To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, is one thing. But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as "antiwar" when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side. Was there a single placard saying, "No to Jihad"? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, "Yes to Kurdish self-determination" or "We support Afghan women’s struggle"? Don’t make me laugh. And this in a week when Afghans went back to the polls, and when Iraqis were preparing to do so, under a hail of fire from those who blow up mosques and U.N. buildings, behead aid workers and journalists, proclaim fatwahs against the wrong kind of Muslim, and utter hysterical diatribes against Jews and Hindus. Some of the leading figures in this "movement," such as George Galloway and Michael Moore, are obnoxious enough to come right out and say that they support the Baathist-jihadist alliance. Others prefer to declare their sympathy in more surreptitious fashion. The easy way to tell what’s going on is this: Just listen until they start to criticize such gangsters even a little, and then wait a few seconds before the speaker says that, bad as these people are, they were invented or created by the United States. That bad, huh?

There are only two serious attempts at swamp-draining currently under way. In Afghanistan and Iraq, agonizingly difficult efforts are in train to build roads, repair hospitals, hand out ballot papers, frame constitutions, encourage newspapers and satellite dishes, and generally evolve some healthy water in which civil-society fish may swim. But in each case, from within the swamp and across the borders, the most poisonous snakes and roaches are being recruited and paid to wreck the process and plunge people back into the ooze. How nice to have a "peace" movement that is either openly on the side of the vermin, or neutral as between them and the cleanup crew, and how delightful to have a press that refers to this partisanship, or this neutrality, as "progressive."

One reason that I am pro-immigrant is that I think that many immigrants -- and certainly the immigrants I most want to encourage -- are highly appreciative of the American system. Coming from countries where government controls more of the economy and where public officials are more corrupt, they are often grateful for the opportunities that our economy provides. In contrast, as the school year begins, my daughter in high school is being inundated with the typical anti-American propaganda of the Left. She is bombarded with lessons claiming that America "controls" too much of the world’s wealth, that we are racist and uncaring, that we spoil the environment, etc. So here is what I propose. Let all of the teachers, professors, journalists, celebrities and others who espouse disgust with America be encouraged to emigrate. And let immigrants take their places.

Every time a hurricane comes along - or a flood, or a drought, or a freeze, or a heatwave - the question is now asked "is it linked to global warming?" A decade ago, that was not the case - a clear signal that climate change is now firmly established in the public mind and in the political arena. Now that climate scientists are being taken seriously, they are also under pressure to produce instant answers. One problem is that not all of those answers exist. Another problem is that some scientists - not to mention lobby groups, environmental organisations, politicians, newspapers and commentators - will go much further in their public statements than the data allow. With such incendiary material, that is unlikely to change; but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we would all benefit from people on both wings of the issue looking rather more to research, however laboured its progress, and rather less to screaming headlines and easy quotes.

it bothers me a great deal when Republicans initiate new entitlement programs, massively expand pork-barrel spending, and show the most callous disregard for fiscal integrity. Not too many years ago, Ronald Reagan vetoed a politically popular highway bill because it contained 157 pork-barrel projects. The latest bill contained at least 5,000. Yet President Bush signed this $295 billion bill into law, despite having promised repeatedly to veto a bill larger than $256 billion.

It truly amazes me how often I hear people on my side talk about cutting taxes as if this is the only thing necessary to downsize government. They seem genuinely oblivious to the fact that the burden of government is largely determined by the level of spending, not taxes. Nor do they understand that in the long-run, all spending must be paid for one way or another. Increasing spending today, therefore, absolutely guarantees that taxes will have to be raised in the future.

I don’t need to remind anyone here that the biggest spending increases in recent years passed Congresses with Republican majorities largely without Democratic votes. Nor do I need to remind anyone here that during the Clinton years we not only went from budget deficits to budget surpluses, but did so to a large extent by cutting spending—something my conservative friends seldom acknowledge.

It is extremely dismaying for me to hear House Majority Leader Tom Delay say that there is no fat in the budget and that Republicans have cut it to the bone. This is, quite frankly, ludicrous. My real fear, however, is that he may actually believe it. I remain convinced that given the total lack of fiscal responsibility demonstrated by the Republican Party that very large tax increases are inevitable. I believe that the fiscal hole is now so large that it is unrealistic to think that we can just tinker with the tax system, as we did so often in the 1980’s, and raise enough revenue to pay for spending commitments that have been made. And under the circumstances, I have no faith whatsoever that spending will be significantly restrained—at least not by my side. They would first have to admit error and beg for forgiveness from people like me, something I don’t expect to be forthcoming any time soon.

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told France’s Finance Minister Thierry Breton the United States has "lost control" of its budget deficit, the French minister said on Saturday.

I think the smart thing for the US state department to do today is build a game about Islam but make it a democracy. And set it up so that every 16-year-old from Morocco to Pakistan can go into that world when they get a computer. Not say anything overt about democracy but have them play -- have them vote, for example.

President Bush decided Wednesday to waive any financial sanctions on Saudi Arabia, Washington’s closest Arab ally in the war on terrorism, for failing to do enough to stop the modern-day slave trade in prostitutes, child sex workers and forced laborers. In June, the State Department listed 14 countries as failing to adequately address trafficking problems, subjecting them all to possible sanctions if they did not crack down. Of those 14, Bush concluded that Bolivia, Jamaica, Qatar, Sudan, Togo and the United Arab Emirates had made enough improvements to avoid any cut in U.S. aid or, in the case of countries that get no American financial assistance, the barring of their officials from cultural and educational events, said Darla Jordan, a State Department spokeswoman. Cambodia and Venezuela were not considered to have made similar adequate improvements. But Bush cleared them nonetheless to receive limited assistance, for such things as combatting trafficking. In the case of Venezuela _ which has had a tense relationship with the United States under the leadership of President Hugo Chavez, one of Latin America’s most outspoken critics of U.S. foreign policy _ Bush also allowed funding for strengthening the political party system and supporting electoral observation. In addition to Saudi Arabia, Ecuador and Kuwait _ another U.S. ally in the Middle East _ were given a complete pass on any sanctions, Jordan said. Despite periodic differences, oil-rich Saudi Arabia and the United States have a tight alliance built on economic and military cooperation. That left Myanmar, Cuba and North Korea as the only nations in the list of 14 barred completely from receiving certain kinds of foreign aid. The act does not include cutting off trade assistance or humanitarian aid, Jordan said. The White House statement offered no explanation of why countries were regarded differently. Jordan also could not provide one. As many as 800,000 people are bought and sold across national borders annually or lured to other countries with false promises of work or other benefits, according to the State Department. Most are women and children.

Only a handful of restaurants and bars in the Quarter have reopened in recent days, serving food and drinks -- usually without charge -- to rescue workers and military who stream through the mostly empty streets. The Deja Vu waived its cover charge, drinks were selling for $3 and a private dance was available for just $1. For Deja Vu manager Brent Ardeneaux, reopening was a public service.

Jessep: You want budget cuts?

Kaffee: I think I’m entitled to them.

Jessep: You want them?

Kaffee: I want the cuts!

Jessep: You can’t handle the cuts! Son, we live in a world that needs quasi-public goods. And those needs have to be funded by men in Congress. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for small government and you curse the ballooning deficit. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that big government, while tragic, probably enriched some lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, enriches some lives...You don’t want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want big government. You need big government.

Today we learned that the Authors Guild filed a lawsuit to try to stop Google Print. We regret that this group chose to sue us over a program that will make millions of books more discoverable to the world -- especially since any copyright holder can exclude their books from the program. What’s more, many of Google Print’s chief beneficiaries will be authors whose backlist, out of print and lightly marketed new titles will be suggested to countless readers who wouldn’t have found them otherwise.

Ice-T is to produce David Hasselhoff’s first hip-hop album. The pair are neighbours in Los Angeles and are said to have struck up a close friendship. Hasselhoff has had some success as a singer, releasing seven albums. He’s also said to be very popular in Germany. Ice-T, who was one of the first real hip-hop stars in the late 1980s, said: “The man is a legend. And we are going to show a whole new side of him.”

Americans should be proud of what its soldiers have achieved. The presence of foreign forces has prevented a renewed civil war in Iraq--renewed because there has already been a civil war in Iraq. For 35 years, Saddam and his Baath Party made war on the Iraqi people. The liberation of Iraq ended that civil war.

A team of scientists from universities in France and Brazil have developed a theory that explains the patterns of fine bubbles that arise in a freshly poured glass of champagne. The bubble patterns evolve as the amount of dissolved carbon dioxide changes in the glass. They start out as strings of tiny bubbles that rise in pairs, then gradually transistion to bubbles in groups of threes, and finally settle down in a clockwork pattern of regularly spaced individual bubbles. Although often observed, by scientists and champagne drinkers alike, the reason for the changing bubble patterns had never before been explained. The researchers observed the carbon dioxide bubbles in a champagne glass that form patterns as they rise from nucleation points on the glass wall. The nucleation points are small defects in the glass that trap tiny vibrating pockets of carbon dioxide. Dissolved gas in the champagne gradually collects in a vibrating pocket, causing it to grow and soon expel gas from the defect, forming a bubble that sticks to the outside of the defect. The bubble, in turn, grows as more dissolved carbon dioxide collects inside it and it eventually breaks free of the defect to rise through the champagne. Then the process begins again with a a new bubble. The patterns are determined by the vibration rate of the gas trapped in the defect and the growth rate of the bubbles outside the defect, which are in turn determined by such things as the pressure of the atmosphere on the surface of the champagne, the champagne temperature, and the size of the nucleation defect, among other factors.

The origins of copyright date back to seventeenth century England. Prior to the invention of the printing press in the late fifteenth century, the English royalty controlled information dissemination by punishing dissenting authors. After the arrival of the printing press, the locus of control shifted to the publishers, and royal declarations required printers to display their names, cities and dates of publication on each work. Several publishers banded together to form the Stationers Company, which in 1662 was given the exclusive right to practice the "mistery or art" of printing, in exchange for the obligation to publish only those works approved by Parliament. The Stationers were given the right to enforce their monopoly by burning the books and presses of any unauthorized competitors. In order to keep track of authorized works, the Stationers created a registration scheme which was a precursor to the system of copyright registration. The English censorship laws expired in 1694, and the Stationers lobbied for relief from the harsh competitive environment in which they found themselves.(...) It was not until 1891 that Congress passed an international copyright act. The arguments advanced for the act were virtually the same as those advanced in 1837. However, the intellectual climate was quite different. In 1837 the US had little to lose from copyright piracy. By 1891 it had a lot to gain from respecting international copyright, the chief benefit being the reciprocal rights granted by the British. On top of this was the growing pride in homegrown American literary culture and the recognition that American literature could only thrive if it competed with English literature on an equal footing. Although the issue was never framed in terms of "dumping" it was clear that American authors and publishers pushed to extend copyright to foreign authors in order to limit cheap foreign competition-such as Charles Dickens.

People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices.

Photographs from Nasa’s orbiting spacecraft Mars Global Surveyor show recently formed craters and gullies. The agency’s scientists also say that deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near the planet’s south pole have shrunk for three summers in a row. They say this is evidence to suggest climate change is in progress.

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe expressed his satisfaction over his official visit to Cuba which finished on Tuesday. Minutes before boarding the plane, President Mugabe told the press that his visit allowed an exchange of ideas with his comrade President Fidel Castro and expressed his gratitude for the Cuban medical personnel working in his country. After praising the work of almost 200 Cuban medical personnel in Zimbabwe, the African leader ratified his country’s solidarity with the island’s Revolution and its leaders and condemned Washington’s blockade against Cuba.

The fact is that the police fail the poor. Poor areas often suffer much more crime than richer ones, and the poor - especially blacks - are more likely to be harrassed by the police. The police would rather play games with drug dealers, attack demonstrators and protect politicians than serve the poor. There should, therefore, be more demand for radical reform. One possibility would be for the government to allocate police vouchers. People could then use these (possibly along with cash) to vote for their preferred suppliers of police services at a borough level. This would permit private firms to compete alongside the established police, or allow people to vote for the bundle of services they want from the existing police force. They could allocate x% of the budget to stopping graffiti, y% to catching drug-dealers and so on.

On your watch, we’ve lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four airliners, two Trade Centers, a piece of the Pentagon and the City of New Orleans...Maybe you’re just not lucky! I’m not saying you don’t love this country. I’m just wondering how much worse it could be if you were on the other side.

What kind of entrepreneurship depends on tax subsidies? With subsidies, I could be an entrepreneur. A subsidy to entrepreneurship means the government finances a business that can’t turn a market rate of profit. It’s paying someone to lose money. Hey, I could do that. Mr. President, over here!

The Sunni delegation represented a variety of views, but it was dominated by former members of the Baath Party. The group’s spokesman and de facto leader was a former Baath Party functionary, Saleh al-Mutlaq, who argued against nearly everything that was proposed, and did so in an aggressive way that offended the Kurds and Shiites and some of his fellow Sunnis. Also on his team were Saddam Hussein’s former translator and several other former Baathist functionaries, as well as representatives of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni religious party. The leaders of the Iraqi Islamic Party ended up supporting the new constitution, but their voices have been drowned out in the anti-Shiite, anti-Kurd rhetoric of the others.

By pandering to unelected former Baathists, the Bush administration made them appear as more authentic representatives of the Sunni Arabs than those Sunnis who had actually been elected, including Iraq’s Vice President Ghazi Yawher (from one the country’s largest Sunni Arab tribes) and the speaker of the National Assembly, Hajem Hassani. Although they were not part of the Sunni negotiating group, both were inclined to agree to a compromise, and Hassani, a liberal who had spent years in California, objected not to the provisions on federalism or de-Baathification but to the inadequate protection of the rights of women. By refusing to compromise, the Sunni Arabs selected by the US forced protracted delays that both emphasized the dominant American role in preparing the constitution and undermined its legitimacy in Iraq and internationally. Their fierce denunciation of the outcome has intensified Sunni Arab hostility to the draft.

The Bush administration also made other mistakes, some of which bordered on the bizarre. Although the administration would have to rely on the pro-Western Kurds to support US positions in the negotiations, US diplomats went out of their way to offend them. The US embassy office in Kirkuk was instructed to snub a Kurdistan government–hosted July 4 reception, unless the Kurds flew the Iraqi flag. The Kurds, who associate the flag with Iraqi genocide, canceled the reception. A few days later, the US embassy’s political counselor, in talking to the foreign press, denigrated Kurdistan’s constitutional proposals, comparing the Kurdish leaders to carpet sellers who set a high price with the intention of settling for much less.

we have seen the failure of what was already a “big push” of foreign aid to Africa. After 43 years and $568 billion (in 2003 dollars) in foreign aid to the continent, Africa remains trapped in economic stagnation. Moreover, after $568 billion, donor officials apparently still have not gotten around to furnishing those 12-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. (...) The eight Millennium Development Goals actually have 18 target indicators. The U.N. Millennium Project released a 3,751-page report in January 2005 listing the 449 intermediate steps necessary to meet those 18 final targets. Working for multiple bosses (or goals) doesn’t usually work out so well; the bosses each try to get you to work on their goal and not the other boss’s goal. Such employees get overworked, overwhelmed, and demoralized—not a bad description of today’s working-level staff at the World Bank and other aid agencies

Kijk, als je weet dat daar de gemiddelde leeftijd van de mensen 88,8 jaar is, dat de kindersterfte het laagste ligt van heel Zuid-Amerika, dan is dat omdat de geneeskunde daar gratis is. De beste studenten (dat kan je in België aan mensen van de VUB vragen) komen uit Cuba, omdat het onderwijs daar gratis is. Dat zijn twee zeer belangrijke dingen. [...] Het blijft in mijn ogen een soort ideale omstandigheid om als kind alle kansen te krijgen. Als ge dat kunt geven aan de bevolking - eigenlijk moet je dat gewoon geven, vrij onderwijs en vrije geneeskunde - dan pleit dat heel erg voor Cuba.

You take a look at the standard Human Development Indicator variables--GDP per capita, infant mortality, education--and you try to throw together an HDI for Cuba in the late 1950s, and you come out in the range of Japan, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Israel.

French Parliament released a harshly worded report blaming the deaths on a complex health system, widespread failure among agencies and health services to coordinate efforts, and chronically insufficient care for the elderly.

In 1970, British railway filed patent number GB1310990. What might it be, you ask... a new locomotive? A new signalling system? Maybe a new control computer. Nope. Wrong, wrong wrong. British Rail filed a patent for... sit down... a flying saucer. Powered by nuclear fusion no less.

While I have little faith in individual corporations, I have more faith in decentralized market processes. For example, although I have no admiration for any oil company in particular, I believe that we will never run out of oil. I trust markets in the aggregate to send the right price signals to encourage development of alternative energy sources. We do not need the Intelligent Design of a government energy policy to achieve that objective.

creationism: n.

The (false) belief that large, innovative software designs can be completely specified in advance and then painlessly magicked out of the void by the normal efforts of a team of normally talented programmers. In fact, experience has shown repeatedly that good designs arise only from evolutionary, exploratory interaction between one (or at most a small handful of) exceptionally able designer(s) and an active user population — and that the first try at a big new idea is always wrong. Unfortunately, because these truths don’t fit the planning models beloved of management, they are generally ignored.

