Mitch's Ramblings

2003-04-06T15:10:00.000-04:00

Haven't posted in a while. Just don't care to right now. Maybe I'm finished with this blog, maybe not. Time will tell.

2003-03-12T18:09:00.000-05:00

Governor McGreevey is going to have to explain himself better if he wants the Democrats to have a chance in this November's election, and if he wants to be re-elected. All of the previous scandals were bad, but I think this takes the cake.

For those who don't know about this, or aren't from New Jersey: Right before Governor McGreevey took office, in January 2002, the state parole board denied parole for a guy named Angelo Prisco. Prisco is said to be a capo in the Genovese crime family and the head of its New Jersey branch. His lawyer just happened to work for a firm that was a top fund-raiser for Governor McGreevey and state Democrats. In May 2002, the parole board changed its mind and decided to let Prisco go, even though he had served less than half his term. Recently, this story has become public. State and Federal prosecutors are now investigating the "very unusual" circumstances of Prisco's release. Republicans are demanding more investigation into what happened. McGreevey recently made an angry speech denying any inappropriate behavior by himself or his lieutenant (who has also been criticized). The speech reminded me of one of ex-Senator Bob Torricelli's speeches during his own meltdown, and it appears to have made the Governor's situation worse.

I'm a loyal Democrat. I was happy that we won the last election. I even think McGreevey's much-criticized budget is fairly good, if I accept his idea that breaking the no new taxes pledge would be politically disasterous. But this sort of thing really disgusts me. I hope McGreevey was not responsible for Prisco's release, because right now I feel like my Governor is no different from Assemblyman Zellman in the Sopranos.

2003-03-12T13:53:00.000-05:00

I usually tell people that I like Washington Monthly. But I just read this article, and it stinks. I don't know how they can publish this garbage.

The article says that the best way to improve the economy and make people happier would be to increase creativity. Great. It says that only about 30% of people are in creative jobs, and the rest should be brought in from the cold. Great. But it doesn't say how this should be done. For example, the author's first specific prescription for government policy deals with education. Look at what he says:

First, we need an education system that develops and harnesses the creative talent of all our people. The current K-12 system is a vestige of the old mass-production age and is beyond tinkering with. The current education reform movement is laudable, but must be taken to its logical conclusion. No one wants to admit this openly, but we're already headed toward effective federal government takeover of troubled public schools. It was George W. Bush, after all, who passed the most federally intrusive education bill in American history, the No Child Left Behind Act. Only a national strategy can repair the now broken connection between good local schools and regional prosperity.

Education reform must also, at its core, make schools into places where human creativity is cultivated and can flourish. With the same zeal that schools and communities across the United States have embraced athletics and fitness, they now need to embrace creativity. We revel in the legendary stories of young creators like Michael Dell building new businesses in dorm rooms, or in the garage, in their spare time. The question to ask is: Why are they doing these things in their spare time? Isn't this the real stuff of education in the creative age? One person I interviewed told me that he'd bought his kids drums and guitars, and encouraged them to form a band, just because he thought it might keep them home at night and out of trouble. He'd never imagined, he said, that they would go on to learn useful skills by looking for and booking gigs and then producing and marketing their CDs. This kind of activity needs to be encouraged in schools.

Now, does anybody notice that besides an extremely vague suggestion of more federal control over education, he doesn't really propose anything specific to increase creativity or creative education?

He never gives any specific suggestions as to how to move more people into creative jobs. This flaw wouldn't be so bad, except that it's a terribly long article. And I don't even think he made such a good case for moving more people into "creative" jobs. So why did the Washington Monthly publish this article?

2003-03-04T19:45:00.000-05:00

I support a war in Iraq, because I think it is less bad than any alternative. But the situation in Iraq doesn't worry me more than all other threats. The situation with North Korea is genuinely frightening. I've been very worried that Kim Jong Il isn't sane and reasonable enough to avoid war. But another thing that worries me, and gets far less attention, is Pakistan's possession of nuclear weapons, and the possibility that the government of that country might fall to Taliban-style fundamentalists. This scary BBC story says that the main Pakistani Islamist party is praising the captured Al Qaida number 3 man, Khalid Shaikh Muhammed, as a "hero of Islam".

2003-03-04T18:28:00.000-05:00

I've never been a big fan of Nick Kristof columns. Maybe I'm put off by his (in my opinion incorrect) belief that China is going to overtake the US economically. But anyway, I just read his column today. As I'm reading it, it seems like he has a somewhat mocking tone towards evangelical Christians. This didn't bother me, and I've read things like it before. He said this:

President Bush has said that he doesn't believe in evolution (he thinks the jury is still out). President Ronald Reagan felt the same way, and such views are typically American. A new Gallup poll shows that 48 percent of Americans believe in creationism, and only 28 percent in evolution (most of the rest aren't sure or lean toward creationism). According to recent Gallup Tuesday briefings, Americans are more than twice as likely to believe in the devil (68 percent) as in evolution.

In its approach to evangelicals, the national news media are generally reflective of the educated elite, particularly in the Northeast. It's expected at New York dinner parties to link crime to deprived childhoods — conversation would stop abruptly if someone mentioned Satan.

So ok, he's writing a column to tell educated northeastern liberals about who evangelical Christians are, and he's doing it in the sort of tone that educated northeastern liberals would use in private conversations. But then he says this:

But liberal critiques sometimes seem not just filled with outrage at evangelical-backed policies, which is fair, but also to have a sneering tone about conservative Christianity itself. Such mockery of religious faith is inexcusable. And liberals sometimes show more intellectual curiosity about the religion of Afghanistan than that of Alabama, and more interest in reading the Upanishads than in reading the Book of Revelation.

