quota’s, but because China’s currency is artificially undervalued. If China would let it’s currency appreciate, maybe some of the problems could be solved, and some of the anxiety alleviated.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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5/08/2004
Immorality is natural, at least the search for it is....
From Reason, why the search for immortality is not immoral, only "natural":
What if a biomedical researcher discovered that lives were being cut short because every human being was infected in the womb by a disease organism that eventually wears down the human immune system’s ability to protect us? Until that discovery, the "natural" average lifespan was the proverbial three score and ten years.
Once the discovery is made, another brilliant researcher devises a "vaccine" that kills off the disease organism. Suddenly the average lifespan doubles to seven score (140 years). In a sense, this is exactly where we find ourselves today. There are no "vaccines" yet to cure the disease of aging. But biomedical researchers understand more with each passing year about the processes that cause the increasing physical and mental debilities that we define as aging. Aging is no more or less "natural" than cholera, smallpox, diabetes, arteriosclerosis, or any disease that cuts short human lives.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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5/08/2004
Chomsky suddenly finds Iraqi opinion important
Johann Hari notices that Noam Chomsky has found that Iraqi’s have opinions, now that they concur with his own:
Noam Chomsky writes on his website, "For what it’s worth, polls in Iraq reveal very considerable and apparently growing support for withdrawal of the US occupying army, apart from the Kurdish regions."
Hurrah! Chomsky has noticed that Iraqis actually have opinions. Okay, so he only mentions them when they concur with his own, but it’s a start. Now Noam, look again at the opinion polls you cite. Don’t they - er - show that a majority of Iraqis wanted the invasion to proceed? Why do you advocate siding with the Iraqis only now, and not when they were tyrannised and even more desperate than they are today?
Oh, and you mention that the Kurds want the US to stay. If the military bases you have written about as the real reason for the war were based there, would you accept that this was democratic? You wrote well and bravely about the abuse of Kurds in Turkey in the 1990s, which continues (to a thankfully lesser extent) today.
What do you recommend for the Kurdish regions of Iraq? Make it clear. Do you support the plain wishes of a majority of Iraq’s Kurds? Your fan-base will be appalled if you do; is that why you don’t mention it?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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5/08/2004
Another great day for the WTO
After cotton, now sugar. After the U.S., now Europe. The winner again this time is Brazil and other third world countries (yeah, ok, and Australia). Say again that the WTO’s rules are rigged in favor of the developed countries:
The World Trade Organization found European Union subsidies for sugar producers violate global trade rules, upholding a complaint filed by Brazil, Australia and Thailand, a top Brazilia |
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