The single best statistic for judging the health of an economy is what’s known as multifactor productivity (MFP). (I wrote about it here). MFP measures how efficiently an economy uses all of its physical, human, and technological assets. To put it another way, rising MFP is like free money--you get added output without having to invest more. An economy with fast-growing MFP will over the long-run always beat one with low-growth MFP. I didn’t see it at the time, but in June the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued early estimates of MFP for 2003 and 2004--and the results were spectacular. According to their numbers, MFP growth was 3.1% in 2003 and 3.3% in 2004. To put these results in perspective, this was the first time MFP growth had topped 3% since 1976. And it was the first time since the mid-sixties that the U.S. had had two straight years of plus 3% MFP growth. If MFP keeps rising at this rate--if Americans keep finding ways to work smarter and to advantage of new technology--then the trade and budget deficits are fairly irrelevant.

The profound flaws in our officially calculated poverty rate are revealed by its very intimation that the poverty situation in America was "better" in 1974 than it is today. Those of us of a certain age remember the year 1974 - in all its recession-plagued, "stagflation"-burdened glory. But even the most basic facts bearing on poverty alleviation confute the proposition that material circumstances in America are harsher for the vulnerable today than three decades ago. Per capita income adjusted for inflation is over 60 percent higher today than in 1974. The unemployment rate is lower, and the percentage of adults with paying jobs is distinctly higher. Thirty years ago, the proportion of adults without a high school diploma was more than twice as high as today (39 percent versus 16 percent). And antipoverty spending is vastly higher today than in 1974, even after inflation adjustments. In the face of such evidence, what do you call an indicator that stubbornly insists that the percentage of Americans below a fixed poverty threshold has increased? How about "a broken compass?" The soundings from the poverty rate are further belied by information on actual living standards for low-income Americans. In 1972-73, for example, just 42 percent of the bottom fifth of American households owned a car; in 2003, almost three-quarters of "poverty households" had one. By 2001, only 6 percent of "poverty households" lived in "crowded" homes (more than one person per room) - down from 26 percent in 1970. By 2003, the fraction of poverty households with central air-conditioning (45 percent) was much higher than the 1980 level for the non-poor (29 percent). Besides these living trends, there are what we might call the "dying trends": that is to say, America’s health and mortality patterns. All strata of America - including the disadvantaged - are markedly healthier today than three decades ago. Though the officially calculated poverty rate for children was higher in 2004 than 1974 (17.8 percent versus 15.4 percent), the infant mortality rate - that most telling measure of wellbeing - fell by almost three-fifths over those same years, to 6.7 per 1,000 births from 16.7 per 1,000.

anyone who walked into a polling place on Wednesday was virtually certain to witness what was at the root of the complaints: the National Democratic Party had its supporters positioned all around polling stations, chanting slogans, photographing voters, in many cases intimidating anyone considering voting against Mubarak. Even government officials acknowledged that by the end of the day, poll workers eager to pump up Mubarak’s numbers were letting people vote at some stations even if they were not registered. While the tactics were far milder than in years past, when voters were beaten and security forces used for intimidation, they led many people to dismiss the validity of the count.

Het liberalisme van de Angelsaksische wereld is helemaal gebaseerd op laissez-faire. Dat merk je duidelijk in de nasleep van Katrina. Je moet een kat een kat durven te noemen: Katrina is een dramatisch voorbeeld van de gevolgen van het Amerikaanse ultraliberalisme. In de VS is er geen staat meer, geen openbare structuren om je reddingsoperatie in te passen. Zo hebben ze duizenden mensen laten sterven. Bij zo’n ramp kan zelfs het machtigste land in de wereld geen degelijke reddingsactie op gang brengen. Dát is liberalisme, en dat kan ik onmogelijk verdedigen. Ik wil een samenleving die op solidariteit is gebaseerd, waar individuen werk hebben en een zekere koopkracht, waardoor ze vrij zijn in hun bestaan en autonoom. Dat is het grote verschil tussen de socialisten en de liberalen.

On Friday, I took the oath and became an American citizen. I can’t claim to be escaping an authoritarian regime or hopeless poverty. Indeed, the security guard at the INS saw my passport and said "What you doing here? Why you want to be American? Free medical care, free welfare. I want to be Canadian." So why did I make the leap? There are plenty of pragmatic reasons. I have a home here, a job, a life. The United States has been good to me. But the deciding factor in my choice was emotional. Four years ago when I awoke to the devastation, I felt that my country had been attacked. And if that is how you feel then what more needs to be said?

After giving a litany of Katrina-related institutional failures at the local, state, and Federal level, (DeLong) concludes (:) we should be surprised. Fema is a bureaucracy. A bureaucracy is designed to keep functioning even when it is headed by a man who was suddenly told by his private-sector bosses to find a new job and whose only qualification is that he is the friend of a friend of the president. In other words, government at all levels would function perfectly, except that George Bush is President. With all due respect to DeLong, his views of the bureaucratic process and the role of administration strike me as stunningly childish. He describes a bureaucracy as a well-tuned engine ready to respond to the Presidential throttle. Only someone who has little or no experience working within a large, interdependent organization (a university is large, but professors are fairly autonomous) could have such a naive picture. If I had DeLong’s simplistic view of organizational behavior, then I probably would share his instincts to enlarge the public sector. Instead, as an empirical matter I believe that we will never any organization, public or private, that operates along the well-tuned engine model. In fact, the private sector has mechanisms in place to winnow out the worst-tuned bureaucratic engines. Such mechanisms operate less effectively in government. DeLong and I will tend to disagree on issues as long as he believes that the natural state of government programs is high effectiveness and as long as I believe that their natural state is SNAFU.

Music fans are giving up buying CDs in favour of downloading music, according to download service Napster’s UK arm. Some 150,000 of Napster UK’s 750,000 members say they no longer buy CDs, the company has revealed. And Napster UK manager Leanne Sharman said it was "a matter of time" before downloading overtook high street shops as the most popular way to buy music.

More than 13 million songs have been legally downloaded in the UK so far this year - compared with virtually zero in 2003. In June, market leader Apple revealed that more than 50 million tracks were bought in the first year of its European iTunes service, across 17 countries. Apple says it has sold more than 500 million songs worldwide in total. Napster president Brad Duea recently told the BBC News website the online music industry would become an "exploding multi-billion dollar space in the next two years".

While state and federal officials have come under harsh criticism for their handling of the storm’s aftermath, Wal-Mart is being held up as a model for logistical efficiency and nimble disaster planning, which have allowed it to quickly deliver staples such as water, fuel and toilet paper to thousands of evacuees. In Brookhaven, Miss., for example, where Wal-Mart operates a vast distribution center, the company had 45 trucks full of goods loaded and ready for delivery before Katrina made landfall. To keep operating near capacity, Wal-Mart secured a special line at a nearby gas station to ensure that its employees could make it to work. Wal-Mart has much to gain though its conspicuous largesse -- it has hundreds of stores in Gulf Coast states and an image problem across the country -- but even those who have criticized the company in the past are impressed.

1. De vraag naar arbeid is meer elastisch indien de substitutie tussen arbeid en kapitaal makkelijker is. Dit hangt nauw samen met de productietechnologie. Indien het gemakkelijk is om arbeid te vervangen door machines, dan zal een verhoging van de loonkost aanleiding geven tot meer uitstoot van arbeid, die dan door machines worden vervangen.
2. De vraag naar arbeid is meer elastisch indien de vraag naar de finale output elastischer is. Dit heeft te maken met prijszetting (en regulering) op de outputmarkt. Indien men in een concurrentiële afzetmarkt opereert, zal een verhoging van de loonkost leiden tot een verhoging van de outputprijs. Dit vermindert de vraag naar producten en bijgevolg kan er minder worden verkocht, wat een negatief effect heeft op de tewerkstelling. Deze effecten zijn kleiner in markten die meer beschermd zijn van concurrentie.
3. De vraag naar arbeid is meer elastisch indien het aandeel van de arbeidskosten in de totale kosten groter is. Dit zal, uiteraard, vooral het geval zijn bij arbeidsintensieve sectoren. Indien dan de loonkosten stijgen, dient de prijs van het verkochte product of dienst ook te stijgen wat een daling van de finale vraag tot gevolg heeft en dus een daling van de vraag naar werknemers.
4. De vraag naar arbeid is meer elastisch indien de aanbodelasticiteit van de andere productiefactoren zoals kapitaal groter is. Indien de loonkosten stijgen en werkgevers arbeid wensen te vervangen door machines, zal dit moeilijker gaan indien machines snel duurder worden ten gevolge van de hogere vraag naar machines (dit komt overeen met een lage aanbodelasticiteit van machines). Als gevolg daarvan verloopt de substitutie trager en zal dus de vraag naar arbeid minder elastisch zijn.

What caused that paralysis? President Bush certainly failed his test. After 9/11, all the country really needed from him was a speech. This time it needed action - and he didn’t deliver. But the federal government’s lethal ineptitude wasn’t just a consequence of Mr. Bush’s personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn’t forthcoming?

Jonathan Kozol has spent a good deal of his life writing eloquently and passionately about children and the sad state of education in America. The depths of his passion and caring are to be admired and applauded. The tragedy is that his eloquence has often been put to ill use attacking the one reform that would really help - private schools and school choice. Kozol’s good intentions, therefore, earn him no free pass from me. In a recent interview he said: [Private schools] starve the public school system of the presence of well-educated, politically effective parents to fight for equity for all kids. Kozol’s argument can be summed up thusly: Letting people escape over the Berlin Wall starves the East German system of the presence of well-educated, politically effective people to fight for the equity of all East Germans. Barricading parents into the poor schools their government offers them is like barricading people into communist East Germany. People, even well-educated, politically effective people, should not be used as tools to further some social engineering scheme. But is the argument even true? Kozol, draws on Hirschman’s great book Exit, Voice and Loyalty, but like many who read that book he shows no sign of understanding any of its subtleties. Yes, exit and voice can be substitutes and reducing exit may increase voice. But more often than not, voice and exits are complements. When you complain of delay where is your voice more likely to be heard; at a restaurant or at the department of motor vehicles? It’s the threat of exit that makes people listen. Moreover, shutting down exit does not guarantee that voice will arise. The people whose children are stuck in the worst-performing schools have neither voice nor exit - they are like the people of New Orleans who did not have the means to escape nor the political power to compel help from others. Finally, we go to the data. Kozol’s argument implies that places with more exit should have worse public schools. But in fact a large body of research shows that the opposite is true. Places with more choice - whether that choice comes from private schools, charter schools, or even choice among public schools - have better schools. Exit and the threat of exit makes educators listen. But will Kozol listen? Sadly, I think not because his fundamental opposition to vouchers is not economic but aesthetic. He says: Vouchers elevate the lowest instincts of humanity over the most beautiful instincts. Need I quote Adam Smith in response?

the typical $6000 voucher where the lowest cost students exit and the highest cost students remain in public schools is just a scheme to detroy the public schools. Alex Tabarrok should know that. And he probably does and is just shilling for mass-murderers like W. "Milosevic" Bush.

Als het tegen Bush / Israel is, dan is het oprechte verontwaardiging en een uiting van een ongenoegen dat getuigt van maatschappelijke betrokkenheid en moed, enkel gegeven aan de sterke voorvechters van de ware volksdemocratie. Als het tegen vadertje staat / Europa is dan ben je een asociale verzuurde blokker met oogkleppen, het soort dat te dom is om een lezersbrief te mogen schrijven.

This paper quantifies the macroeconomic and distributional implications of an array of flat tax reforms for Spain. A standard general equilibrium economy with heterogeneous agents is used to infer the behavioral parameters of individuals and to evaluate the impact of the tax reforms. We find that a revenue neutral reform with a marginal tax equal to 17.42% and a fixed deduction equal to 15% of per capita income will yield increases in aggregate consumption and labor productivity equal to 7.6% and 2.5% respectively. Admittedly, this type of reforms also generate increases in the gini indices of after tax income and consumption. However, a revenue neutral flat tax reform with a marginal tax equal to 23.37% and a fixed deduction equal to 35% still displays aggregate gains and has the good property that people in the lowest quintile of wage distribution pay lower taxes and enjoy higher consumption than under the current income tax.

Why do Democrat errors more frequently get framed as failures of will or morality, rather than ignorance, vice versa for current Republican errors?

Think of an area the size of Great Britain devastated by a natural disaster. Add a federal system of government that guards state rights and limits the ability of the federal government and the joint military to intervene. Add the fact that most of the state administration is from a different political party to the federal administration and they treat each other accordingly; with suspicion and in some cases hostility. Into the whole horrible mix throw a media intent on apportioning blame in one direction only-- towards the federal administration, a populace who are needing help but stuck in a place where is it difficult to get aid in because the roads and bridges that are left cannot bear the weight of most big trucks and therefore needs the aid to be offloaded onto smaller trucks or helicopters (who cannot land in many places either due to the built up area).

Some points:

President Bush appealed directly by phone to the state governor to evacuate New Orleans before the hurricane hit and it was not until he did that things got moving. Bush did something unprecedented with this disaster in declaring a Federal State of Emergency in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana before Katrina even landed. But President Bush does not have the power to order a US city to evacuate unless he declares martial law for every single state in the United States.

The state government failed in many ways to plan and then implement a plan resulting in hundreds of buses becoming flooded and large groups of people becoming cut off as they remained behind despite being told to leave.

I saw a lot of ambulances, police cars, and fire equipment flooded in the Katrina footage. It will be interesting to see what the New Orleans preplanning was, since their director of emergency response is all over the TV blaming Bush.

It’s up to local and state people to tell the feds what they need and to run the emergency command centers, not just throw their arms up in the air and start blaming everyone else.

The media and some opposition politicians claim that funding was cut to protective walls but forget to mention these cuts were made by the previous administration lead by President Clinton. The Corps of Engineers say that there were no cuts and that in any event all their walls were suitable for a Cat 3 storm not a once in a lifetime Cat 5 like Katrina was. The main failure occurred at an upgraded section.

President Clinton himself has gone on TV saying that the current administration and President Bush are doing a good job-- as well as can be expected under the circumstances.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin declared a state of emergency on Sunday and ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city as Hurricane Katrina churned toward the city with maximum sustained winds of nearly 175 mph. (...) Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said that President Bush had called and urged the state to order the evacuation.

It is an old chestnut—a car that drives itself—but General Motors, the world’s largest car manufacturer, has become the latest company to claim to be building one. The car uses updated technology combined with several existing innovations and, according to the manufacturer, could be in production by 2008. But, while the technology takes some of the boring bits out of driving, it falls far short of an automatic taxi service and, anyway, various legal, technical and social barriers to its introduction remain. The latest prototype currently being tested is based on an Opel Vectra, a mid-sized family car. It is undergoing evaluation near the headquarters of Adam Opel, General Motors" European subsidiary in Rüsselsheim, Germany.

I was born in New Orleans and raised in its close-in suburbs. I lived there until 1980, when I moved to New York City for graduate school. My parents, most of my siblings, and many of my nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends still live either in New Orleans proper or in its greater metro area.

I have purposely avoided blogging about the catastrophe in my home town, partly because I find myself unexpectedly emotional about it and partly because my mind now is swirling with too many disconnected thoughts and uncertainties.

But here are some reactions that I find myself having again and again as I encounter reports on this disaster. I offer these in no particular order.

First. While it’s true that New Orleans sits below sea level, and the Mississippi River’s natural flow has been replaced by a human-directed flow, these facts alone do not mean that New Orleans should not exist where it exists. The Netherlands, to pick one example, is one of the many other places that exist only because of human ingenuity at holding back the sea and replacing nature’s boundaries with man-made ones.

The long-standing existence of The Netherlands and other such places, of course, doesn’t prove the wisdom of having a major population center squeezed between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River – but it does mean that New Orleans’s significant reliance upon levees, spillways, and other feats of earth movement and hydraulic engineering is not necessarily a curse condemning New Orleans to tragedy.

Second. Virtually all useful help – from search and rescue to rebuilding – will come from decentralized sources. No governor, no beltway bureaucrat, and certainly no U.S. President, has sufficient knowledge of what must be done and how best to do it. It’s a fantasy to suppose that Washington can ‘save’ or even give much help to New Orleanians today. The vast majority of good and even great deeds will be performed by individuals, with no direction from DC or from any government agency. Individuals each in his or her own unique circumstances, each knowing of unique problems and opportunities, are the ones who will save lives, help re-unite families, and assist in rebuilding homes and infrastructure.

Third. Time and again, the mantra is that government’s core duty is to supply law and order. Well, it’s not doing so in New Orleans. There is little law there today.

Fourth, the government’s plan for protecting people from Katrina – first putting them in the Superdome, then in the New Orleans Convention Center – seems, admittedly in retrospect, to have been grotesquely ill-advised (to put it mildly). People were herded into these places that are utterly inadequate to handle refugees. Then these people were abandoned there. Where were – where are – the great and good government officials, the public servants, dedicated to protecting people from each other and from the elements in such times of grave emergency? They’ve failed. Why?

I understand that the devastation spread by Katrina makes even the most ordinary daily tasks difficult or even impossible to do. There may be good, if regrettable, reasons for why FEMA is taking so long to get water and food to the refugees, and for why there’s too little police presence in the Convention Center. Maybe. But damn it, isn’t it time people reject as a cruel hoax the notion that government possesses superhuman powers and is motivated by angelic intentions? That it can do things that non-political institutions cannot do?