Now I really have no problem with him saying either of these two things. Honestly, these aren't issues that I care about very deeply. I'd much rather discuss health insurance, taxes, foreign policy, etc. But I'm annoyed by the apparent contradiction. It's like he's criticizing what he just wrote a few paragraphs ago. Or like he's trying to have it both ways. For evangelicals and their defenders, he writes how bad insulting evangelicals is. But for his secular liberal friends, Kristof makes it clear that he understands very well why they don't like evangelicals. Am I missing something here?

2003-03-04T18:09:00.000-05:00

I haven't posted in a while, because I've been busy. But this story in the "liberal" New York Times forced my hand.

"Bush's Goal for Medicare: Good Doctor-Patient Relationship
The president offered a vision today of full coverage of prescription drugs and preventive services."

Why couldn't they have used a more honest headline? The article doesn't mention anything that Bush is doing that would improve doctor-patient relationships. He simply used that phrase multiple times in a speech before the AMA. The article does say that Bush is proposing some sort of prescription drug plan. But what does that have to do with doctor-patient relations? The headline could have been something like: "Bush Pushes for Medicare Changes". That would have been an honest, unbiased headline.

But wait. Doesn't Mickey Kaus say that the Times is a liberal paper? So I've gotta be wrong.

2003-02-22T18:16:00.000-05:00

I had wanted to read this story about the McWane pipe company when it first came out, and now I have. It's shocking. I find it difficult to believe that 19th century capitalism, the sort of thing I read about in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, is still alive and well in America. Here are some illustrative quotes:

To keep up production, McWane eliminated one of three shifts; instead of three shifts of eight hours, there were two 12-hour shifts. At the end of a shift, supervisors often marched through yelling, "Four more hours!" So employees worked 16-hour days, sometimes seven days a week.

and

Workers are covered with black residue from the foundry sand. Many work areas are dark, due to poor lighting and clouds of sand. Despite all the ignition and fuel sources, exit paths are not obvious. Many workers have scars or disfigurations which are noticeable from several feet away. Burns and amputations are frequent.

and

But it was not until pumpkin heads started showing up with electronic monitoring bracelets that people realized the company was recruiting at Texas prisons. Many of the newly released prisoners did not last. They worked up to 16 hours a day, sometimes for 14 days straight, then were fired or quit before they qualified for benefits or union protection.

According to interviews and company documents, turnover at times approached 100 percent. Many rookie employees got hurt and left. It was a vicious cycle: injuries fueled turnover; turnover fueled injuries.

The plant was filled with workers who barely knew their way around, let alone grasped the dangers they faced. In April 1996, a crew of outside contract workers was sent up onto the roof to clean gutters. One worker, Juan Jimenez, stepped through a skylight and plunged 55 feet to his death.

and

His maintenance crew had finished work on a production line and, hurrying to get out of the way, cut through a molding machine. The line started up, and Jerry Hopson was crushed by a hydraulic piston. A year later, after more than 20 operations, he died.

"He was just a swell feller," his brother, the former union president, said, brushing back tears. In the local paper, a plant executive had called Jerry Hopson "a good man who made a very big mistake." But Bobby Hopson insisted that senior supervisors were well aware of the shortcut and its hazards, yet made no effort to stop its use.

"If you lose a minute, you've already lost, you know, maybe a fitting or two," he said.

and

The question was what to do with a pile of 200 old tires. It would have cost about $750 to have them hauled away to a hazardous waste dump. But company documents show that Mr. Stoker had another solution, even though he had been told that it violated state air-quality laws.

"He wanted the tires burned and he wanted them burned now," an internal company document stated. And so they were, in the cupola. Buckets of contaminated grease disappeared the same way, workers said.

What happens if an employee doesn't keep an injury secret?

As many companies do, McWane insists that injured workers return to work as soon as possible on "modified duty." Mr. Page described modified duty as a beneficial program that speeded recovery. At Tyler Pipe, though, records and interviews show that modified duty often meant humiliating and punitive jobs like cleaning toilets.

it goes on...

At Atlantic States Cast Iron Pipe, the McWane plant in Phillipsburg, N.J., residents have complained about pollution for decades. Local newspapers reported that crossing guards near the plant once had to wear gas masks. Since 1995, the plant has been found in violation of state and local environmental rules and emission limits more than 150 times. It has paid or faces more than $3 million in fines. Even so, regulators still consider it one of the state's worst polluters.

I could have gone on and on, because pretty much the whole long article is made up of frightening factoids like the ones above. But is any of this necessary to compete, or is the McWane family simply evil? The way that the Acipco company does business suggests the latter:

Acipco, as workers and managers there describe it, is a place where safety and a clean environment are not captive to the demands of production. Workers take yoga classes in a modern health club with the latest in weight-training equipment and a spring-loaded floor for aerobics. They get cash bonuses if they keep their cholesterol down. The company has even spent millions of dollars to install special air-conditioned booths in the hottest parts of the plant.

`"We had people say, `You're crazy, that won't work. Why are you doing that?'" the company's president and chief executive, Van L. Richey, said. But they did it, he said, and productivity increased.

Just this week, Acipco was ranked sixth in Fortune magazine's list of the 100 best employers in America. Acipco, in short, sounds almost like a caricature of blue-collar paradise. But it also strongly suggests that the McWane way is not the only way to survive, and succeed, in the dangerous and increasingly competitive business of making cast-iron pipe.

2003-02-18T21:21:00.000-05:00

I often get worried when I hear the latest government warnings of terrorist attacks. Orange alert, stuff like that. Cable news tends to be scary. But then I read stories like this one, about the tragedy in South Korea, where some nutjob arsonist killed at least 120 people, and I wonder, "Why haven't the terrorists been able to do anything in the US since Sept. 11?" You'd think that Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups would have been able to do something that killed a lot of people. Maybe not on the scale of September 11, but one or two attacks in the US like this attack in Korea would have scared everyone. I can think of only three reasons why the terrorists haven't done a similar attack in the US. One is that the US government has stopped all the planned attacks. Another is that there are hardly any terrorists in the whole country. The last reason I can think of is that the terrorists are just stupid, and haven't thought of any of the dozens of easy ways to kill lots of people, and are instead focused on doing a difficult attack with something like ricin or a dirty bomb.

I don't believe the government security agencies are competent enough to have stopped lots of terrorist attacks. Maybe a few, but not many. So that means that either Al Qaeda is much smaller than the public has been led to believe, or is really stupid.

2003-02-17T22:31:00.000-05:00

This chilling story about North Korea implies that the people there really do believe the propaganda they are subjected to.

But every year, a million North Koreans, about 5 percent of the population, go through the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum in Pyongyang, where exhibits indicate that the United States attacked North Korea.

and

Indoctrination here is so deep that when five Japanese citizens returned to Japan last fall, 25 years after they had been kidnapped by North Korea, the Japanese government had to resort to a cult deprogrammer to get them to abandon plans to return to Pyongyang.

and, most frighteningly,

Kim Chong Duk, a North Korean band manager, argued here today with South Koreans that the sole obstacle for uniting the two Koreas into a nation of 63 million people was the presence of American troops on the peninsula. "The South must expel that presence," he said. "Only then will it be possible to unify."

Apparently, posters like the ones on the right work.

2003-02-17T20:28:00.000-05:00

I'm a bit worried about how this is going to turn out...

2003-02-16T19:54:00.000-05:00

There has been a lot of discussion recently about problems with medical malpractice insurance, but most of it has blamed greedy lawyers, as opposed to, you know, actual medical malpractice. I just saw a story on 60 Minutes about one huge case of malpractice. It told the story of Dr. Moon. Dr. Moon told patients left and right that they needed heart bypasses, even though nothing was wrong with them. Eventually, the FBI raided his office, and Dr. Moon isn't prescribing any more heart bypasses or anything else, but hundreds of people got unnecessary and dangerous surgery. No co-workers said anything for years, even though the story made it clear that they believed Dr. Moon prescribed unnecessary surgeries.

The story didn't make any connection between guys like Dr. Moon and malpractice suits, or between Dr. Moon's co-workers' silence and malpractice suits. It should have. I'm not sure about whether some type of ceiling on malpractice suit payments is a good idea, but I do think that cases like that of Dr. Moon show us that the medical community needs to do a better job of policing itself.

2003-02-16T15:16:00.000-05:00

Via CalPundit, I read that the Republicans are going to raise five times as much hard money as the Democrats in 2004. It looks like we're going to need the ketchup money to stand a chance...

2003-02-13T22:05:00.000-05:00

It looks like President Bush has forgotten Afghanistan.

2003-02-13T22:01:00.000-05:00

I'd like to recommend to anyone who reads this (anyone?) a tv show I first saw a few weeks ago. It's called Penn & Teller: Bull! It features Penn, Teller, and a healthy dose of skepticism. In the two shows I've seen, they take down psychics like John Edward and that Von Praagh guy, and show how stupid non-medical health care like magnet therapy and chiropractic treatments are. The show is funny and enlightening. I hope more people watch it. Today's episode, on at 10:05, is supposed to feature alien abductions.

The only problem I can think of about this show is that I don't see how they can find enough quack ideas to make it into a regular series. I've read that they've signed up for 13 episodes, but I don't see how they could do more, even if the ratings are good. How many popular quack ideas are out there? There are lots of weird ideas, but most of them aren't very well known.

2003-02-13T12:32:00.000-05:00

Not a crisis, not a crisis, not a crisis...

2003-02-13T11:38:00.000-05:00

Ahh, the liberal New York Times. Always sure to give a fair hearing to liberals' points of view. At least that's what Mickey Kaus says. Here in the real world, the Times publishes stories like this one: "Long Lines Mar Canada's Low-Cost Health Care"

This is another story suggesting that Canada's burning. It says that waiting times for treatment are too long. To back it up, it seems to get its facts from the right-wing Fraser Institute. It even produced a nice graph, titled "Universal Health Care's Downside"..

There are four problems with this story. One is that you shouldn't trust anything the Fraser Institute says. Like its compatriots in America, when the Fraser Institute does a study, it is not troubled by distorting the truth or even outright lying in order to prove the conclusion that it had already come to before doing any research at all. This does not mean that everything the Fraser Institute, or the Cato Institute, or the Heritage Foundation say is always wrong, but it does mean that they cannot be trusted to provide reliable information. The late Steve Kangas gave a very good explanation as to what right wing think tanks are here. Unfortunately, Kangas appears to me to have gone crazy before he killed himself, and started writing conspiracy stories. But the writings on the weblog of the very un-crazy Brad DeLong seems to confirm exactly what Steve Kangas said about right wing think tanks.

Another problem is that it doesn't compare waiting periods in Canada with other advanced countries, especially the United States. Even if you accept the Fraser Institute's data, how does that compare with the United States? Yes, I know that there are no waits in the US if you have unlimited cash to spend. But what about normal people, who have mediocre HMOs? What about the uninsured, or people on Medicaid? The article doesn't say. Maybe Canada has the shortest waits in the world, or the longest? But without knowing, the raw numbers are fairly meaningless.