Who can still believe that, when the chips are down and there’s no one left to count on, people can count on their government for basic help?

Katrina, in addition to stripping my hometown of life, unmasked the pretenses of government as savior.

While bearing the brunt of prohibition-related violence, most Colombians have not benefited much from black market profits. The U.N. estimates that the drug trade may account for as little as 1 percent of the country’s GDP, placing it below oil. The product itself is cheap until it arrives in the U.S.; most of the profits are made outside of Colombia.

Venezuelans don’t seem to share their leader’s vitriolic hatred of the United States. A Pew Global Attitude Survey found that Venezuelan attitudes toward the U.S. and its market system were among the most positive in the world—far more so than in, say, Western Europe. That may be why Eliézer Otaiza, who heads Venezuela’s land reform program, explained in a recent interview that it was necessary to foment hatred of the United States in preparation for "war" with the hegemon to the north. Chávez clearly hopes to use conflict with the U.S. to rally support for himself as an alternative power center—both within Venezuela and throughout Latin America.

Although acreage devoted to opium poppies in Afghanistan supposedly has been reduced by one-fifth, production remains virtually unchanged, and the country is still estimated to supply 87 percent of the world’s heroin. (As Toby Muse reported in the June issue of Reason, something similar is happening in Colombia, where a crackdown on coca cultivation seems to have spurred improvements in productivity.)

Back in the mid-1980s the Internet was the sole province of universities and government institutions. Private individuals who just wanted to send e-mail over the Internet would have had a hard time doing so. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t vibrant computer networks. In fact there were tens of thousands of Bulletin Board Systems around the country that were relatively cheap to join and offered e-mail, files, discussion forums and a whole host of things that are now largely on the web; although some remnants of this BBS culture still exist. The main problem with the BBS system was a lack of standards for interconnection. As the 1990s approached and computers became more powerful and modems supported more bandwidth there were several competing proposals for graphical interconnection standards, but those were wiped out by the Internet tsunami. It is interesting, given [Barbara] Ehrenreich’s view that the Internet was an innovation made possible by the government, that prior to the early 1990s almost nobody outside of governments and universities had home access to the Internet while several million had logged on to a BBS at one point or another. What caused the change? Something Ehrenreich and her left/liberal friends usually fight tooth and nail -- privatization. The floodgates of the Internet came open only after key resources became privatized and companies and individuals could operate on the Internet. For much of its existence, commercial activity on the Internet had been forbidden. The removal of that barrier is primarily responsible for the Internet we have today, where both anarchists and Abercrombie and Fitch use the web to broadcast their respective messages. The Internet, in fact, reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government. Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished with almost no added benefit other than to the military and academia. In less than a decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological revolutions of the millennia.

the Kurds firmly believe that four core principles cannot be surrendered: federalism, equal rights for women, freedom of individual conscience, and justice for the victims of Baathism

It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.

For anyone with eyes to see, there was only one other state that combined the latent and the blatant definitions of both "rogue" and "failed." This state--Saddam’s ruined and tortured and collapsing Iraq--had also met all the conditions under which a country may be deemed to have sacrificed its own legal sovereignty. To recapitulate: It had invaded its neighbors, committed genocide on its own soil, harbored and nurtured international thugs and killers, and flouted every provision of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center attack in 1993, subsequently sought and found refuge in Baghdad; (...) Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, Saddam’s senior physicist, was able to lead American soldiers to nuclear centrifuge parts and a blueprint for a complete centrifuge (the crown jewel of nuclear physics) buried on the orders of Qusay Hussein; that Saddam’s agents were in Damascus as late as February 2003, negotiating to purchase missiles off the shelf from North Korea; (...)Rolf Ekeus, the great Swedish socialist who founded the inspection process in Iraq after 1991, has told me for the record that he was offered a $2 million bribe in a face-to-face meeting with Tariq Aziz. And these eye-catching examples would by no means exhaust my repertoire, or empty my quiver. Yes, it must be admitted that Bush and Blair made a hash of a good case, largely because they preferred to scare people rather than enlighten them or reason with them. Still, the only real strategy of deception has come from those who believe, or pretend, that Saddam Hussein was no problem.

But a positive accounting could be offered without braggartry, and would include:

(1) The overthrow of Talibanism and Baathism, and the exposure of many highly suggestive links between the two elements of this Hitler-Stalin pact. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who moved from Afghanistan to Iraq before the coalition intervention, has even gone to the trouble of naming his organization al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

(2) The subsequent capitulation of Qaddafi’s Libya in point of weapons of mass destruction--a capitulation that was offered not to Kofi Annan or the E.U. but to Blair and Bush.

(3) The consequent unmasking of the A.Q. Khan network for the illicit transfer of nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea.

(4) The agreement by the United Nations that its own reform is necessary and overdue, and the unmasking of a quasi-criminal network within its elite.

(5) The craven admission by President Chirac and Chancellor Schröder, when confronted with irrefutable evidence of cheating and concealment, respecting solemn treaties, on the part of Iran, that not even this will alter their commitment to neutralism. (One had already suspected as much in the Iraqi case.)

(6) The ability to certify Iraq as actually disarmed, rather than accept the word of a psychopathic autocrat.

(7) The immense gains made by the largest stateless minority in the region--the Kurds--and the spread of this example to other states.

(8) The related encouragement of democratic and civil society movements in Egypt, Syria, and most notably Lebanon, which has regained a version of its autonomy.

(9) The violent and ignominious death of thousands of bin Ladenist infiltrators into Iraq and Afghanistan, and the real prospect of greatly enlarging this number.

(10) The training and hardening of many thousands of American servicemen and women in a battle against the forces of nihilism and absolutism, which training and hardening will surely be of great use in future combat.

If the great effort to remake Iraq as a demilitarized federal and secular democracy should fail or be defeated, I shall lose sleep for the rest of my life in reproaching myself for doing too little. But at least I shall have the comfort of not having offered, so far as I can recall, any word or deed that contributed to a defeat.

(W)hat would an economy look like with its manufacturing "hollowed out"? It’d look like my street, that’s what. Almost no-one in Belsize Park Gardens, to my knowledge, works in manufacturing. And there are loads of service industries where no-one’s employed either - and certainly, no agricultural jobs (though some do grow their own herbs). This isn’t jsut true of my street. It’s true of most of the area. The people round my way work pretty much in just two industries: entertainment/meeja and financial services. And are we poor? No. Sure, we have problems with single parents and drug users. But we’re pretty rich, despite a catastrophic hollowing out of manufacturing, and despite the fact that almost all the food and clothing we buy is imported, sometimes from as far away as Camden Town. What, then, is the difference between my area and a country that makes hollowing out a problem in the latter but not in the former? It’s certainly not that only a few people have the brains to work in the meeja or banking whereas a whole nation cannot. Such a view misunderstands both these industries and the nature of comparative advantage. (...) People - countries if you must - merely specialize in what they are relatively least bad at. Even if China were to become absolutely better than us at producing everything, we could still earn a living by specializing in what we were less bad than them at producing. Think of it this way. I am a worse economics writer than Larry Elliott. But I can make a living by specializing in a field - financial writing - where my inferiority to him is smaller. So, here’s my question. If I, and my neighbours, can do OK without manufacturing or agriculture, why can’t larger geographical units? I suspect this is one of many ways in which thinking about countries rather than people merely clouds our judgment.

"Debt relief is a very complicated subject, and there is a lot of mythology out there about canceling debt," said Dr. William Easterly, a New York University economics professor and former World Bank senior advisor. "You have to face reality. If debt cancellation and relief has not brought that much in the way of benefits over the last 20 years, why do we expect it to today?" According to Easterly, the G7 — which became the G8 in 1997 with the addition of Russia — has been canceling increasingly larger chunks of debt for almost 20 years. Recently, nearly $40 billion of debt has been canceled for 18 impoverished countries — 14 of which are in Africa — and up to 28 more are expected to have their debts completely wiped out over the next four years (see "Bush, Blair Lead Up To G8 — And Live 8 — With Commitment To Aid Africa"). Yet that still leaves some $260 billion owed by 40 other countries. Another concern with foreign aid is that it could fall into the wrong hands. Most indebted African countries are helmed by brutal dictators and oppressive regimes. Former dictators Mengistu Haile Mariam (Ethopia) and Mobutu Sese Suko (Zaire) were given billions of dollars in aid during the Cold War, but much of that money ended up lining their pockets rather than feeding their people. "The sad reality is that Africa has not had very good governments. There’s been a lot of corruption, and they’re just not very effective at getting good things to the people," Easterly said. "The money didn’t go to build clinics or schools or roads or hospitals, [it] went into Swiss bank accounts to build houses on the Riviera for these rulers," said Salih Booker, executive director of Africa Action, a nonprofit U.S. organization that promotes political and economic justice in Africa. Another pitfall of monetary aid is the means by which it is distributed. Most aid money is distributed through international establishments like the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Easterly says are "arcane bureaucracies that don’t function very well on the ground."

From 1999 through 2004, the number of mobile subscribers in Africa jumped to 76.8 million, from 7.5 million, an average annual increase of 58 percent. South Africa, the continent’s richest nation, accounted for one-fifth of that growth. Asia, the next fastest-expanding market, grew by an annual average of just 34 percent in that period.

Africans have never been rabid telephone users; even Mongolians have twice as many land lines per person. And with most Africans living on $2 a day or less, they were supposed to be too poor to justify corporate investments in cellular networks far outside the more prosperous cities and towns. But when African nations began to privatize their telephone monopolies in the mid-1990’s, and fiercely competitive operators began to sell air time in smaller, cheaper units, cellphone use exploded. Used handsets are available for $50 or less in South Africa, an amount even Ms. Skhakhane’s husband was able to finance with the little he saves from his factory job. It turned out that Africans had never been big phone users because nobody had given them the chance. One in 11 Africans is now a mobile subscriber. (...) Villagers in the two jungle provinces of Congo are so eager for service that they have built 50-foot-high treehouses to catch signals from distant cellphone towers.

In Yanguye, as in other regions, the solution is often a car battery owned by someone who does not have a prayer of acquiring a car. Ntombenhle Nsele keeps one in her home a few miles down the road from Ms. Skhakhane’s. She takes it by bus 20 miles to the nearest town to recharge it in a gas station.

Do these various initiatives indicate that Google is getting ready to take over the world? So far the company has relied on providing free, sometimes cheap and cheerful but always effective products to build its userbase, avoiding strong-arm tactics like proprietary lock-in. Competitive suppliers may have to pull their socks up, but the rest of us can probably relax. One indication of Google’s unthreatening and laid-back approach is that you can read the knocking copy about Google Talk, and the “new Great Satan” scare stories, simply by typing “Google” into Google News. “Take it or leave it” continues to be the essence of the Google proposition.

A US TV evangelist has apologised for calling for US special forces to kill Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Pat Robertson conceded that comments made on his widely-watched TV show amounted to a call for assassination.

Saudi journalist says terror groups should be treated as Nazis, total war should be declared on extremist Islamic Ideology

"The Bush administration finally did something right in brokering this constitution," Galbraith exclaimed, then added: "This is the only possible deal that can bring stability. ... I do believe it might save the country." Galbraith’s argument is that the constitution reflects the reality of the nation it is meant to serve. There is, he says, no meaningful Iraqi identity. In the north, you’ve got a pro-Western Kurdish population. In the south, you’ve got a Shiite majority that wants a "pale version of an Iranian state." And in the center you’ve got a Sunni population that is nervous about being trapped in a system in which it would be overrun. In the last election each group expressed its authentic identity, the Kurds by voting for autonomy-minded leaders, the Shiites for clerical parties and the Sunnis by not voting. This constitution gives each group what it wants. It will create a very loose federation in which only things like fiscal and foreign policy are controlled in the center (even tax policy is decentralized). Oil revenues are supposed to be distributed on a per capita basis, and no group will feel inordinately oppressed by the others. The Kurds and Shiites understand what a good deal this is. The Sunni leaders selected to attend the convention are howling because they are former Baathists who dream of a return to centralized power. But ordinary Sunnis, Galbraith says, will come to realize this deal protects them, too.

It’s crazy, he says, to think that you could have an Iraqi constitution in which clerical authorities are not assigned a significant role. Voters supported clerical parties because they are, right now, the natural leaders of society and serve important social functions. But this doesn’t mean we have to start screaming about a 13th-century theocratic state. Understanding the clerics, Gerecht has argued, means understanding two things. First, the Shiite clerical establishment has made a substantial intellectual leap. It now firmly believes in one person one vote, and rejects the Iranian model. On the other hand, these folks don’t think like us.

Ninety-seven per cent of all water distribution in poor countries is managed by the public sector, which is largely responsible for more than a billion people being without water… In poor countries with private investments in the water sector, more people have access to water than in those without such investments. Moreover, there are many examples of local businesses improving water distribution. Superior competence, better incentives and better access to capital for investment have allowed private distributors to enhance both the quality of the water and the scope of its distribution.

Yesterday on CBS’s Early Show, senior presidential advisor Dan Bartlett took the "opportunity to clarify what President Bush is saying" about the war on terrorism:

BARTLETT: Not only after 9/11 do we have to go after Osama bin Laden and the people who perpetrated the act on 9/11, but also we had to change our policy in the Middle East. The policies of stability in tolerating dictatorships got us 9/11 in the first place. The status quo has to change.

(CROSSTALK)

SMITH: So you’re talking about Saudi Arabia then?

BARTLETT: Absolutely.

Much European health comes from diet, walking, and tighter social networks of friends. Don’t expect European healthcare policies to produce the same level of well-being in the United States.

The U.S. health care system probably is the world’s best for some class of people, namely the well-off and I don’t mean just the super-rich. Trying to extend those benefits -- however this might be accomplished -- is a better approach than nationalizing the sector.

James Annan, a climate scientist, has been trying to get skeptics of global warming to put up or shut up, mostly with no success on either front. A number of prominent skeptics refused to bet (perhaps having learnt from Paul Ehrlich’s embarassment) or offered to bet only at very high odds in their favor (i.e. implicitly admitting that they thought the probability of global warming was high). The failure to bet is telling and a nice reminder that even markets with no trades can tell you things of importance!

Finally, however, Annan has found some takers. From Nature (subs. required):

James Annan, who is based at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokohama, has agreed a US$10,000 bet with Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev, two solar physicists who argue that global temperatures are driven by changes in the Sun’s activity and will fall over the next decade. The bet, which both sides say they are willing to formalize in a legal document, came after other climate sceptics refused to wager money...

Both sides have agreed to compare the average global surface temperature between 1998 and 2003 with that between 2012 and 2017, as defined by the records of the US National Climatic Data Center. If the temperature drops, Annan will pay Mashnich and Bashkirtsev $10,000 in 2018, with the same sum going the other way if the temperature rises.

if combined with a citizens basic income - which would be the personal allowance for tax-payers - would a flat tax necessarily be less egalitarian than our current tax system (which isn’t that egalitarian anyway)? Could we increase equality with a flat tax by cutting goverment spending (...) and raising the basic income? Should egalitarians therefore really be opposed to a flat tax?

Historic Mecca, the cradle of Islam, is being buried in an unprecedented onslaught by religious zealots. Almost all of the rich and multi-layered history of the holy city is gone. The Washington-based Gulf Institute estimates that 95 per cent of millennium-old buildings have been demolished in the past two decades. Now the actual birthplace of the Prophet Mohamed is facing the bulldozers, with the connivance of Saudi religious authorities whose hardline interpretation of Islam is compelling them to wipe out their own heritage.

In the 1970s and the 1980s, the United States secured its interest in oil without stationing a single combat soldier on the Arabian Peninsula. Instead, we formed an alliance with Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which we can now do again. We relied on numerous aircraft carriers off the coast of the Arabian Peninsula, and naval air power now is more effective not less. We also built numerous military bases so that we could move large numbers of ground forces to the region quickly if a crisis emerged. That strategy, called “offshore balancing,” worked splendidly against Saddam Hussein in 1990 and is again our best strategy to secure our interest in oil while preventing the rise of more suicide terrorists.

Last I heard, Bangladesh was a free and overwhelmingly Muslim country, but that shouldn’t prove much of a problem to the usual suspects: it certainly hasn’t proven to be an obstacle to their blaming Bush and Blair for terrorizing their fellow Muslims. It all makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? What better way could there be to get the Bushitler Zionist neocon lackeys out of Muslim countries? The minds of Islamic terrorists and their apologists work in mysterious ways - next thing you know, some jihadist will be attacking Mecca to teach the US a lesson ...

The new approach for democratising the wealth of nations is based on four novel ways in which people may acquire wealth. All four methods have a number of common features and they all reduce, in various ways, the manifold inequities and inefficiencies of conventional capitalism. The four capitalistic innovations in the way that people can own and control things are:
1. Employee Share Ownership Plan (ESOP). The logic of business cash-flow financing is used to allow directors, managers and other employees to acquire part-ownership in the growth of their enterprise.
2. Ownership Transfer Corporation (OTC). Corporate employees can be remunerated with part-ownership of the enterprise, according to their contribution to new values.
3. Land Bank (community-owned land or town co-operative). New wealth created in land values of the community can be shared by all residents in the region, according to their contribution to its creation.
4. Producer-Consumer Co-operative (PCC). Wealth created from the ownership of depletable natural resources can be pooled and so shared with the wealth created by regenerative consumer enterprises.
The novel methods for distributing new wealth create a capitalistic alternative for achieving some of the more idealistic objectives of Karl Marx.
(a) The introduction of change into society on a continuous basis but without revolution.
(b) The democratising of industry but avoiding the transitory phase of State ownership.
c. The withering away of the State but by natural attrition, not anarchy.

Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!

Less than a year after the Cuban revolution, one of its original leaders was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Although Comandante Huber Matos had supplied weapons for the revolutionary forces and had triumphantly rode alongside Fidel Castro as the rebels victoriously entered Havana, 10 months later he would be labeled as a traitor. His crime? Refusing to be part of a government that had turned its back on democracy. For this, Ernesto “Che” Guevara wanted him killed, or better put: sent to el Paredón, “the wall” for execution by firing squad. Castro eventually spared Matos’ life, fearing a death sentence would make him a martyr. Ask yourself, should a man that openly favored the murder of someone who spoke out for democracy really be the poster child for justice in the world? And Matos is not alone in this experience. Eusebio Penalver and Chanes De Armas are but two more that fought against Batista, only to be turned upon by Che and Castro when they publicly voiced concern over the new government’s consolidation of power. Hardly the leadership one would expect from such an idol. In addition to this, Guevara personally shot a young man under his command for the crime of stealing food in order to set an example for the rest of his subordinates, he founded the Cuban labor camps thus setting up a system that would be a means to terrorize “enemies of the revolution” (i.e. political dissidents, homosexuals, AIDS victims), and by his own account ordered over two thousand executions while in charge of La Cabaña prison and other posts. Again and again he proved that human life posed no obstacle in reaching his goal of creating a “new man”.

By continuing to enforce these restrictions on travel and trade, the U.S. gives Castro a scapegoat for his country’s poverty. They are poor, he states, because of the U.S. embargo. (Of course, the logic seems to escape Castro that if Communism works so well, why then is their economy dependent on the capitalistic government to the north?) And there is no doubt that Castro’s message does hold sway with some Cubans. I’m sure they wonder… why does the U.S. government have these restrictions against Cuba but not against China, which is also a communist state? When one looks at the recommendations put forth by President Bush and his commission it only gets all the more bizarre. Since May 2004 Cubans in the United States can only go to visit family members once every three years (instead of once a year which was the previous policy), the definition of family members has been restricted to include only immediate family, and Cubans visiting family are only allowed to spend $50 dollars a day in the country instead of the previous amount which was $164. If that were not enough, cash remittances can now only be sent to immediate family members, they remained limited to $300 per family every three months, and gift parcels must be worth less than $200 (not counting food which is excluded). The administration also further restricted the travel by students to Cuba through educational programs. Are we not punishing the wrong people here?

Rising up against insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi, Iraqi Sunni Muslims in Ramadi fought with grenade launchers and automatic weapons Saturday to defend their Shiite neighbors against a bid to drive them from the western city, Sunni leaders and Shiite residents said. The fighting came as the U.S. military announced the deaths of six American soldiers. Dozens of Sunni members of the Dulaimi tribe established cordons around Shiite homes, and Sunni men battled followers of Zarqawi, a Jordanian, for an hour Saturday morning. The clashes killed five of Zarqawi’s guerrillas and two tribal fighters, residents and hospital workers said. Zarqawi loyalists pulled out of two contested neighborhoods in pickup trucks stripped of license plates, witnesses said. The leaders of four of Iraq’s Sunni tribes had rallied their fighters in response to warnings posted in mosques by followers of Zarqawi. The postings ordered Ramadi’s roughly 3,000 Shiites to leave the city of more than 200,000 in the area called the Sunni Triangle. The order to leave within 48 hours came in retaliation for alleged expulsions by Shiite militias of Sunnis living in predominantly Shiite southern Iraq. "We have had enough of his nonsense," said Sheik Ahmad Khanjar, leader of the Albu Ali clan, referring to Zarqawi. "We don’t accept that a non-Iraqi should try to enforce his control over Iraqis, regardless of their sect -- whether Sunnis, Shiites, Arabs or Kurds.’’ Iraqi Sunni tribal leaders and armed followers of Zarqawi have clashed before in the far west, and Sunnis and Shiites in western cities have sympathized with one another over what they have said are attempts by foreign fighters to spark open sectarian conflict. But Saturday’s clash in Ramadi was one of the first times Sunni Arabs have been known to take up arms against insurgents specifically in defense of Shiites.

If you focus too much on the latest statistics and speculation about what could go wrong, it’s easy to lose sight of some very important long-term trends. The solid growth of U.S. productivity is one piece of very good news that’s not getting sufficient attention. There will always be some pessimists who think that productivity growth is a bad thing, reasoning that if one person can do the work of two, the unnecessary second worker will become unemployed. The record of history on that hypothesis is extremely clear, however. U.S. workers today produce more than three times as much per hour compared with their counterparts 50 years ago, and even so, the unemployment rate today is the same as it was in 1950. Instead of putting people out of work, what productivity growth has always meant in practice is a rising standard of living for everyone. No other statistic may be as important for determining long-run economic welfare as productivity. Between 1947 and 1973, U.S. output per worker chugged along impressively at an annual growth rate of 2.7% per year. Beginning in 1973, however, that trend abruptly deteriorated, with productivity growing at only a 1.4% annual rate for the next two decades. The consensus among most economists is that there is no one factor that accounts for that productivity slowdown, but rather that it was the result of a series of different influences that each made a modest contribution and happened to occur at about the same time. Among the factors that are likely to have played some role are increased safety and environmental regulation, reduced investment in productive equipment, and demographic changes, along with a number of other developments. Just when economists were thinking we understood that trend, however, the facts on the ground were reversed. U.S. productivity began to grow quickly again in the late 1990’s, and there now are enough data to suggest that this change is for real. Between 1995 and 2004, U.S. output per worker grew at a 2.9% annual rate, even faster than the impressive pre-1973 pace. It’s hard to attribute this to a change in any of those factors thought to have contributed to the slowdown in the seventies. Instead, the good news seems to be the result of a new set of favorable developments, chief among which is the way that computers and information technology have changed so much about the American workplace. Whatever the explanation for the productivity gains of the last decade, the above graph displays every indication that this welcome development is continuing. Most recently, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported productivity gains at a 3.2% annual rate for the first quarter and 2.2% annual rate for the second quarter of 2005. So why doesn’t that get more attention in the press? I guess the headline, "decade of good news continues" just doesn’t sell as many papers.

Tijdens de Wereldjongerendagen in Keulen van 16 tot 21 augustus is het mogelijk de belangrijkste uitspraken van de paus per sms te ontvangen. De sms-dienst is een initiatief van de "Katholische Fernseharbeit" in Frankfurt in samenwerking met RTL Media Services. Belangstellenden kunnen zich daarvoor sinds 8 augustus aanmelden. De dienst kost 29 eurocent per ontvangen bericht.

SOME REMAIN skeptical of President Bush’s concern for Africa, and there’s no doubt that the United States could and should do more. But the latest report on Sudan from the United Nations offers a snapshot of an issue on which Mr. Bush has been a leader. So far this year the United States has given $468 million in foreign assistance to Sudan, mostly for humanitarian relief in the western region of Darfur. The U.S. contribution comes to 53 percent of all outside donations -- a proportion about twice the size of the nation’s weight in the global economy. A few other countries have been even more generous relative to the size of their economies, notably Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Britain. But the contribution from many others has been embarrassing. How can France, which prides itself on its leadership in Africa, give only $2 million to this year’s U.N. appeal for Sudan -- an amount that, when rounded, comes to zero percent of total contributions to the country? Even if one generously ascribed, say, a fifth of the European Union’s donation of $90 million to French taxpayers, France’s share of the total contribution to Sudan comes to a paltry 2 percent. There are plenty of other culprits. Japan accounts for just 2 percent of total contributions despite the size of its economy; China has made no contribution to the U.N. effort, even though it has extensive investments in Sudan’s oil sector. But perhaps the most striking absentees are the oil-rich Arab countries, which have more money than ideas on how to spend it, thanks to oil prices above $60 a barrel. Saudi Arabia has contributed a grand total of $3 million, according to the U.N. data; the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have given less than $1 million between them. No other Arab country even makes the list. This Arab indifference is shameful. The victims of Sudan’s worst crisis, in Darfur, are Muslim, and aid to non-Muslim southern Sudan is essential to shoring up the fragile north-south peace deal that would help Muslims as well. Sudan borders Libya and Egypt; only the narrow Red Sea separates it from Saudi Arabia. Arabs have every reason to care about Sudan, and yet they have done far less than remote non-Muslim countries such as Norway, which has an economy roughly the same size as Saudi Arabia’s.

The final blow to the claim that intelligent design is scientific is its proponents’ admission that we cannot understand the designer’s goals or methods. Behe owns up to this in Darwin’s Black Box: "Features that strike us as odd in a design might have been placed there by the designer for a reason — for artistic reasons, to show off, for some as-yet undetectable practical purpose, or for some unguessable reason — or they might not." ....Well, if we admit that the designer had a number of means and motives, which can be self-contradictory, arbitrary, improvisatory, and "unguessable," then we are left with a theory that cannot be rejected. Every conceivable observation of nature, including those that support evolution, becomes compatible with ID, for the ways of the designer are unfathomable. And a theory that cannot be rejected is not a scientific theory. If IDers want to have a genuinely scientific theory, let them propose a model that can be rigorously tested.

Above all avoid the trap of administrative reorganisation. The best intentions of some of your predecessors of all political persuasions in this and other bodies became bogged down in these reorganisations. Make the best of the system you have, with the aid of a few key personnel, and concentrate on actual problems. You are probably rightly suspicious of aid to governments as often wasteful and counterproductive. Give as much of your resources as possible to modest sized local organisations whose resources cannot easily be diverted into national Treasuries. So far as you have to deal with governments, I agree with much of the advice you are being given about insisting on the rule of law, and human and property rights. And do not provide aid to emerging countries that can already borrow for themselves on world capital markets. Concentrate on providing grants for the really poorest. If I may add my own gloss, it is not only to refuse all aid to unnecessary arms programmes and prestige projects of all kinds such as dams, which often attracts an unholy alliance of self interested corporations and Third World lobbyists. But go further. It will mean not only refusing to finance such projects themselves, but cutting off governments who misuse development funds to divert money into these projects. This advice will not make you popular with business, but you will only have one chance.

Het World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) heeft de temperaturen van 16 Europese hoofdsteden geanalyseerd. Volgens het rapport steeg de gemiddelde zomertemperatuur na Madrid (2,2°C) het sterkst in Luxemburg (2°C), Stockholm (1,5°C) en in Brussel, Rome en Wenen (1,2°C). Volgens de wetenschappers zorgt de uitstoot van broeikasgassen afkomstig van menselijke nijverheid voor een verdubbeling van het risico op recordtemperaturen tijdens de komende jaren.

Russische wetenschappers hebben namelijk sterke aanwijzingen dat de permafrostbodems in het westen van Siberië al een paar jaar aan het ontdooien zijn. Het zou nu al gaan om een gebied ter grootte van Duitsland en Frankrijk samen. Daardoor dreigen miljarden tonnen van het broeikasgas methaan in de atmosfeer vrij te komen

This is an ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming

It’s very worrying. The release of these emissions is causing massive climate instability leading to extreme weather events, rising temperatures, the melting of the Arctic ice sheet, rising sea levels, droughts, heat waves and famine.

For a few weeks there were only minor problems: after all, the treaties were still in force. Only the organization in Geneva was shut down; no more endless talk-fests like Cancún that go nowhere. No more impenetrable jargon. No more closed-door disputes panels. But a little more than a month after the lights went out in the Centre William Rappard in Geneva, several developing country governments -- with advice from anti-globalization NGOs in the USA and Europe -- notified their trading partners that they intended to abrogate the treaty so that they could lift their import tariffs above the rate at which they had been bound against increase in the WTO. To an extent, the United States and the EU had anticipated this and they acted quickly to try to keep a cap on defections from the treaties. They sent senior officials on flying visits around the globe with threats of trade ’consequences’ for any country that pulled back from its treaty obligations. But the threats were ignored: three countries in Latin America, two in south Asia and most of West Africa formed -- or said they had formed -- a Fair Trade Alliance all of whose members increased their tariffs on a range of imports, breaching their bound WTO ceiling on import duties. The United States reacted in a ’measured’ way to this provocative act by withdrawing only the preferential tariff rates that it had formerly applied to imports from these countries under the old WTO rule that permitted this discrimination in favor of developing countries. The European Commission issued some rhetorical press statements about the plight of poor countries but had to follow suit quickly, cutting its own preferences to avoid a diversion of the exports that the Alliance countries had sent to the USA into the European market. The lesson was quickly learned by the three Latins in the alliance: within a week or two they put their tariffs back down again to the WTO bound rates, but their retraction was too late. Import competing industries in the USA lobbied hard against the restoration of any of the preferences: winning an unusually quick resolution from the Congress that had begun to realize that the demise of the WTO -- if that’s what was happening -- meant a change in the balance of power between itself and the Administration in the management of trade policy. Although the President negotiates and manages treaties the Congress has been more and more willing to use its approval powers creatively. With the WTO organization shut down and WTO negotiations in the freezer, the Administration’s role was reduced and Congress was clearly eager to take the center stage. Japan, sensing that it could now withdraw its own preferences without attracting much adverse attention, withdrew concessions on imports from all developing country sources on certain ’sensitive’ import items such as fresh fruit, spices, poultry and wire assemblies for automobiles. With their access to markets in the EU, Japan and USA now dramatically reduced pending the restoration of preferences, the Latins and Africans quickly lost their already-modest access to commercial investment and credit and found that even the IMF and World Bank had begun to warn that they would put lending facilities on hold until the trade crisis was resolved. But the prospects of that happening any time soon were dramatically reduced when the European Commission announced that it would start, immediately, to implement a $4 billion ’retaliation’ package of new duties aimed at imports from the United States. EU bureaucrats had concluded -- probably correctly -- that neither the United States Administration or Congress would now feel the same obligation to implement the recommendation of the (former) WTO disputes panel to change the US Foreign Sales Corporation (FSC) tax legislation that had been operating as a massive export subsidy to US firms. The Europeans opted to pressure the USA to make a start on fixing FSC by putting penalty tariffs on imports of US citrus, oilseeds and airplane parts (among many other goods). But the effect of the European action was almost the converse of what they had intended. The Congress was now determined to ’take the wheel’ in US trade policy (’from the back seat’ as several editorials remarked acidly). Congress quickly re-enacted the Byrd amendment to the anti-dumping legislation that had been overturned in 2003 by a WTO disputes panel. This law directed that the collections from anti-dumping duties should be given to the firms that had successfully brought a dumping complaint. The law fostered the growth of a speculative anti-dumping bar that took ’contingency’ fees for bringing a case: the number of cases rocketed. In virtually every ’chapter’ of the US tariff, from live animals to nuclear processing equipment, anti-dumping duties were levied. Imports from China and Vietnam were particularly hard-hit in the rage of cases that followed because the determination of the dumping margins for ’non-market economies’ could made mostly by reference to the allegations of the firms bringing the complaint. The volume of cases forced officials in the Department of Commerce to cut corners in their investigations. But since there was no longer any prospect of a WTO review of their procedures they had to worry only about compliance with US domestic law; and it was clear that Congress wanted them to be as aggressive as possible. Naturally, Vietnam and China took a dim view of the trend and began to retaliate, at first by taking administrative action, against US imports. Within months it became obvious that in industries such as textiles and electronics the rash of trade suits was threatening US relations with north Asian countries and the damage was leaking badly into many other areas of cooperation, including on security measures. The US Administration managed the problem in the cases of Vietnam, Republic of Korea, Taiwan and Malaysia by means of old-fashioned bilateral ’ trade restraint’ measures. In effect the market for telecommunications equipment and components was cartelized by obscure executive agreements that ensured there would be no ’disruption’ in the US market that there would be ’reasonable returns’ for Asian exporters. The deals, widely known as the ’cell-phone compact’ saw prices of many types of consumer electronics rise sharply and availability fall. But China was a very different case. Despite the best efforts of the White House, the AFL-CIO convinced Congress to call for a wide-ranging investigation of Chinese labor practices by the US International Trade Commission with a view to blocking almost all textile, footwear, clothing and other light manufactures imports from China. Although there were many in Congress with the good sense to see that such actions would lead to a deterioration in trade relations with ’tit-for-tat’ retaliation between China and the USA, their arguments were weakened by the rapidly worsening US trade deficit. As ever, in times of global economic uncertainty, the financial markets turned out to have an almost insatiable hunger for US dollars, driving the exchange value through the roof -- along with the value of imports -- and squeezing US exports. The decision of Germany to withhold its contributions to the European Union budget (via the value-added tax system) shocked many outside Europe. But what puzzled almost everyone across the Atlantic was the passing reference to the collapse of support for WTO. What had that to do with anything? Several acres of salmon-coloured newsprint barely concealed the delight of the Financial Times editors with the German ’budget blitzkrieg’. They explained to their US readers that this was a pre-emptive move intended to reassert German control over the European budget process and over future decisions on the Euro monetary pact. The rules of the world trading system -- both the WTO and the GATT that preceded it -- were peculiarly important in the European Union. Management of Europe’s participation in the multilateral trade system was among the original, and until the WTO began to fall apart, the most secure and extensive of the constitutional powers of the European Communities and the Union built on top of them. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was the glue that held the Community together for many decades, but it was frequently on the brink of running out of control and busting the budget, especially under pressure from France, Italy and Greece -- and now from Poland, and the Czech republic and Hungary. The Germans, who had always paid more than their fair share of the budget for farm subsidies, also had their ’sofa farmers’ who pulled down big cheques from Brussels. But it was an open secret that the German government relied on the restraints imposed by the WTO agreements to keep the ambitions of the politically powerful farm lobbies in Europe under some control. Now that the WTO disputes system had disappeared and the USA seemed to be treating some of the treaty rules as ’optional’, the old defenses against ’green greed’ were seriously weakened. No German Farm or Finance minister wanted to go into a European Council meeting arguing for budget cuts in apparent opposition to his own farmers and to the farmers of other EU countries, without at least the additional leverage that the world trade rules provided. Cuts to the EU budget were now absolutely essential. The German economy had been stumbling along through the late 1990s with mounting public financing obligations, low growth and rising unemployment. Now it was obvious to all that with the rising storms of trade conflict between Asia and North America and between North America and Europe, and with no possibility of putting the battles into the ’quarantine’ of the WTO disputes process, world trade would slow further. As trade charts turn down, in a global economy structured around globalized production and investment, economic growth quickly follows into the trough. The German economy would not grow strongly enough to fund both its domestic obligations and the ambitions of the farmers of southern and eastern Europe. Already their deficits made it impossible to sustain the European monetary pact limits on public debt and financing. Rather than face up to the massive fines that were the consequence of breaking the Euro rules, the German government decided to remind its European partners that it still had its hand on the faucet. Equities markets were stunned by the German decision. Uncertain what the move meant and unable to see the full consequences for Europe, investors fled equities and European bonds of all qualities. The US dollar, gold, diamonds and race-horses all leapt in value but commodity prices took a dive, on the fairly safe assumption that consumer sentiment in Europe, Japan and possibly in North America would drive the industrialized countries into a slump. The outlook, as every economist on any cable channel news program warned, was for a rebound in protectionism, possibly along the lines of the 1930s now that the WTO ’schedules’ of tariff bindings had little or no effect. For once, the economists were right and seen to be right in short order. The commodity price plunge worsened the outlook for many developing countries, but those hardest hit were those already ’on the brink’. Argentina suspended loan repayments to the international financial institutions. Rescheduling meetings were hastily organized. But Argentina (and Uruguay), convinced that they could not trust the Brazilians not to competitively devalue their currency, raised their tariffs and froze bank accounts to try to preserve their reserves. There was a chain-reaction around Latin America: the barriers went up in Brazil, then Paraguay, then Bolivia, Colombia and Chile. Finally, Mexico rejected strong US pleas and put up its defences to imports and exchanges with countries other than its NAFTA partners. The chief consequence of this step was that it dragged Japan into the Latin maelstrom...