Yet another problem is that the article strongly implies that the waits (if they exist) are a serious medical problem, without providing any medical or statistical evidence. Instead, it talks about people's comfort with waiting. For example, the article includes this quote:

"Your worst fear is it is going to grow while you are waiting," said Pat McMeekin, a 53-year-old hospital clerical worker, recalling the two months she had to wait between a mammogram and the first of two biopsies confirming she had breast cancer last summer. "When you have something, you want to take care of it and be done with it."

The problem with this is that the psychology of patients has very little to do with actual medical outcomes. What is the difference in breast cancer survival rates between Americans and Canadians? I don't know, but I do know that Pat McMeekin says that she felt afraid.

Also, even if Canada's system is lousy compared to America's (which isn't true), does that condemn all universal health care systems? I have heard that France's system has virtually no waits, and everyone gets excellent care. It also costs a lot less than America's system. What about other countries? My point is that if Canada's system works better than the US system (which is does), then that shows that a universal health care system can improve health care in the US. But if Canada's system is bad, all it shows is that Canada's system is bad. Maybe another country has a better universal system that we should adopt. Maybe not. But it doesn't prove that universal health is always bad.

Meanwhile, the OECD has real statistics (which the Times reporter didn't care about). It says that in the year 2000, the US spent $4631, while Canada spent $2535 on health care. And as a percentage of GDP, the US spent 13%, while Canada spent 9.1%. Then there's life expectancy. Portugal, Slovak Republic, Turkey, Poland, Mexico, South Korea, Hungary, Czech Republic each have a lower life expectancy for males than the US. We're tied with Ireland and Finland. Everyone else beats us, often by about 4 years. I didn't bother checking females, because I'm sure the ranking of each country would be about the same as for males. (I'm actually somewhat surprised that France beat us by a few years, because so many more people smoke there.) Then there's infant mortality. Time spent in hospitals for acute care. Acute care beds per 1000 people. And on and on and on. Go to the OECD site to see for yourself.

But the Times says that Canada's health care system is bad,
and it must be true,
for the New York Times is a liberal paper.

2003-02-11T18:53:00.000-05:00

NBC news just did a piece on single-payer healthcare. It was mostly fair. It attempted to be even-handed by spending time noting the waiting lists for treatment. It also said that Canadians paid higher taxes. It didn't note that Canada spends half of what the US spends on health care. But it was basically a positive piece. I'm very surprised. I would have expected a story suggesting that "Canada's Burning".

What appears to be a transcript of the story is here.

2003-02-11T18:40:00.000-05:00

I'm reading ABC's the Note now. It says Bob Graham is going to run for President. And I just read Howard Kurtz' column, which says that Dennis Kucinich is going to run. There have been rumors that Gary Hart will run. I don't know what's up with this race. How is it going to play out with so many people running? Will any of the candidates be able to get a message out? And who would this help? My guess is that it would help Joe Lieberman, because he has the best name recognition. But what if John Kerry spends the ketchup money? This looks like it's going to be a very competitive race.

2003-02-07T10:22:00.000-05:00

For the second time in the past year, rebel troops are approaching the Liberian capital. I like this quote from the Times article:

Mr. Taylor, returning from a summit meeting of African leaders, invited the rebels to peace talk and swore he would not surrender. "We do not see how anyone can come to power by violence and force of arms," said the president, who came to power after a brutal seven-year war.

2003-02-07T08:45:00.000-05:00

Today's New York Times has an article about the Presidential candidates and the South Carolina economic boycott to oppose the Confederate flag. It had one amusing part that illustrates what Dick Gephardt stands for:

Mr. Gephardt switched speeds on the issue of the flag itself. After first declining to take a position on it, he issued a statement the next day saying he had been "too cautious in stating my views in regard to the Confederate flag."

"The Confederate flag is a hurtful, divisive symbol and in my view, has no place flying anywhere in any state in this country," he said.

2003-02-06T20:40:00.000-05:00

I'm reading a great article in the Economist. It talks about the difference in living standards between the US and Europe. When I read this part:

Mr Gordon does not stop there. After adjusting GDP per head for extra leisure time, he then attacks GDP itself. Mr Gordon argues that GDP comparisons tend to overstate America's living standards and understate Europe's. For example, America's climate is more extreme than western Europe's, so more has to be spent on air conditioning and heating to attain a given indoor temperature. This extra spending boosts GDP, but does not enhance welfare. More of America's GDP is also spent on home and business security—largely because of a higher crime rate. In most of Europe, such spending is less necessary. The huge cost of keeping 2m people in American prisons (a far bigger proportion of the population than in Europe) also bolsters America's GDP relative to Europe's, but not its welfare.

Another factor is the greater dispersion of America's population in vast, sprawling metropolitan areas with few transport options other than the car. This is partly the result not of private choice but of public policy, such as subsidies to suburban motorways and a starving of public transport, or local zoning laws that limit the minimum size of residential developments. It leads to higher spending on roads and energy, and hence higher GDP. In Europe the convenience of more compact cities and frequent train and bus transport does not count towards GDP figures.

it made me think of this Robert Kennedy quote, one of my favorites:

For too long we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community value in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product now is over 800 billion dollars a year, but that gross national product, if we judge the United States of America by that, that gross national product counts air pollution, and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic squall. It counts Napalm, and it counts nuclear warheads, and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our city. It counts Whitman's rifles and Speck's Knifes and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet, the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play; it does not include the beauty of our poetry of the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate for the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country it measures everything in short except that which makes life worth while. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

The article concludes with this:

...Europe's living standards are now perhaps only 8% behind America's, he suggests, not the 23% suggested by official data. Indeed, on Mr Gordon's broader measure, Europeans' productivity may have overtaken that of their poor American cousins.

2003-02-04T19:07:00.000-05:00

I wrote this in the comments to a posting at Matthew Yglesias's site:

The shuttle is a symptom of the wrong priorities for Nasa. It's a pork program that has very little to do with advancing human spaceflight. Its existence simply blocks research into far better technologies. If you believe in manned spaceflight, like I do, the shuttle is worse than nothing.

The number one priority for Nasa ought to be doing things that time is running out for. An example of this is the probe to Pluto, which needs to be sent before 2006 or it won't get there before Pluto's atmosphere freezes. The number two priority ought to be to make human spaceflight as cheap as possible, so that private individuals can make money there, universities can do their own science research in space, and tourists can visit. I don't mean that Nasa should simply build a marginally more efficient, safer shuttle and go on like it has. Nasa should try to get the technology to the point where Nasa doesn't need to exist. So it should be spending billions every year simply researching launch technologies- not with an aim to build a vehicle within a short period of time, but to get space technology really practical eventually. "Science", which includes things like Mars probes, the space shuttle, and the ISS, should be a distant third. There is no reason why these things can't wait until we've made some progress with priority number two.

2003-02-03T20:41:00.000-05:00

From Talkingpointsmemo, I found two excellent Gregg Easterbrook articles about the US space program and the shuttle. I'm not sure if I agree with them entirely, but I wanted to save the links.

2003-01-25T16:44:00.000-05:00

Bush is going to announce in his State of the Union speech his intention to privatize Medicare. This worries me far more than his terrible tax cut plan or anything else. It moves us in completely the opposite direction of where we need to go.

Conservatives complain that the media is biased against them. They haven't had any sort of liberal bias for this story. Maybe it's because most reporters don't understand health policy. Whatever it is, here is how Associated Press reporter Jennifer Loven described Bush's plan to privatize Medicare:

The president also plans to announce next week broad outlines of his proposed changes in the nation's health care system, including a plan to modernize Medicare while adding some prescription drug coverage.

That's the way she chose to describe it. "Modernize Medicare". She didn't use a more neutral phrase, such as "change Medicare" or "change the structure of the Medicare program". If she said something like that, it wouldn't have been a biased phrase. She could also have added that the plan is controversial. "Democrats say that the plan will lead to benefit cuts for seniors, shift risk to the poor, and reduce efficiency in the Medicare program." She could have said that. It wouldn't have been a liberal bias, simply covering both sides. Instead, all we get is "Modernize Medicare".

2003-01-17T19:55:00.000-05:00

I disagreed with the Bush administration's decision to impose steel tariffs. So did pretty much every economist I read online, and every non-economist I read online. So I was surprised when I recently saw two stories, one in The Economist, one in Slate, that basically imply that the steel tariffs might have worked- they might have saved the US steel industry. The US steel industry is staying in business, becoming more productive, and consolidating, instead of simply expanding production to take advantage of the temporary high steel prices caused by the tariffs. I'm not sure what to think about this.

2003-01-17T19:42:00.000-05:00

"NASA Sets Its Sights on Nuclear Space Rocket"

What about Warp Drive?

2003-01-13T19:55:00.000-05:00

It looks like the dictator of Zimbabwe may finally be going.

2003-01-10T19:15:00.000-05:00

This BBC story makes it looks like time is running out for Hugo Chavez.

"[The army] must prepare plans to take military control of the food factories and stocks," he told supporters on Friday, according to the news agency AFP.

2003-01-10T17:57:00.000-05:00

I just read an interesting story in Time Asia. It talks about the possibility that North Korea might collapse. The story begins and ends with the sad story of Jae Young, a young North Korean who fled to China so that he could earn enough money to fulfill his dream of buying his parents a bowl of corn soup.

2003-01-08T08:46:00.000-05:00

There's an interesting chart in the Economist. It lists growth in per capita income among rich countries over the past few years. The results might be somewhat surprising. The US is in the middle of the chart, with growth of about 2%. Other countries with faster annual growth of per capita income include France, Sweden, Canada, Finland (with more than 3% annual growth!), and others.

2003-01-04T11:44:00.000-05:00

I just changed back to the old template. I hope the fonts work properly now.

2003-01-03T21:11:00.000-05:00

Why don't the fonts work correctly in this template?

2003-01-03T21:10:00.000-05:00

I just read a hilarious prediction of the new year at Daily Kos. It's the funniest thing I've read in a very long time. Here's just a few small parts:

March 10 The U.S. economy continues its downward spiral, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average falls to 38.67 – a 106-year low. President Bush unveils his 12th economic stimulus package of the year, calling for a new “lactation excise tax” on low-income mothers. Revenues would be used to finance total repeal of the corporate income tax.

March 11 Democratic leaders endorse Bush’s lactation tax proposal, but suggest a partial exemption for mothers under the age of 16, to be funded by a 0.0000000001% increase in the top federal marginal rate.

March 12 A Wall Street Journal editorial accuses the Democrats of waging “Maoist-style class warfare.” Democratic leaders immediately abandon their tax plan.

and

Sep. 9 The Democratic Party announces that “for the good of the country,” it is disbanding.

Sep. 16 Administration officials reveal that the newly created Department of Homeland Security has been renamed the Ministry of Love, while the White House press office has been upgraded to cabinet rank and renamed the Ministry of Truth.

Sep. 17 Newly confirmed Minister of Truth Ari Fleischer tells reporters his new department is “double plus good.”

2003-01-03T16:26:00.000-05:00

God damn. Now it looks like Bush is going to try to privatize Medicare.

I guess the problem is that many of the people who want to privatize the system assume that private health insurance is more efficient. But it isn't- it's less efficient. No private health insurance company is as efficient as Medicare. The best thing we could do to improve our health care system would be to abolish private insurance entirely, and give everyone a far more comprehensive Medicare.