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us. We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights, and blinds --in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat.

That Paul Krugman is an ideologue really doesn’t bother me that much. What bothers me is that he a wholly unoriginal, boring, and mean-spirited ideologue, and he occupies prime real-estate at the NY Times.

Zimbabwe, once a vibrant and diversified economy, had been a hope for Africa’s future. Today, it is a country in deep crisis and the signs of collapse are everywhere. The economy has contracted in real terms in each of the past five years, inflation is in triple digits, the local currency has lost 99% of its value, and almost half of the country faces food shortages. Unsurprisingly, up to one-quarter of the population has fled the country. (...)Zimbabwe’s recent economic crisis is so deep that it has set the country back more than half a century. In 1953 the average person living in then-Southern Rhodesia had an average income of $760 per year (in constant 1990 US$ at purchasing power parity rates). In mid-2005 the average Zimbabwean had fallen back to that level, wiping out the income gains over the past 52 years. The scale and speed of this income decline is unusual outside of a war situation.

Twenty years ago I was an extreme right-wing Republican . . . who believed, as one friend pungently put it, that "Senator Taft had sold out to the socialists." Today, I am most likely to be called an extreme leftist, since I favor immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, denounce U.S. imperialism, advocate Black Power and have just joined the new Peace and Freedom Party. And yet my basic political views have not changed a single iota in these two decades! It is obvious that something is very wrong with the old labels, with the categories of "left" and "right," and with the ways in which we customarily apply these categories to American political life. My personal odyssey is unimportant; the important point is that if I can move from "extreme right" to "extreme left" merely by standing in one place, drastic though unrecognized changes must have taken place throughout the American political spectrum over the last generation.

to have a big impact on developing countries, trade negotiators should spend more time improving the cross-border mobility of labor -- particularly of low-skill laborers, who typically are at the bottom of the pile. Current WTO negotiations on labor mobility ("mode four" in the trade jargon) focus only on high-skill labor, and even there they have made very little progress. Greater opportunities for poor and less-skilled workers to move across borders would, more than anything else, increase both the efficiency of resource allocation in the world economy and the incomes of the citizens of poor countries. This fact is based on a simple principle of economics. The loss in efficiency due to segmented (as opposed to integrated) national markets increases with the gap in prices in these different markets, and the loss is further compounded as the gap increases. Now compare price gaps across different types of markets. In markets for goods and capital, quality- and risk-adjusted price gaps from country to country are relatively small -- perhaps no more than 50-100 percent. But in labor markets, which suffer from huge border restrictions, wage gaps for similarly skilled workers are enormous -- on the order of 500-1,000 percent. That is why even small relaxations of work-visa restrictions generate large income gains for workers from poor countries (as well as for the world economy). What is especially appealing is that the gains in income go directly to the workers, rather than through imperfect distribution channels (as with trade in goods) or through governments (as with aid).

The deepest challenge for countries in the poorest parts of the world, especially Africa, is governance. The African continent has been ravaged both by civil war and conflict and by rapacious leaders who have plundered the natural wealth of their nations. Corrupt rulers and their weak regimes have arguably been the single most important drag on African development. But with increasing democratization, the situation may be starting to improve. And rich countries can play a large role in the reform process, for the simple reason that corruption has two sides -- demand and supply. For every leader who demands a bribe, there is usually a multinational company or a Western official offering to pay it. For every pile of illicit wealth, there is usually a European or American financial institution providing a safe haven for the spoils. The governments of wealthy countries need to take steps to block these activities. There have been notable strides in the right direction: the British Department for International Development helped found the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative a few years ago, and the UN and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have been working together to address the bribery of officials in developing countries by foreigners. But these efforts do not go far enough. Many institutions -- the OECD and the U.S. government, for example -- have laws against bribing foreign officials. But the regulations are often both narrow in scope and weak on enforcement. For example, a loophole in the U.S. laws ("deferred gifts") invites abuse. Some OECD rules damage transparency by protecting banks that hide ill-gotten wealth deposited by leaders of developing countries. Multinational companies and banks need to be more transparent in their dealings with poor-country governments. Preempting corruption must also be made more of a priority. One idea, first proposed by Harvard University’s Michael Kremer, is for the international community to categorize certain regimes as corrupt or "odious." Companies that deal with such regimes would risk losing their claims to repayment if later on a lawful government decided to default on the debt passed down by its unlawful predecessor.

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.

A follower of Realism is called a realist.
A follower of Marxism is called a Marxist.
A follower of Liberalism is called... well it’s not a liberalist.

I would perhaps express it not so much as "markets are not a very good predictor" as "nobody’s a very good predictor." (...) But any such statement invites us to look at the underlying policy question. How much should we be surrendering right now in the way of current resources, researching and developing alternatives for energy supply and utilization, and forcing consumers to pay more now in order to make sure that we save enough oil for the future? These costs in the here-and-now are most real and tangible, and yet we somehow have to weigh them against something we only see through a veil, darkly. If you ask people today to make huge sacrifices that later turn out to be unnecessary or to be following a dead-end technological alternative, you’ve created poverty as a deliberate object of policy. I don’t see uncertainty about the world as something that would give us a good reason to prefer government intervention over market solutions; if the market is uncertain, then so should you be about what the best government policy would be. In fact, the more uncertainty we have about these matters, the more I am inclined to turn to markets to assimilate that information for us. After watching the sausage-creation of the current energy bill before Congress, I have relatively little faith that Washington is going to figure out for us exactly which technologies are most promising. But the entrepreneur who brings a workable hybrid vehicle to the market will make himself or herself quite rich. The lure of earning such profits is, in my mind, a much more powerful and effective incentive than anything that the world’s leaders are likely to dream up and try to lead us to on their own.

The unsuccessful CNOOC bid may make domestic enterprises pause for a while to carefully review their expansion plans, but it will not stop them from transforming themselves into competitive players in the international arena. In this sense, the cost CNOOC paid is limited. But the outcome of the failure of the takeover bid on the US side may be more serious than some US politicians have calculated. The unjustified US opposition, largely politically motivated, will certainly more or less poison the current prevailing mood as bilateral economic ties between China and the United States are enhanced. The high-profile takeover battle demonstrated to the world that the United States is not a free economy as it claimed to be. In the US market, an asset for sale has not gone to the buyer that most prized it, because of regulatory concerns fuelled by bogus fears and hidden interests. Apparently, Unocal shareholders chose to accept the cheaper offer free of regulatory risk. But the politicized regulatory matter has, in fact, deprived them of the chance to maximize value, as the market should allow. The implications may not be what US policy-makers intended when foreign investment is badly needed to finance the soaring trade and budget deficits to sustain economic growth.

Today’s New York Times has two articles that tell the story behind what economists call the Environmental Kuznets Curve. The basic idea behind the EKC is that as countries develop environmental quality first falls, but then improves. Although it makes a lot of intuitive sense, the EKC has been suprisingly difficult to show statistically and papers are still being published that find evidence for and against the principal. But sometimes anecdotal evidence does a better job than statistics. The first article talks about recent catastrophic results of the torrential rains in Mumbai (the city that used to be called Bombay). When 30 inches of rain fell in a 24-hour period, the result was 406 deaths in the city alone, 962 across the state. The article points out, however, that the deaths cannot be blamed on mother nature alone. They were brought on by the environmental destruction that has been wrought on the landscape as India has clawed its way up the development ladder. The second article tells a story at the other end of the development ladder, in Los Angeles. California. In the 1950s and 60s, the air in California was so polluted that it caused not only long term health problems, but daily inconveniences as sporting events were cancelled due to smog, drivers had to pull off the road with tears in their eyes, and runners choked on the dirty air they were forced to inhale. Although the article points out that there is still room for improvements, there’s little doubt that things are dramatically improved. Is the Environmental Kuznets Curve true for all problems? Probably not. But for many problems, particularly where the impacts on human wellbeing are the most tangible, there’s at least some evidence that at first development makes things get worse, but if it persists, they can also get better.

The more important reason why Diamond’s rhetoric doesn’t play well any longer is that it presents only one side of the balance-sheet: it ignores the human benefits that accompany environmental damage. You build a road, but that destroys part of the local ecosystem; there is both a cost and a benefit and you have to weigh them up. Diamond shows no sign of wanting to look at both sides of the ledger, and his responses to environmental sceptics take the form of ‘Yes, but . . .’ If someone were to point out that chemical fertilisers have increased food production dozens of times over, he would reply: ‘Yes, but they are a drain on fresh water, and what about all that phosphorus run-off?’ Diamond is like a swimmer who competes in a race using only one arm. ‘In caring for the health of our surroundings, just as of our bodies,’ he writes at one point, ‘it is cheaper and preferable to avoid getting sick than to try to cure illnesses after they have developed’ – which sounds wise, but is simply misleading bombast. Technology brings out the worst in him. At one point he claims that ‘all of our current problems are unintended negative consequences of our existing technology,’ to which I felt like shouting in exasperation that perhaps at some times, in some places, a few of the unintended consequences of our existing technology have been beneficial. Reading Diamond you would think our ancestors should all have remained hunter-gatherers in Africa, co-evolving with the native flora and fauna, and roaming the wilds in search of wild berries and the occasional piece of meat. Here I should put my cards on the table. I am an economist who shares Diamond’s worries, but I think he has failed to grasp both the way in which information about particular states of affairs gets transmitted (however imperfectly) in modern decentralised economies – via economic signals such as prices, demand, product quality and migration – and the way increases in the scarcity of resources can itself act to spur innovations that ease those scarcities. Without a sympathetic understanding of economic mechanisms, it isn’t possible to offer advice on the interactions between nature and the human species.

The new climate initiative that the US and five Asian countries, including the major emerging economies (namely India and China), have unveiled is putting the Kyoto Protocol and its supporters under pressure. Both for its language and scope, the "Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate" follows closely the recent action plan released at the G8 in Gleneagles, Scotland. The agreement is focused on (a) long term actions aimed at (b) developing cleaner, more efficient technologies without (c) harming economic growth; especially as far as developing countries are concerned, the parties agree that (d) the creation of wealth is by far the most effective, if not the only, way to address environmental problems. President Bush and his colleagues from Australia, Japan, India, and China have set forth a new framework that is much more flexible and long-sighted than the Kyoto Protocol. In fact the Republican Administration has been able to coagulate the consensus from a number of countries that account for roughly half of global GHGs emissions today, a figure that is likely to grow with time. I was quite disappointed, then, when I first saw a comment from Friends of Earth’s Tony Juniper: "this is another attempt to undermine Kyoto and a message to the developing world to buy US technology and not to worry about targets and timetables." In fact there is no need to undermine Kyoto, as the Protocol is - in a way - self-undermining. Its most vocal supporter, the European Union, will fail in meeting the targets as the European Environmental Agency openly tells. Apparently some climate fundamentalists, as well as some political actors (it seems that neither London nor Brussels took very well the Partnership), value their opposition to the White House more than a move that might well help to reduce future emissions.

Meer en meer hoor ik geruchten over een verrechtsing van de VLD die op til is. Overigens zijn er ook geruchten die een verlinksing aankondigen. Grappig eigenlijk. Ik heb veel kritiek geleverd op de VLD en de kern van die kritiek is dat ze niet liberaal genoeg is. Een verrechtsing of verlinksing zou dat probleem enkel nog doen toenemen. In feite is de verrechtsing erop gericht om de kleine zelfstandige terug te lokken van het Vlaams Belang, terwijl de verlinksing wat twijfelende intellectuelen terug wil lokken. Nog zoiets. Elke intellectueel is links, wist u dat nog niet? Ik ben niet links en dus ook geen intellectueel. (einde sarcasme. of het begin ervan?) Links en rechts zijn echter behoorlijk gelijkaardig vanuit liberaal standpunt. Ze stellen beide de maatschappij en de staat boven het individu. De ene omwille van meer veiligheid en moreel fatsoen voor dat individu, waarvoor het zijn vrijheid moet opgeven. ( vreemd genoeg ook heel wat verdedigers aan linkerzijde zoals Louis Tobback en Flor Koninckx) De andere willen het individu meer welzijn bezorgen, maar daarvoor moet het wél in de pas lopen. Overigens is het niet zo uitzonderlijk dat linkse en rechtse ideeën door elkaar lopen. Liberalisme daarentegen heeft een andere visie. Liberalisme stelt het individu als absoluut middelpunt. En wel élk individu als individu. Het individu primeert op de staat en die staat is er overigens enkel maar om bepaalde relaties tussen individuen te regelen. Met het individu zélf heeft de staat niets te maken. De liberaal is niet links of rechts. Hij of zij streeft in de eerste plaats naar individuele vrijheid op élk vlak. Dat is wat de VLD verdedigt.

services/goods export balance as of 2003 was much like those of Britain and the United States -- $25 billion in services exports and $56 billion in goods. India’s services exports are also more heavily weighted to finance, telecom, call center, and other "IT-enabled" services than to tourism. One sign of this trend, is the fact that NASSCOM, India’s National Association of Software and Services Companies, had 38 members in 1988; now it has close to one thousand.

Power is evil. Political power opposes Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Power’s very existence infringes the individual’s exercise of his right of self-ownership. This article explains ways in which power comes to work its evil. One is that a ruler is never as careful with public money as with his own, which is true because the power to tax lowers the sovereign’s cost of making mistakes. The second is Lord Acton’s argument that power corrupts, which is true because power both induces a shift in the morality of the ruler and also lowers the cost of acting corruptly. The third explanation is that even when a powerful ruler tries to do what is good, he fails, because he has limited knowledge of the preferences and values of his subjects and less incentive to discover them than his subjects, even if he could.

There are a good many more points that now extend our understanding beyond the debates of 1995. But it is clear that all three of the critics’ central premises are wrong. The Japanese did not see their situation as catastrophically hopeless. They were not seeking to surrender, but pursuing a negotiated end to the war that preserved the old order in Japan, not just a figurehead emperor. Finally, thanks to radio intelligence, American leaders, far from knowing that peace was at hand, understood--as one analytical piece in the "Magic" Far East Summary stated in July 1945, after a review of both the military and diplomatic intercepts--that "until the Japanese leaders realize that an invasion can not be repelled, there is little likelihood that they will accept any peace terms satisfactory to the Allies." This cannot be improved upon as a succinct and accurate summary of the military and diplomatic realities of the summer of 1945.