The only way that private insurers can cost less than Medicare is if they somehow skimp on service (like if an HMO denies treatments) or skim the healthiest patients, so that the private insurer ends up charging Medicare more than Medicare would have spent on the same patients.

Sometimes privatizers say that there will not be enough money for Medicare in the future. They might be right. But privatizing it simply will move that burden onto individuals, so instead of the government not having enough money for healthcare, elderly people won't. And overall, more health care dollars will be wasted, because private insurance is less efficient.

2003-01-03T14:38:00.000-05:00

I changed my blog format again. The old one didn't seem to work right in Internet Explorer.

2003-01-02T20:01:00.000-05:00

I justed changed the template of the blog. The fonts don't look right, with some of them in Times and others in Arial, but it seems stuck that way. This is actually the second template I changed it to, and the first one had the same problem. I like how this one looks better than the other one anyway.

2003-01-02T19:13:00.000-05:00

Now it looks like Charles Taylor is promoting war in Ivory Coast.

2002-12-29T18:52:00.000-05:00

Here are some articles about Charles Taylor from TNR. This article focuses on Taylor and his American apoligists. This other one focuses on the Clinton administration's inaction. Here is a quote from the second article about the nature of Charles Taylor:

One of Taylor's first military innovations was his creation of the Small Boys Unit, a battalion of intensely loyal child soldiers who were fed crack cocaine and referred to Taylor as "our father." Soon, refugees from the Liberian countryside began recounting stories of horrific cruelty. Taylor's soldiers were seeking out pregnant women and placing bets on the sex of their unborn children. Then they would rip open the women's wombs and tear out the babies to see who was right. Evidence of cannibalism also began to trickle out. One soldier told Reuters, "We rip the hearts from their living bodies and put them on the fire, then eat them." A Liberian human rights organization claimed cannibalism in Taylor-controlled territory was so widespread that "there is fear of persecution based on one's fitness for consumption." Taylor's own defense minister accused him of taking part in the practice himself.

2002-12-29T18:41:00.000-05:00

Charles Taylor took Al Qaeda cash. I'm not at all surprised. This WaPo story says: "...President Charles Taylor of Liberia received a $1 million payment for arranging to harbor the operatives..."

2002-12-27T17:13:00.000-05:00

The situation with North Korea is getting scarier and scarier as time passes. Something I saw that is funny and scary: North Korea has threatened to "destroy the earth."

2002-12-26T14:09:00.000-05:00

Today's William Safire column:

With a naïve Jimmy Carter as his agent, President Clinton caved in to North Korea's nuclear blackmail in 1994 by agreeing to a $5 billion payoff, mainly in oil.

What would he have had Clinton do? I've read a lot of conservatives make similar statements. What, specifically, would they of had Clinton do?

At the time, making a deal seemed like the right thing to do. The choices were war or peace. A war would have been too terrible to contemplate. It would not have been a painless war like the Gulf War, but something terrible, most likely worse than the war in Vietnam. At least hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Koreans would have died. More Americans would have died than had died in Vietnam. That is, this would have happened if the US did not decide to make a first nuclear strike against North Korea, and fight conventionally. But then millions of North Koreans would have died. And there is also a possibility that a limited airstrike against North Korean nuclear facilities would not have led to a wider war. But it might have. And then we would of had to choose between a terrible conventional war or nuking millions of people.

Peace seemed, and still seems, much better. All of those lives would be saved. Even back then, I'm sure that the Clinton administration never really trusted North Korea. But what choice was there but to make a deal? We are back in the same situation now, and we again need to make a deal, because war is not an acceptable outcome, and neither is a nuclear armed North Korea.

I'm not sure what that deal should be, and how we should arrive at it. But all the right-wingers who criticize the 1994 deal ought to say what they would have done, or shut up. As for Safire's ideas (remove soldiers from S. Korea- stupid; get China to pressure N. Korea- obvious), they are not a serious response to my challenge. What would Safire or Clinton's other critics have done differently that would have led to a better outcome?

2002-12-22T22:22:00.000-05:00

Uh oh. From the New York Times:

As Secretary of State Colin Powell discussed the situation over the weekend with top officials of China, South Korea, Russia and Japan, the International Atomic Energy Agency charged that North Korea had broken seals at a spent fuel facility near the same reactor, a pond containing some 8,000 irradiated fuel rods.
Advertisement

The move ``raises further serious concerns and belies North Korea's announced justification to produce electricity,'' State Department spokesman Lou Fintor said. ``The 8000-odd spent fuel rods are of particular concern because they could be reprocessed to recover plutonium for nuclear weapons. They have no relevance for the generation of electricity.''

and

``If they lift the seals on these canisters (at the plant), they're going to be able to build four to five additional nuclear weapons within months if they begin that reprocessing operation -- that's within a year,'' Biden, D-Del., told ``Fox News Sunday.''

2002-12-22T19:27:00.000-05:00

This Onion article looks precient now.

2002-12-19T19:29:00.000-05:00

How strange. Zimbabwe' s stock market is booming.

2002-12-18T13:18:00.000-05:00

They're considering rebuilding the World Trade Towers, with two buildings 600 feet higher than the current tallest building in the world, and 50% taller than the old WTC!

2002-12-17T22:01:00.000-05:00

From Atrios: Mr. Clinton, he said: "When Robert Kennedy ran for president, we supported him. We're proud of it. And if he had lived and been elected, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years."

2002-12-16T21:43:00.000-05:00

How terrible. The White House seems determined to raise taxes for the poor.

2002-12-15T17:14:00.000-05:00

Damn. No credible candidate to carry the single-payer banner.

The great thing about Gore and his support of single-payer healthcare is that he had about as much credibility as a Democrat could have on this issue. He was a southern New Democrat, and an important figure in the centrist Clinton administration. If he had argued for single-payer healthcare in a campaign, it would have been hard to cast it as a looney-left idea. Now, it looks like John Kerry is the frontrunner. He has already dismissed single-payer. Even if he had supported it, he wouldn't of had the same credibility as Gore, because he can be portrayed as an anti-business Massachusetts liberal.

Who else is there? Lieberman? If Lieberman supported single-payer, he would have credibility. But I don't expect him to do so. How about Howard Dean? He opposes it. Who else might run? Maybe Tom Daschle. It's conceivable that he might support single-payer, but I don't think he'd make a very good candidate. Edwards? I don't think he's a credible candidate, given that he's only been in elected office for three years and hasn't really accomplished anything. Plus, he's fairly conservative and cautious, so I wouldn't expect him to adopt single-payer as his cause. Dick Gepardt? Please, not him. Maybe a lefty member of the House, like Denis Kucinich, or a lefty Senator, like Russ Feingold, will run and endorse single-payer. But what are the chances they could win the nomination? And if they did, their lefty rep would discredit single-payer, and they wouldn't win the Presidency anyway.

Gore was single-payer healthcare's best shot. And now, if the NYT story is right, he's gone.

2002-12-14T21:54:00.000-05:00

"They show, too, how segregation served Mr. Lott well politically over the years...as a Congressional aide writing sympathetic letters to a constituent who railed against the 'gorilla race'..."

2002-12-14T00:09:00.000-05:00

Do blockquotes work? Let me test it.

...we need either a breakthrough where we can take advantage of the energy in the space vacuum, a breakthrough in energy production physics, or a breakthrough where the laws of kinetic energy don’t apply.

2002-12-14T00:04:00.000-05:00

Here it is, I think I figured out what messed blogger up, even though it shouldn't have, because it was only the basic blockquote tag.

The Fermi Paradox is basically this: The galaxy is billions of years old. Surely an advanced technical civilization should have formed billions of years ago. Even if it had fairly slow interstellar travel, and did not form colonies rapidly, it should have expanded onto every potentially habitable world by now. Just think about it. Even if a planet can only send two colony ships, and if it takes 10,000 years for a colony ship to get to its destination, and it takes another 20,000 years for that colony to be able to send two ships of its own, then by now every habitable planet would have been colonized and we shouldn't be here.

I read the "Great Filter" article, and am unimpressed. It places great emphasis on biological explanation to the Fermi Paradox. Given our current knowledge of science, it is far easier to believe that interstellar colonization is totally impossible than the other possibility that intelligent life is so extremely rare and/or is often destroyed through natural and man(alien?)-made disasters.

If the only means of space travel is through rockets that work on Newtonian principles (push a gas one direction, and it exerts an equal force in the other direction) interstellar travel does not seem possible. This Nasa site explains it well. Here is a quote:
"...we need either a breakthrough where we can take advantage of the energy in the space vacuum, a breakthrough in energy production physics, or a breakthrough where the laws of kinetic energy don’t apply." Perhaps I'm wrong about this, I'm not a physicist, but my understanding is that this doesn't seem likely to be possible.

The idea that it is so difficult for intelligent life to form that the Fermi paradox is explained away (we would only be one of the first few intelligent species in the galaxy, ever) doesn't seem to be backed up by current science. Life formed on Earth soon after it cooled. There is also some evidence that life might have formed on Mars. It took a while to form advanced multicellular life, so perhaps this might be the Great Filter. We might have just been extremely lucky that this development happened on Earth. But is there a scientific reason to believe that once you have living cells, it is extremely difficult for them to evolve into advanced multicellular life? I have not heard of one, but again, I'm no expert. As for intelligence, evolution seems to have been pushing brain sizes up in animals. I remember reading somewhere that scientists found a dinosaur whose brain to body proportion was so much greater than other animals living at the time that it is comparable to the current difference between humans and other animals. But this super-intelligent dinosaur was only about as smart as a modern ostrich.

Gamma ray bursts are interesting, but they don't seem to solve Fermi's paradox. They do not seem very common. They happen once and a while, so that we have to look for them in galaxies far away. The bursts of energy only go in two directions. I have read that astronomers do not believe that Earth is within 1000 light years of a potential gamma ray burst, and so is safe. And we obviously haven't been hit by a burst yet. It seems strange that we would be so lucky if these bursts are so common. I think bursts might have destroyed many civilizations, but could it have destroyed enough of them?

I think that the Great Filter article exaggerates the problems with intelligent life forming, and brushes away the fact that the laws of physics, as we know them now, seem to say that interstellar colonization is impossible.

2002-12-14T00:02:00.000-05:00

God damn blogger! I can't even delete the last two posts!

2002-12-14T00:01:00.000-05:00

Hmm, that last post seems broken. Damn blogger. I'll try again.

I just posted this rant about Fermi's Paradox as a . I wanted to save it, so here it is:

The Fermi Paradox is basically this: The galaxy is billions of years old. Surely an advanced technical civilization should have formed billions of years ago. Even if it had fairly slow interstellar travel, and did not form colonies rapidly, it should have expanded onto every potentially habitable world by now. Just think about it. Even if a planet can only send two colony ships, and if it takes 10,000 years for a colony ship to get to its destination, and it takes another 20,000 years for that colony to be able to send two ships of its own, then by now every habitable planet would have been colonized and we shouldn't be here.