Some headlines and editorials from al-Sharq al-Awsat tell it like it is: "Passing of the Brave King." "Fahd Ibn Abd al-Aziz: Wise Political Decisions in Trying Circumstances." "Great accomplishments of the great leader." "Kuwait’s loss as big as the Kingdom’s." "Champion of the Umma Passes." "Fahd: thirty five years of serving the Umma." "The King of Political Rationality." Well, I’m not sure how Fahd’s reputation can survive that hard-hitting scrutiny. Quality journalism all around from SA! Odd that the editorialists of al-Sharq al-Awsat, who have written about virtually nothing the last month other than the evils of Islamist extremism, have not a word to say about the role played by the late King in encouraging the growth of said extremism. Not quite the "progress and development" to recall today, I suppose. Oddly enough, these Saudis in a picture published by al-Sharq al-Awsat don’t exactly look all that broken up... funny about that: Let’s see how al-Hayat handled it: "a hero in the liberation of Kuwait"... "an era of development"... "history will remember his courage"... "the smartest son of his generation" (what, not the smartest man in history? Is this veiled criticism?) (ha, ha, get it? "veiled"?) (no, it’s funny because one of al-Arabiya’s headlines is - get this - "Saudi women: unprecedented achievements in the era of King Fahd"! Really... could I make this up?) (Coincidentally, the Women of Elaph were absent for the second day running... really, is not showing half-dressed young women what Fahd would have wanted?) Ugh. I’m feeling a bit ill. Today is not a good day for the Arab media. Interestingly enough, the "independent" TV station al-Arabiya (which has the King as the first, second, third, and fourth story this morning) received thousands of messages of condolence for the passing of King Fahd. Kind of odd for an independent station, huh? And then they ran a story congratulating themselves for receiving all those messages... even odder! Not that the other Arab TV stations are much better... one columnist in al-Quds al-Arabi describes the Arab TV coverage as a procession of wailing infants. The same columnist noticed that LBC TV had the exact same Shaykh reading the exact same Quranic verses as on Saudi TV... Thank the gods for al-Jazeera, today. Their lead: "Intense security arrangements for the funeral of King Fahd." They do have some stories noting the world’s mourning, but it’s treated as a news story, not as a Reaganesque burlesque. The death of John Garang in the Sudan - which has already led to fierce rioting, and which could potentially bring about the collapse of the hard-won peace accord - continues to receive equal billing. Same thing in al-Quds al-Arabi: Fahd’s death is covered, but the Sudan gets top billing.

So, what’s wrong with the Laffer Curve? Won’t tax revenues fall to zero if tax rates were either 100% or 0%? If yes, then it must be true that tax revenues must be same for at least two different tax rates (otherwise how do you connect the dots at the 100% and 0% rates).

We examined the apparel industry in 10 Asian and Latin American countries often accused of having sweatshops and then we looked at 43 specific accusations of unfair wages in 11 countries in the same regions. Our findings may seem surprising. Not only were sweatshops superior to the dire alternatives economists usually mentioned, but they often provided a better-than-average standard of living for their workers. The apparel industry, which is often accused of unsafe working conditions and poor wages, actually pays its foreign workers well enough for them to rise above the poverty in their countries. While more than half of the population in most of the countries we studied lived on less than $2 per day, in 90 percent of the countries, working a 10-hour day in the apparel industry would lift a worker above - often far above - that standard. For example, in Honduras, the site of the infamous Kathy Lee Gifford sweatshop scandal, the average apparel worker earns $13.10 per day, yet 44 percent of the country’s population lives on less than $2 per day. In 9 of the 11 countries we surveyed, the average reported sweatshop wages equaled or exceeded average incomes and in some cases by a large margin. In Cambodia, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Honduras, the average wage paid by a firm accused of being a sweatshop is more than double the average income in that country’s economy.

President Bush waded into the debate over evolution and "intelligent design" Monday, saying schools should teach both theories on the creation and complexity of life. In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session with a small group of reporters, Bush essentially endorsed efforts by Christian conservatives to give intelligent design equal standing with the theory of evolution in the nation’s schools.

1.) Intelligent design is not a theory. There is no theoretical basis to it. It is not scientific theory, and it is not just bad scientific theory, it is simply not theory. It is ascientific. It is a flight of fancy. It is a call to discard mountains of evidence, throw up ones hands, and state: “This is all too confusing and complex, and science is hard, so some ‘intelligent designer’ must be behind all this.”

2.) Intelligent design is creationism. It may not be quite as audaciously stupid as the nonsense peddled by the ‘young earth’ crowd, but it is creationism. Just who do you think this ‘intelligent designer’ is?

3.) Teaching ‘intelligent design’ as science, or as a viable theory, or whatever you want to call it other than bullshit, is to assault science. Criticism of evolutionary theory is always welcome, but attempting to replace evolutionary theory with fanciful tales is to assault not only the senses, but to attack the very manner science itself is conducted.

4.) People don’t want ‘intelligent design’ taught because it is a viable scientific theory, they want it taught because it is tailored to fit their pre-existing religious beliefs. The introduction of ‘intelligent design’ into the class room will be seen as a blow to the ‘evil secularists.’ It will be just another step in ‘taking back the culture.’

It had planned to lift tariffs on Latin American bananas from €75 (£52m) a ton to €230 from the beginning of next year

Een windmolenpark voor de Belgische kust biedt geen enkele maatschappelijke meerwaarde. Integendeel, zo’n park vormt een verliespost voor de samenleving. Dat concludeert de econome Karen Van Capellen in haar eindverhandeling voor de KULeuven.

Opmerkelijk is dat de kosten van het windmolenpark toenemen naarmate het project op grotere schaal wordt uitgevoerd. Als er 300 in plaats van 216 megawatt wordt geïnstalleerd, loopt het negatief saldo op tot 484 miljoen euro. Dat komt doordat zowel de kosten voor de bouw van de molens als voor de reservecapaciteit op land toenemen, terwijl de externe baten niet evenredig toenemen.

Steroids(...) probably aren’t all that bad for you. The furor over "performance enhancers" has mostly been invented by tweedy baseball fans who like to keep track of batting records and don’t like putting an asterisk by their figures. Well, that plus the fact that Congress really didn’t like to see all those androgynous Eastern European women hauling down gold medals at the Olympics. So in the 1970s sporting organizations started telling athletes that steroids didn’t work, and anyway, they’d give you "bitch tits." (Which they can... if you take far too many.) But no. Steroids do work. What’s more, they might actually be useful for treating AIDS, MS, or as an antidote to aging—one theory of why we age is that we lose hormones over time. Which sucks, because I’m totally allergic to steroids. (Took ’em for a rash when I was younger and puffed up to two or three times my normal size; not pretty.) At any rate, even if steroids did have harmful long-term effects, so what? Let the players juice up. Athletes since the beginning of time have done all sorts of ludicrous and harmful crap to their bodies in order to compete at the highest levels. All that jogging botches up your joints. Pulling on an erg can give you tendonitis. And steroids shrink your testicles. Hey, whatever! A commenter at this site, diddy, once suggested that we just create two professional sports leagues: one for steroid users who want to alter their body chemistry however they see fit in order to perform amazing feats on the field; and an "all natural" league, for the purists. That’s a great idea, I think. In a sense, the pressure to compete would be sort of immoral ("Psst, kid, go inject this unpronounceable chemical so we can see some awesome home runs!") but that’s not so much different from what goes on now, is it? The other point worth mentioning is that trying to ban steroids seems deeply, deeply futile. Much like "assault weapons", "steroids" aren’t a single, easily identifiable entity, and as such, virtually impossible to ban. With a few molecular tweaks, it’s very easy to invent some new sort of performance enhancer that hasn’t been black-listed. And these "mock" drugs often turn out to be more harmful, and more likely to send you to the hospital, then the reliable old steroids that were banned in the first place. Even the DEA has opposed the ban. The DEA! Surely Congress can find something better to do with its time.

``It has been pre-arranged for the past 10 years,’’ said Neil Quilliam, Middle East analyst at London-based business risk consultant, Control Risks Group. ``The succession is just going to pass off fairly smoothly and the Saudi population is going to be fairly sympathetic after the death of Fahd.’’

Uzbekistan has issued an eviction notice to a U.S. air base that has been used since 2001 to stage military and humanitarian operations in Afghanistan, the Pentagon said Saturday. The notice, delivered Friday to the U.S. Embassy in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, gives the United States six months to comply, Pentagon spokesman Glenn Flood said. "The bottom line is, they want us out," he said. The Uzbek government has increasingly bristled at the U.S. military presence, especially since the State Department joined international allies in calling for an inquiry into the shooting deaths of protesters during a rally in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijon in May.

Let us hope that finally the Bush administration will now recognise the true nature of the Karimov regime. It is symptomatic of the complete failure of Western policy in Central Asia that rather than withdraw with some dignity, the US has managed to hand the dictator Karimov the propaganda coup of kicking out the World’s greatest power. This is not about the response to the Andizhan massacre. To the end the US was muted on human rights in Uzbekistan and still has not called for full elections including the opposition. This is about the Karimov regime’s decision to turn to Gazprom and the Russians, not the US, to develop Uzbekistan’s oil and gas fields. This deal involves Uzbekneftegas and was brokered between the President’s daughter, Gulnara Karimova, and Alisher Usmanov, the Uzbek born Russian oligarch who bought 27% of Corus (British Steel). The Karimov regime are determined to keep complete control of the economy so they can continue their massive looting for personal enrichment. They were concerned that Western companies could build centres of wealth not under their direct control. They have therefore decided to turn to Russian and Chinese state companies for investment. These companies operate the system of oligarch corruption that the Karimov regime understands. This is the explanation for Central Asia’s “Diplomatic Revolution” as Uzbekistan turns decisively away from the USA towards Russia and China. There will now be massive pressure by Karimov on Tajikistan and Kirghizstan – both tiny countries dependent on Uzbekistan for energy supplies – to follow suit.

Overheard at a Cato Institute talk I attended:

What have we gotten from Republicans controlling all the branches of government? A bloated entitlement state that eats its young, and a lot of buildings named after Ronald Reagan.

The future level of greenhouse gas emissions is governed mainly by the increasing demand for transport and electricity as economic development progresses in developing countries. Rich countries must pay for the research and development which would make developing and running a low carbon infrastructure affordable by poorer countries. In the recent Group of Eight Gleneagles discussions on climate change, US President George W.Bush made four assertions: there are large uncertainties about the science and the economics; the Kyoto agreement would involve large costs and negligible benefits for the US; proposals to deal with greenhouse gas emissions that exclude developing countries are ineffective; and that research and development on new technologies should take priority over expenditure for meeting emissions reduction targets. It pains me to say it but on all points Mr Bush is right. (...) The Kyoto treaty is inconsequential because even if fully implemented it would not change greenhouse gas concentrations by much. If the degree of potential warming is large – say 5˚C over the next century – reducing that figure to 4.5˚C is nowhere near enough. If the degree of potential warming is small – say 0.5˚C over the next century – a policy which reduces that figure to 0.45˚C imposes costs a great deal larger than its benefits. There is no scenario in which actions that reduce global concentrations by a small amount make much sense. Since a small amount is exactly what we are doing, this is a key conclusion. We should, instead, either take major action or focus on adapting to any consequences. What would be involved in doing a lot? The US accounts for just over 20 per cent of greenhouse gas output and Europe and Japan for a bit less. The whole of the developed world contains 800m people, compared with 2.4bn in India and China. The future level of greenhouse gas emissions is governed mainly by the increasing demand for transport and electricity as economic development progresses in these countries. This is the issue that matters on climate change. It is almost the only issue that matters on climate change. And it points to the only way in which, if western leaders did take climate change seriously, the issue could be tackled. Rich countries must pay for the research and development that would make developing and running a low carbon infrastructure affordable by poorer countries. This is a matter for serious science, not wind farms and bicycle-to-work day. Only nuclear technology fulfils these requirements today but its deployment on a global scale raises as many problems as it solves. There are many options that might become but are not yet commercially viable – hydrogen, photovoltaics, fusion. There are some not yet imagined. It is a curious lacuna that the most technologically progressive century in history ended with fuel technologies not fundamentally different from those employed when it began. And that we still do not have any cheap way of storing electricity. These are the projects on which action against climate change should focus. Many of the people who express concern about climate change do not want a technological solution. Their concern is really an expression of guilt about materialism, distaste for capitalism and fear of technology. It is because Mr Bush does not experience any of these feelings that he is right on this issue.

If we accept that the risk of a greenhouse effect is large enough to demand action, the question is: what sort of action? Greenhouse gas emissions are cumulative; it seems likely that more good will come of stopping the flow entirely later than slightly slowing it now. If only the faddish short-term fixes (such as offshore wind farms) were likely to lead to longer-term solutions (such as nuclear fusion, or solar after three more decades of Moore’s Law-type progress) - we wouldn’t have to make difficult choices today.

This is all about taxpayers’ money being diverted from developing clean renewable technologies to try and make burning coal less dirty," Bob Brown, leader of the minority Australian Greens party, said in a statement.

i wonder if it would be a good bet to follow my natural cynicism, and say that one of the technologies to be pushed will be hydrogen fuel cell cars?

The United States, the world’s top polluter, is set to unveil a five-nation pact to combat global warming by developing energy technology to cut greenhouse gas emissions, officials said on Wednesday. China and India, whose burgeoning economies comprise a third of humanity, as well as Australia and South Korea are part of the agreement to tackle climate change beyond the U.N.’s Kyoto protocol. The United States and Australia are the only developed nations outside Kyoto, which demands cuts in greenhouse emissions by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. Both say Kyoto is flawed because it omits developing states. Diplomats in the Laotian capital Vientiane said the pact would be formally announced on Thursday when U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick holds a news conference attended by representatives of the other signatories. Zoellick is attending a regional forum in Laos. Details of the pact were unclear but it appears to echo recent comments by President Bush who advocates the use of technology to curb growth in greenhouse gas emissions rather than setting Kyoto-style caps on emissions. Bush believes Kyoto would threaten the U.S. economy even though many of his allies see it as a vital step to brake a rise in temperatures they fear could trigger more floods, storms, lift sea levels and drive thousands of species to extinction.

Using purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates, the IMF (2004b) calculates that the United States and China presently account, respectively, for 21 and 12½ percent of world GDP. Given 2003 and 2004 growth rates, this implies that the United States was responsible for roughly 16 percent of global growth in 2003 and 17 percent in 2004. The same kind of calculation for China reveals a higher contribution: 30 percent of global GDP growth in 2003 and 24 percent last year. Together, these two locomotives made up over 40 percent of the 2003–04 global expansion. Their joint contribution to global growth in 2003–04 is similar if we were to use market exchange rates as weights, but their relative contributions would be reversed; the US contribution would then be on the order of a third, while China’s contribution would fall to roughly a tenth. This reflects the facts that the US share of world GDP is somewhat higher with market exchange rates than with PPP exchange rates (29 percent versus 21 percent), while China’s share is much lower with market exchange rates than with PPP exchange rates (4 percent versus 12½ percent). If the relevant measuring rod is taken to be domestic demand growth (at market exchange rates), the US contribution to global (domestic demand) growth would still be slightly higher and China’s contribution would be slightly lower, since the United States has been running an increasing trade deficit whereas China has been running an increasing trade surplus. Turning to world trade, in 2004 the US share of world trade was 12½ percent, while China’s share was 6 percent (10 times the share China had in 1977). China alone accounted for more than 10 percent of global trade expansion in 2003–04, while the US contribution was 8 percent. Together, China and the United States supplied about one-fifth of global trade expansion during the past two years. These back-of-the-envelope estimates suggest that if China and the United States were to grow considerably slower over the next three years than they did during the last two, emerging economies would, ceteris paribus, face a less supportive global environment.

What really sticks in the craw of conventional journalists is that although individual blogs have no warrant of accuracy, the blogosphere as a whole has a better error-correction machinery than the conventional media do. The rapidity with which vast masses of information are pooled and sifted leaves the conventional media in the dust. Not only are there millions of blogs, and thousands of bloggers who specialize, but, what is more, readers post comments that augment the blogs, and the information in those comments, as in the blogs themselves, zips around blogland at the speed of electronic transmission. This means that corrections in blogs are also disseminated virtually instantaneously, whereas when a member of the mainstream media catches a mistake, it may take weeks to communicate a retraction to the public. This is true not only of newspaper retractions - usually printed inconspicuously and in any event rarely read, because readers have forgotten the article being corrected - but also of network television news. It took CBS so long to acknowledge Dan Rather’s mistake because there are so many people involved in the production and supervision of a program like ’’60 Minutes II’’ who have to be consulted. The charge by mainstream journalists that blogging lacks checks and balances is obtuse. The blogosphere has more checks and balances than the conventional media; only they are different. The model is Friedrich Hayek’s classic analysis of how the economic market pools enormous quantities of information efficiently despite its decentralized character, its lack of a master coordinator or regulator, and the very limited knowledge possessed by each of its participants. In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise - not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with almost no costs. It’s as if The Associated Press or Reuters had millions of reporters, many of them experts, all working with no salary for free newspapers that carried no advertising.

The argument for filtering is an argument for censorship. (That it is made by liberals is evidence that everyone secretly favors censorship of the opinions he fears.) But probably there is little harm and some good in unfiltered media. They enable unorthodox views to get a hearing. They get 12 million people to write rather than just stare passively at a screen. In an age of specialization and professionalism, they give amateurs a platform. They allow people to blow off steam who might otherwise adopt more dangerous forms of self-expression. They even enable the authorities to keep tabs on potential troublemakers; intelligence and law enforcement agencies devote substantial resources to monitoring blogs and Internet chat rooms. And most people are sensible enough to distrust communications in an unfiltered medium. They know that anyone can create a blog at essentially zero cost, that most bloggers are uncredentialed amateurs, that bloggers don’t employ fact checkers and don’t have editors and that a blogger can hide behind a pseudonym. They know, in short, that until a blogger’s assertions are validated (as when the mainstream media acknowledge an error discovered by a blogger), there is no reason to repose confidence in what he says. The mainstream media, by contrast, assure their public that they make strenuous efforts to prevent errors from creeping into their articles and broadcasts. They ask the public to trust them, and that is why their serious errors are scandals.

The back-to-back nature of the deadly attacks in Egypt and London, as well as similarities in the methods used, suggests that the al Qaeda leadership may have given the orders for both operations and is a clear sign that Osama bin Laden and his deputies remain in control of the network, according to interviews with counterterrorism analysts and government officials in Europe and the Middle East. Investigators on Saturday said that they believed the details of the bombing plots in Egypt and Britain -- the deadliest terrorist strikes in each country’s history -- were organized locally by groups working independently of each other. In Sharm el-Sheikh, where the death toll rose to 88 people, attention centered on an al Qaeda affiliate blamed for a similar attack last October at Taba, another Red Sea resort. In London, where 52 bystanders were killed in the subway and on a bus, police have identified three of the four presumed suicide bombers as British natives with suspected connections to Pakistani radicals.

Iran’s support for al-Qaeda is something of a mystery. Darling thinks it’s active support by certain factions. Ken Pollack has told me that it’s just a matter of Iran not wanting to deal with the problem and hence doing nothing. Dan seems more convincing on this question, but I really don’t know.

(Iraqi Prime Minister) Jaafari welcomed the signing of agreements to improve cooperation in areas ranging from security to Iraq’s serious shortage of refined fuel, as he prepared to board a plane for the northeastern city of Meshhad for closing talks with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

De omvang van de aanslag in de badstad aan de Rode Zee wijst er trouwens op dat daar een lange voorbereiding en coördinatie voor nodig was, met name ook op Egyptisch grondgebied. De ideologie die de harde jihadisten aankleven, vindt in Egypte steeds meer aanhangers en dat komt in de eerste plaats door de ellende en armoede waarin Hosni Moebarak zijn bevolking laat leven.

On a Windows Vista Web site, Microsoft says the new operating system will enable "a new level of confidence in your PC and in your ability to get the most out of it," introduce "clear ways to organize and use information the way you want to use it," and connect users "to information, people, and devices that help you get the most out of life."

ABC News reported in 1999 that Osama bin Laden had a “long relationship” with his “friend” Saddam Hussein, that he was “welcome in Baghdad,” that he tried to get enriched uranium from Saddam, and that he also asked for political asylum in Iraq. They even have a clip of Osama himself admitting he hoped to get enriched uranium from Saddam.

We are witnessing one of the greatest betrayals by the left since so-called left-wingers backed the Hitler-Stalin pact and opposed the war against Nazi fascism. Today, the pseudo-left reveals its shameless hypocrisy and its wholesale abandonment of humanitarian values. While it deplores the 7/7 terrorist attack on London, only last year it welcomed to the UK the Muslim cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who endorses the suicide bombing of innocent civilians. These same right-wing leftists back the so-called ’resistance’ in Iraq. This ’resistance’ uses terrorism against civilians as its modus operandi - stooping to the massacre of dozens of Iraqi children in order kill a few US soldiers. Terrorism is not socialism; it is the tactic of fascism. But much of the left doesn’t care. Never mind what the Iraqi people want, it wants the US and UK out of Iraq at any price, including the abandonment of Iraqi socialists, trade unionists, democrats and feminists. If the fake left gets its way, the ex-Baathists and Islamic fundamentalists could easily seize power, leading to Iranian-style clerical fascism and a bloodbath. I used to be proud to call myself a leftist. Now I feel shame. Much of the left no longer stands for the values of universal human rights and international socialism.

In the postwar years, South Korea and Taiwan had the good fortune to become, effectively, client states of the U.S. South Korea received huge infusions of aid, with which it rebuilt its economy after the Korean War. Between 1946 and 1978, in fact, South Korea received nearly as much U.S. aid as the whole of Africa. Meanwhile, the billions that Taiwan got allowed it to fund a vast land-reform program and to eradicate malaria. And the U.S. gave the Asian Tigers more than money; it provided technical assistance and some military defense, and it offered preferential access to American markets. Coincidence? Perhaps. But the two Middle Eastern countries that have shown relatively steady and substantial economic growth—Israel and Turkey—have also received tens of billions of dollars in U.S. aid. The few sub-Saharan African countries that have enjoyed any economic success at all of late—including Botswana, Mozambique, and Uganda—have been major aid recipients, as has Costa Rica, which has the best economy in Central America. Ireland (which is often called the Celtic Tiger), has enjoyed sizable subsidies from the European Union. China was the World Bank’s largest borrower for much of the past decade.

The Mezzogiorno (South of Italy) is a large macro-region of about 20.9 million inhabitants (36% of Italy) with a GDP of €220.2 billion (24% of Italy). Ireland is a much smaller region, of 3.8 million inhabitant and a GDP of €82 billion33. Between 1991 and 2000, Ireland grew on average by about 8% a year, while the Mezzogiorno grew by about only 1%. As a result, the per capita GDP of Ireland moved over the ten years from 77% to 116% of the EU average, while that of the Mezzogiorno remained between 74% and 69%. The GDP of an Irish resident in 2000 is about 168% of the GDP of a resident in the South of Italy, while, back in 1991, it was only 4% greater. According also to other economic and social indicators (unemployment, poverty, etc.), Ireland is often among the top performers with the Mezzogiorno often the weakest performer (e.g. see European Commission 2003c and 2001a). Funds per head effectively paid out by the EU cohesion policy were four times higher for Ireland than for the Mezzogiorno in 1991, 40% higher in 2000 and 25% lower in the period 2000-2006.

There is already some reports that Iraqis have begun to deploy crude WMD weapons against U.S. forces in Iraq. In the beginning of 2005, the Iraqi correspondent of Mafkarat al-Islam reported that fighters fired mortar rounds containing chemical substances at the U.S. al-Habbaniyah base. There has also been speculation that Iraqi guerrillas fired rockets loaded with Sarin gas at a US base near Falluja in February 2005. While neither of these reports have been confirmed, there can be little doubt that Iraq is still a repository of some WMD material, despite the fact that none have been found since the ouster of Saddam Hussein. In an ironic twist of catastrophic proportions the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq may result in exactly the kind of attack that it was purportedly designed to prevent in the first place; namely a WMD attack on U.S. interests by Iraqis.

In 1984, nearly 40% of the average New Zealand sheep and beef farmer’s gross income came from government subsidies. A year later, almost all of these subsidies were removed. New Zealand farmers were on their own, and remain so today in 2002. As they saw it at the time, New Zealand farmers were cut adrift by their government. Yet, more than 15 years later, the farming sector in New Zealand has grown and is more dynamic than ever. The intervening years have been a struggle for many, but now farmers are proud of their achievements. They remain without subsidies, earning their living by their own efforts without interference. Farmers now fiercely defend their independence. Where once farmers were treated with derision and scorn by the rest of the nation, now there is respect and even admiration. Much traditional animosity between town and country has gone.

Illicit sales of uranium from Niger were being negotiated with five states including Iraq at least three years before the US-led invasion, according to senior European intelligence officials. Intelligence officers learned between 1999 and 2001 that uranium smugglers planned to sell illicitly mined Nigerien uranium ore, or refined ore called yellow cake, to Iran, Libya, China, North Korea and Iraq. These claims support the assertion in the British government dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programme in September 2002 that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from an African country, confirmed later as Niger. George W. Bush, US president, referred to the issue in his State of the Union address in January 2003.

Freedom to Access Content.
First, consumers should have access to their choice of legal content. Consumers have come to expect to be able to go where they want on high-speed connections, and those who have migrated from dial-up would presumably object to paying a premium for broadband if certain content were blocked. Thus, I challenge all facets of the industry to commit to allowing consumers to reach the content of their choice. I recognize that network operators have a legitimate need to manage their networks and ensure a quality experience, thus reasonable limits sometimes must be placed in service contracts. Such restraints, however, should be clearly spelled out and should be as minimal as necessary.

Freedom to Use Applications.
Second, consumers should be able to run applications of their choice. As with access to content, consumers have come to expect that they can generally run whatever applications they want. Again, such applications are critical to continuing the digital broadband migration because they can drive the demand that fuels deployment. Applications developers must remain confident that their products will continue to work without interference from other companies. No one can know for sure which “killer” applications will emerge to drive deployment of the next generation high-speed technologies. Thus, I challenge all facets of the industry to let the market work and allow consumers to run applications unless they exceed service plan limitations or harm the provider’s network.

Freedom to Attach Personal Devices.
Third, consumers should be permitted to attach any devices they choose to the connection in their homes. Because devices give consumers more choice, value and personalization with respect to how they use their high-speed connections, they are critical to the future of broadband. Thus, I challenge all facets of the industry to permit consumers to attach any devices they choose to their broadband connection, so long as the devices operate within service plan limitations and do not harm the provider’s network or enable theft of service.

Freedom to Obtain Service Plan Information.
Fourth, consumers should receive meaningful information regarding their service plans.

Belgians suffering under a morass of contradictory, complicated or just plain absurd regulations have for two years had a place to make their complaints known: a Web site called Kafka, set up by their government. The rare flash of bureaucratic humor has had tangible results: a savings of $281 million over two years, Belgian officials said Friday. The site www.kafka.be was set up by the government in 2003, encouraging individuals and businesses to come up with examples of needless rules and regulations. It was named after Franz Kafka, the late Czech-German author who hated irrational authority and whose work defined the alienated modern world of the 20th century. This multi-ethnic nation of 10 million has mind-numbingly complex bureaucratic systems. The country is divided into 589 communes and run by a national government and six other separate governments representing the French, Dutch and German language groups and the Brussels, Walloon and Flanders regions. The man in charge of the Kafka initiative, Secretary of State for Administrative Simplification Vincent Van Quickenborne, said the millions in savings came from "alleviating some of the administrative burden imposed on citizens and entrepreneurs." Based on thousands of complaints, the government eliminated some outdated rules, such as one concerning the so-called "conform copies." For two centuries, official documents submitted to authorities had to be accompanied by a copy issued and stamped by an individual’s local district proving the authenticity of the original. Another regulation to be abolished by the end of the year is the obligation to validate a new driver’s license with a fiscal stamp — a form of an administrative fee — which can be only purchased at post offices, Van Quickenborne said.

In particular Dawa-oriented radical-Salafist organisations and networks from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states strongly emphasise ’re-Islamisation’ of the Muslim minorities in the West. These organisations include missionary, socio-cultural and finance organisations which claim not to be politically orientated or violent, but whose activities are often based upon extreme puritan, intolerant and strongly anti- Western ideas. Their efforts are purposefully aimed at encouraging Muslims in the West to turn their back on Western values and standards. They preach an extreme isolationism from Western society and propagate ’exclusivism’ and parallelism. In some cases they propagate the creation of fully Islamised districts in big cities in the West or even pursue parallel social structures in the form of autonomous Sharia areas, as a sort of enclaves foreshadowing the Umma. In the future the Umma is to spread across the whole world, including the West.

In the War on Terrorism headed by the United States following the attacks of 11 September, several relative successes have been achieved which were decisive for the present nature of the threat from international radical-Islamic terrorism. The dismantling of Al Qaeda’s infrastructural facilities in Afghanistan as well as the elimination or arrest of several of its foremost leaders have resulted in a fragmentation of Al Qaeda. As a result, its actual strength and organisational powers have been reduced. This has caused a decentralisation of international Islamic terrorism. There are no longer any global networks controlled by a central Al Qaeda leadership. Instead, local networks have emerged which are related on the basis of a common Al Qaeda ideology, rather than by organisational ties. Within the local networks in particular in the Western world (especially in Europe) Al Qaeda’s ideology is interpreted in an even more extremist way than by the Al Qaeda’s leadership itself. Often the actors in these networks are not really driven by strategic-tactical considerations; they see themselves as participants in a mythical, apocalyptic final battle with Evil (the Western world) in the context of which, in principle, all exponents of Evil (in fact any Western citizen) should be destroyed. This perception may lead to a willingness to participate in ruthless mass destruction. The willingness among members of local radical-Islamic networks in the Western world to use extreme violence is mainly fuelled by the part of Al Qaeda’s ideology that is based on the ideas of one of the founders of Al Qaeda, Abdallah Azzam (1941-1989). He contended that each Muslim individually has an obligation (’Fard ayn’) to wage an armed Jihad against the nonbelievers. Islam is threatened to such an extent that each Muslim individually (independently of a higher religious authority) is fully justified to engage in an armed Jihad. Local radical-Islamic networks in the Western world are also characterised by a further radicalisation of ideological thinking about Takfir (’branding as heretics’). In particular the ideas of Shukri Mustafa (1942-1978), the founder of the Takfir wal Hidjra (literally: ’branding as heretics and leaving’) movement have contributed to this further radicalisation. According to this movement, in effect all those who adhere to another faith (both non-Muslims and Muslims who, according to the Takfiri, do not adhere to the proper form of Islam) are nonbelievers who are to be combated. This means that, in effect, society as a whole is designated as a target.

Osama bin Laden’s standing has dropped significantly in some pivotal Muslim countries, while support for suicide bombings and other acts of violence has "declined dramatically," according to a new survey released yesterday. Predominantly Muslim populations in a sampling of six North African, Middle Eastern and Asian countries share to a "considerable degree" Western concerns about Islamic extremism, according to the poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, conducted by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan and nonprofit organization. "Most Muslim publics are expressing less support for terrorism than in the past. Confidence in Osama bin Laden has declined markedly in some countries, and fewer believe suicide bombings that target civilians are justified in the defense of Islam," the poll concluded. The one exception is attitudes toward suicide bombings of U.S and Western targets in Iraq, a subject on which Muslims were divided. Roughly half of Muslims in Lebanon, Jordan and Morocco said such attacks are justifiable, while sizable majorities in Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia disagreed. Yet, support for suicide bombings in Iraq still declined by as much as 20 percent compared with a poll taken last year. The results, which also reveal widespread support for democracy, show how profoundly opinions have changed in parts of the Muslim world since Pew took similar surveys in recent years. The poll attributed the difference in attitudes toward extremism to both the terrorist attacks in Muslim nations and the passage of time since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. (...) The poll results are a rare piece of good news for the Bush administration, which has faced difficulties seeing gains in its two top foreign policy goals -- combating terrorism and promoting democracy in the Islamic world. (...) The new poll also found that growing majorities or pluralities of Muslims now say that democracy can work in their countries and is not just a Western ideology. Support for democracy was in the 80 percent range in Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon and Morocco. It was selected by 43 percent in Pakistan and 48 percent in Turkey -- the largest blocks of respondents in both countries because significant numbers were unsure.

In the future, there will only be two sectors of the American economy: home developers who continually tear down old housing stock and replace it with bigger, better houses, and homeowners benefitting from leveraged investments in ever-rising real estate prices who keep this sector going. The enormous wealth created this way will allow us to maintain our lifestyle by importing inexpensive consumer goods and by outsourcing all other services.

Kan ik zelf ergens buiten Telenet een Digibox of Digicorder kopen, of misschien zelfs zelf ineen knutselen? Neen, dit kan en mag niet. Men zal de Digibox of Digicorder bij Telenet zelf dienen aan te schaffen.(...) Wanneer blijkt dat het toestel niet van Telenet afkomstig is, zal het niet geactiveerd worden.

Last week at the G8, President Bush restated his favorite global warming canard: that mandatory curbs on fossil fuel pollution will “cripple the U.S. economy.”

WELL, WHAT DOES HE THINK GLOBAL WARMING WILL DO TO THE ECONOMY!?!?

I wish there was an even bolder bold on this computer to emphasize how insane this logic is. Non-stop flooding, killer heat waves, energy and food shortages: what will these do to the economy?

The Kyoto Protocol makes little difference to rates of global warming and has a naive compliance mechanism, which can only deter countries from signing up to subsequent tighter emissions targets

There are several elements to the cost burden that the US would bear if it ratified Kyoto. First, it would have its own domestic emissions reduction programme and the costs of that would fall on industry, transport and households. The US judged early on that these costs would be unacceptable, but had always maintained that the prospect of acceptability would exist if there was widespread emissions trading. In the event, the Kyoto Protocol enabled various forms of trading: trades between rich nations based on allocated permits (cap and trade), project-based trades between (roughly) OECD countries and East Europe and Former Soviet Union (“joint implementation”), and project-based trades between OECD countries and developing countries (“Clean Development Mechanism”—CDM). Moreover, the US had already sponsored major efforts at joint implementation in order to learn how to operate such projects. Arguably, the limited prospects for extensive cap and trade systems (which is what the EU has developed), and the comparatively small role playable by joint implementation and the CDM, persuaded the US government that compliance costs to the US would be higher than they hoped.
Second, the US has been insistent that developing countries must quickly assume targets of their own. We noted above that this is a rational position to take since rates of warming cannot be adequately affected without this happening. The developing countries have always maintained that warming was not their responsibility. If the rich countries want to bring the developing countries on board, they might therefore have to pay for developing country reductions as well as their own. The Kyoto Protocol does have “flexibility mechanisms” which permit reductions in developing countries to be credited to developed economies provided the latter pay for them. But what the US may have feared was the prospect that the developing countries would maintain their “you not us” stance and eventually the US would have to become a major contributor to the costs of reducing emissions in developing countries, without emission credits being secured.
Third, “relative” cost matters, i.e. the burden on the US relative to the burden borne by others. Apart from any feelings about “unfairness” if others did not appear to bear as big a burden, there are concerns about competitiveness, and about impacts on specific sectors of the economy—not least oil and coal producers.
A fourth factor relates to the Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) that influenced the US government. These were primarily those that showed comparatively small global benefits from Kyoto (the work of Professors Nordhaus, Mendelsohn, Manne and Dr Richels). Thus the US was being asked to bear a “big” cost (as they saw it) for uncertain global benefit. The climate models themselves were showing little or no effect on rates of warming from Kyoto. However, a dominant feature of the minor impact of the Kyoto Protocol on warming is also the fact that developing country rates of growth of emissions are the fastest. President Bush clearly stated: “I oppose the Kyoto Protocol because it exempts 80% of the world, including major population centers such as China and India”. We offer this brief analysis of the position of the US not because we wish to defend that position, but in order to argue that there is an economic rationality to the stance taken. Failure to understand that rationality will misdirect efforts to bring the US into future negotiations in a more positive way. (...)
Finally, the US has repeatedly stressed the role of technological change in securing greenhouse gas emission reductions. While the Kyoto Protocol should, in principle, encourage technological change, we are not convinced that it has sufficient focus on this central issue.

1. Have the main headline about your electoral program be how much you’re going to raise taxes. Particularly VAT, which practically everybody pays on practically everything.

2. Face a knock-down drag-out fight with your prospective coalition partner over #1.

3. Have the two parties that make up your Union disagree about the basic approach to health care reform.

4. Present security plans that your prospective coalition partner says had been previously rejected for good reasons.

And that’s just the first 24 hours after the presentation of your campaign program.

The administration was and is right in thinking that the overthrow of Saddam’s regime could change the pattern of Middle Eastern politics in ways that, by favoring the cause of decent government and basic freedoms, would favor our interests as well. Iraq will not become Switzerland, a progressive and prosperous social democracy, for generations, if ever. But it can become a state that makes room for the various confessions and communities that constitute it, that has reasonably open and free politics, and that chooses a path to a future that could inspire other changes in the Arab Middle East. I still think something like that will happen. The administration believed that the invasion of Iraq would jolt and transform a region bewitched by the malignant dreams that my colleague Fouad Ajami has described so well -- the dark fantasies of Baathists, ultra-nationalists and religious fanatics. And indeed, in the aftermath of the Iraq war the cracks have begun to show -- in Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, and even in Syria and Saudi Arabia.

a pundit should not recommend a policy without adequate regard for the ability of those in charge to execute it, and here I stumbled. I could not imagine, for example, that the civilian and military high command would treat "Phase IV" -- the post-combat period that has killed far more Americans than the "real" war -- as of secondary importance to the planning of Gen. Tommy Franks’s blitzkrieg. I never dreamed that Ambassador Paul Bremer and Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the two top civilian and military leaders early in the occupation of Iraq -- brave, honorable and committed though they were -- would be so unsuited for their tasks, and that they would serve their full length of duty nonetheless. I did not expect that we would begin the occupation with cockamamie schemes of creating an immobile Iraqi army to defend the country’s borders rather than maintain internal order, or that the under-planned, under-prepared and in some respects mis-manned Coalition Provisional Authority would seek to rebuild Iraq with big construction contracts awarded under federal acquisition regulations, rather than with small grants aimed at getting angry, bewildered young Iraqi men off the streets and into jobs.

Today, the last caller on Radio 4’s ’Any Answers?’ said that we needed to look at the underlying causes of Muslim terrorism. He went on to talk about the Middle-East, how the West had oppressed the countries in this area for sixty years and how we had installed puppet governments. So which puppet governments would they be then? Hafez and Bashar Assad? Gaddafi? The House of Saud? Nasser and his successors? The leaders of the Arab states seized power themselves. They may have sought Western, or Soviet, sponsors once in power but they do not owe their positions to foreign action. This myth of Western colonialism is fostered by Arab leaders to divert attention away from their oppression of their own people. The Arab world is a shit-hole because their leaders have taken the oil wealth for themselves and used it to buy weapons to keep themselves in power. In that sense, it is very similar to the situation in Africa, except that Africa is poorer and has less money to syphon off. So how does the poverty of the masses in Arab states, a situation created by their own corrupt leaders, justify terrorist attacks on London? What is it that Britain should be doing to tackle these "underlying causes"? Should we invade these countries and help them get rid of their corrupt leaders? Oh hang on, we tried that and the dribbling liberals told us that this is a justification for Islamist terrorism too. Whatever mess the Arab states get themselves into, there will always be liberal apologists lining up to prove that it was the West’s fault. Whenever there is a terrorist attack, the same crew will appear to tell us about our part in "creating the circumstances for terrorism". They blind themselves to the facts and just trot out a load of senseless and illogical drivel. Who are these ignorant fools? How have their views become so prevalent? What makes people hate their own country so much that they can’t even condemn a terrorist attack without adding an apology for the perpetrators?

The issue is clearly one of balance. Most adaptation expenditures would be local, while mitigation requires action on a global scale. Few would suggest doing nothing by way of mitigation, and few would suggest no adaptation expenditures at all. But the policy literature seems to us to be overly focussed on mitigation. We therefore urge the Government to ensure that greater efforts are made to understand the relative costs and benefits of adaptation compared to those of mitigation.

First, labor intensive industries are a source of employment generation, especially for low wage labor. By rendering them uncompetitive, aid inflows could reduce a major avenue by which surplus agricultural labor is absorbed, and inequality and poverty reduced. Thus real appreciation induced by aid inflows could have side effects on distribution, as well as the previously documented effects on growth.
Second, aid inflows do alter the growth trajectory of a country – moving it away from export oriented labor intensive manufacturing. Apart from the foregone growth, this choice may also have spillover effects. Not only could these sectors be the source of productivity improvements or learning, these industries, which by necessity are on the efficiency frontier, could also be a strong political force pushing for sensible government policy to ensure their continued competitiveness. Their shrinkage (and we know that not just growth but also the share of labor intensive industries is lower in countries that receive more aid – estimates available from authors) could have wider repercussions.

I defy anyone to show that this tariff structure optimizes European welfare. More to the point, it’s just fantasy to expect this absurdity to be negotiated into something sane. Line-by-line negotiations will get us nowhere.
So here’s my suggestion for Blair and Brown. Forget negotiation. Fighting street-to-street on this won’t work. Why not just announce, unilaterally, that the UK will have no part in this absurdity, and will allow free imports from everywhere? This will give the rest of the EU three options.
1. They could do nothing, in which case their tariffs will become redundant as goods are freely imported to the UK and re-exported.
2. They could retaliate by imposing tariffs on the UK. This would show clearly to all Europeans that EU leaders want to impoverish Africa and harm European consumers in order to please their lobbyists and special interest groups.
3. Do the right thing, and follow the UK’s example.
If Blair and Brown were serious about wanting to help Africa (and indeed UK consumers) they’d do this today. Both are surely well aware of the text: "follow not a multitude to do evil."
Or do they prefer to just drool and drivel that they care, without actually doing anything?

Public bodies, in fear of litigation, act in highly risk-averse and peculiar ways. We have had a local authority removing hanging baskets for fear that they might fall on someone’s head, even though no such accident had occurred in the 18 years they had been hanging there.

Inspired by the need for Congress to be seen to do something dramatic, Sarbanes-Oxley has imposed the threat of criminal penalties on managers and substantial new costs on American business: an average of $2.4m extra for auditing for each company. The burden is especially heavy on smaller companies, the real risk-takers in the market. Firms with a revenue of less than $100m per annum now pay out more than 2.5% of turnover in compliance costs. Cumulatively the costs run into billions of dollars. There is a delicious irony in this which illustrates the unintended consequences of regulation. Sarbanes-Oxley has provided a bonanza for accountants and auditors, the very professions thought to be at fault in the original scandals.

if an old person falls on the floor, the regulations currently decree that the care worker cannot help them to their feet. They have to go and find some hoists before they can help. No doubt, most care-workers help anyway but if basic human acts of care like this are being prevented by intrusive regulation, it is absurd.

Volgens Hayek is de doorslaggevende politieke tweedeling deze tussen diegenen die voorstanders zijn van groter overheidsingrijpen en diegenen die de overheid zoveel mogelijk aan banden willen leggen. Hayek noemde de eerste groep socialisten en de tweede groep (klassiek-)liberalen. In de Amerikaanse politieke terminologie spreekt men echter van “liberals” voor de eerste groep en “conservatives” voor de tweede groep. Vandaar de verwarring, die soms verholpen wordt door de eerste groep links-liberalen en de tweede rechts-liberalen te noemen. Isaiah Berlin had het zelfs over twee vrijheidsbegrippen: de positieve vrijheid en de negatieve vrijheid. Negatieve vrijheid betekent de afwezigheid van staatsbemoeienis. Volgens Berlin is dit de ware vrijheid. Positieve vrijheid is de misvatting dat de staat de mens zou moeten bevrijden van de cultuur waarin hij is geboren. Het is het begrip vrijheid zoals dat ook door de communisten werd gebruikt. “Liberalisme is per definitie ontvoogdend, bevrijdend,” schrijft Van der Kelen. Het hangt er maar vanaf waarvan we bevrijd moeten worden: de staat of de moraal.

The inability of the LDCs to export to the developed-country market is largely (though, admittedly, not exclusively) the result of the supply-side constraints that are of their own making. The sooner we recognize this fact the more urgently will the countries and international institutions focus their attention on how best to overcome these constraints. Telling the countries that the developed countries are responsible for their woes may make one popular but it does the countries no good. It only encourages complacency towards domestic policy reform in these countries and without those reforms no amount of opening up by the developed countries will kick off growth.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That whenever any Form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundations upon such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

PRESIDENT BUSH yesterday challenged EU leaders to scrap massive subsidies paid to their farmers, saying free trade with Africa would eliminate the need for Third World aid. Mr Bush, on the eve of the G8 summit in Gleneagles, said that Europe paid “tremendous” agricultural subsidies, and that the US was ready to drop its own payouts to American farmers if Europe had the courage to do the same. Mr Bush’s challenge — in an interview with Sir Trevor McDonald to be screened by ITV tonight — is likely to be rejected not only by France and Germany, but by many in his own country. But it appeared to be a bold rhetorical step by his Administration to get the world’s richest nations away from talk of aid and toward free-market solutions in the quest to alleviate poverty in Africa. Asked directly if America would drop its subsidy system if the EU abandoned the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), Mr Bush said: “Absolutely. And I think we have an obligation to work together to do that. “Because if we do achieve this business of free trade, and if markets in the West are opened up to countries in Africa, they could be so successful, they could eliminate the need for aid. The benefits that have come from opening up markets — our markets to them and their markets to us — far outweigh the benefits of aid.” Mr Bush’s call to scrap agricultural subsidies in the developed world follows that of Tony Blair, who recently said the system of over-generous subsidies was “hypocrisy” that could no longer be ignored.

Government figures now show farmers in New Zealand to be the least subsidized and among the most productive among the countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Farming products, excluding forestry, earn more than 40 percent of New Zealand’s export income, and agriculture contributes about 17 percent to New Zealand’s gross domestic product.

Since farm subsidies were withdrawn in New Zealand, the number of sheep has dropped to about 40 million from 58 million, the number of dairy cows has risen to more than five million from 3.5 million, and deer stocks have risen 64 percent. Productivity has risen in each area.

Only 1 percent of farms went under, far less than the 10 percent predicted by the government at the time.

"It was the cost of doing business in New Zealand which was killing farmers, not the prices in the market," Ian Robb said. "The rest of New Zealand was trying to live at a standard which was above what the country could afford. For me, no country can subsidize their major export."

Federated Farmers of New Zealand, the leading farmers’ organization, has prepared a report, "Life After Subsidies," to show other countries contemplating an end to subsidies that there is nothing to fear.

"As they saw it at the time," the report says, "New Zealand farmers were cut adrift by their government. Yet, the farming sector in New Zealand has grown and is more dynamic than ever. The intervening years have been a struggle for many, but now farmers are proud of their achievements."

Ian Ewen-Street, agriculture spokesman for the Greens Party of New Zealand, himself a farmer, said that any attempt to bring back subsidies would face intense opposition, led by farmers.

"Even as a Green," he said, "when I look at the U.S. and Europe, with subsidies up, I wonder why we can do it and others can’t."

The widely differing views of China were vividly evident in 2001 when military and Wall Street officials came together at the World Trade Center in New York to share thoughts on the impact of China’s economic and military rise. The organizer, Thomas Barnett, then a teacher at the U.S. Naval War College, hoped to bring the two constituencies closer together. Instead, their opposing views were reinforced. Mr. Barnett, now a writer and consultant, says the Wall Street participants concluded, "’When I think of the security issues I realize how a strategic partnership with China is all the more imperative,’ and the military guys would say, ’Wow, realizing all the economic competition, war with China is that much more inevitable.’"...

Mr. Barnett argues that most of Asia’s economic success stories had, in effect, one-party government as China does today: Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan. Today, all are important trading partners and pro-U.S. Meantime, North Korea, which cut itself off from the world, is mired in poverty and is one of the U.S.’s chief antagonists.

I asked in passing whether there was a single thing the state does better than the private sector, where comparisons are possible.

Phil Hunt at the Sharpener points to two things: the quality of the BBC’s websites (not its TV programmes), and the “state-developed Internet network and the state-developed World-Wide Web hypertext system.”

I had thought my rhetorical question was rather over-stated. But these examples do little to undermine it.

The quality of the BBC’s websites is due to two things: the vast amount of money that’s been spent on them, and the beneficial effect of competition from other sites. Pound-for-pound, it’s not clear that the BBC’s sites are so superior to other ones.

Nor does the development of the internet greatly undermine my argument. It was not simply “state-developed.” Yes, Darpa provided a lot of the early demand. But the development of the internet was a team effort. It was certainly not an achievement of the state, in the sense that politicians took the lead. This paper says:

Not only US projects were involved in the beginnings of the Internet. Not only government funded US research programs were involved in the beginnings of the Internet. Not only telcos and the commercial sector were involved in the beginnings of the Internet. Neither Arpanet nor TCP/IP is present in all valid theories.We conclude that any claim by a nation, project, person, or team of individuals, or participants in any single event to "the beginnings of the Internet" is wrong.

What’s more, many of the “fathers of the internet”, such as JCR Licklider, got their ideas in private firms or private universities. That’s an example of the message of this research, that private universities are better than state ones at developing commercially useful technologies than state ones.

The message I’d take from these examples is that the state can do some good but only when it doesn’t behave like a state – that is, when it abandons hierarchical command and control structures in favour of loose networks and when it exposes itself to competition.

It’s an open question whether Live Aid did more harm or good. As David Rieff explains in the British magazine Prospect, organizations involved in delivering relief became complicit in the Ethiopian government’s Stalinist program of forced agricultural collectivization and relocation, which helped create the disaster. Today, Ethiopia is significantly poorer than it was 20 years ago, and, as David Plotz explained in this 2003 dispatch, perpetually dependent on charity. This is, sadly, the story of aid to sub-Saharan Africa as a whole. While the developed world has contributed more than $500 billion over the last 40 years, Africans have continued to fall farther behind.

Expanded trade, by contrast, offers significant hope for African economic progress. Growth prospects in most sub-Saharan African countries depend on greater access to heavily protected textile and agricultural markets in the developed world. Unfortunately, Africa advocates wearing white wristbands (including Tony Blair) aren’t arguing for free trade. They’re calling for something called "trade justice." Make Poverty History, the group behind the armbands, contends that developed countries should drop agricultural subsidies and remove barriers to African imports without insisting that African countries open their markets. One-way protectionism may be an improvement on the two-way kind, but it won’t jump-start stagnant economies. To secure foreign investment and grow, African nations need trade in two directions. And for that, they need to be pushed to reduce both the bureaucratic obstacles and endemic corruption that deter businesses, both domestic and foreign.

At the moment, the most promising model appears not to be government-to-government grant-making, but a new style of targeted, goal-driven, private philanthropy. To take the most significant example, the Gates Foundation has spent more than $4 billion, with tremendously encouraging results, to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other infectious diseases, primarily in Africa. It ruthlessly scrutinizes and evaluates its own programs in a way governments seldom do, with the aim of directing additional money where it has the best chance of success.