I read the "Great Filter" article, and am unimpressed. It places great emphasis on biological explanation to the Fermi Paradox. Given our current knowledge of science, it is far easier to believe that interstellar colonization is totally impossible than the other possibility that intelligent life is so extremely rare and/or is often destroyed through natural and man(alien?)-made disasters.

If the only means of space travel is through rockets that work on Newtonian principles (push a gas one direction, and it exerts an equal force in the other direction) interstellar travel does not seem possible.

2002-12-13T23:56:00.000-05:00

I just posted this rant about Fermi's paradox as a
If the only means of space travel is through rockets that work on Newtonian principles (push a gas one direction, and it exerts an equal force in the other direction) interstellar travel does not seem possible.

2002-12-12T14:26:00.000-05:00

Josh Marshall is doing a great job of following the Trent Lott is a white supremacist story. Here he mentions how Lott doesn't seem to have much sympathy for civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi in 1964. Here he talks about Lott's connections to the white supremacist group, the Council of Conservative Citizens.

2002-12-11T22:55:00.000-05:00

This article by Robert George in National Review (!) is a pretty good summary of the whole Trent Lott affair.

2002-12-11T20:29:00.000-05:00

This is the Bergen Record's cartoonist Jimmy Margulies cartoon for today:

2002-12-11T19:33:00.000-05:00

"A poor choice of words conveyed to some the impression that I embraced the discarded policies of the past,'' Lott, R-Miss., said in a statement. "Nothing could be further from the truth, and I apologize to anyone who was offended by my statement.''

Discarded policies! That's the worst thing he can say about lynching and segregation!? From Kausfiles

2002-12-11T19:23:00.000-05:00

Wow! Great 2004 campaign ad using Trent Lott, put together by Oliver Willis. I found it on Tapped.

2002-12-11T18:19:00.000-05:00

Interesting story: "Canadian immigration officials say a Cuban man is lucky to be alive after spending four hours in the wheel well of an airliner."

2002-12-11T07:58:00.000-05:00

In today's NYT: "Lott's Praise for Thurmond Echoed His Words of 1980". It says, "Mr. Lott, then a congressman, told a crowd in Jackson, 'You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today.' "

2002-12-10T19:54:00.000-05:00

Josh Marshall has a classic Trent Lott quote including such gems as "...the fundamental principles that Jefferson Davis believed in are very important to people across the country, and they apply to the Republican Party...".

2002-12-10T19:13:00.000-05:00

I found this great primer on Keynesian economics on what looks like a great site, Calpundit. I've never read Calpundit before, but I'm going to now. I found the link on Matthew Yglesias's site.

2002-12-10T19:07:00.000-05:00

I seem to remember that a lot of Gore-haters and conservatives got angry in the last days of the 2000 election campaign when Al Gore said that he didn't believe that black people were equal to 3/5ths of a person, and suggested that his opponents did. Given Trent Lott's apparent support for lynching, the poll tax, and segregation, I think Gore has been somewhat vindicated (we have yet to see how President Bush will act- will he push Lott out of his job as Senate leader?). A major part of the Republican Party, including the Senate leader, apparently does believe that blacks are 3/5ths of a person.

Paul Krugman's column on this topic today is great. Why is it that some of the poorest parts of the country support politicians that are anti-poor? Because many of the people there do believe that blacks are 3/5ths of a person. What a disgrace, a real shame. I think it will change in time. Younger people there and everywhere else have not been brought up with the racist dogma of the past. As the segregationists die out, the Democrats will do better and better in the South.

2002-12-08T18:22:00.000-05:00

Gore appears to be sticking to single-payer health care. Whoopee!

2002-12-08T13:26:00.000-05:00

More bad news from Ivory Coast.

2002-12-07T22:31:00.000-05:00

This great TNR article says that China's economy isn't nearly as good as it's cracked up to be. I wonder what Nick Kristoff would say if he read this?

2002-12-07T11:59:00.000-05:00

The story about the King of Swaziland buying a $45 million jet while his people are hungry has not gotten much attention. I'm glad the US is at least considering sanctions, but more should be done. It should work to prevent any company anywhere from selling an expensive jet to the King. This means banning US companies from selling a jet and pressuring foreign nations to do the same.

2002-12-07T11:05:00.000-05:00

This is pretty bad: "There were hundreds of dead," said Julien Adeko Achi, a philosophy teacher. "Everywhere we went was piled with corpses."

Why doesn't this get more attention?

2002-12-06T21:08:00.000-05:00

I've seen this on other weblogs before, but Nathan Newman shows both logos on his blog. My question, and Reason Online's question, is who the hell runs the government art department? Does the spookiness of these logos portend a dangerous future? Here's a funny animation I found on Slate.

2002-12-06T19:39:00.000-05:00

I don't like John Kerry very much. I was never a big fan, but I used to think that he might be alright. Then I saw him on Meet The Press last Sunday, when he effectively announced his candidacy.

What bothered me most about this interview, besides refusing to genuinely oppose Bush's tax cuts and supply side economics (Tim Russert showed a JFK quote supporting tax reductions. Kerry should have mentioned that Kennedy's tax cut moved the top rate from 91% to 70%.), was Kerry's opposition to single payer health care. Besides the fact that he is against perhaps my number one cause, I was annoyed by the way that he opposed it. He said he wouldn't want a Canadian or British style system, if that's what single payer means. Hooey. He knows what single payer means, and that it's not the British system. (This reminds me of Andrew Sullivan's criticism of single payer.) And if Kerry doesn't know, then what the hell business does he have running for President?! So he's a liar or he's ignorant.

What I care about most in a candidate is that he's honest and qualified. Issue positions are important to me, but honesty is perhaps more important. This is something I like about Howard Dean, and so far Gore seems to be taking the honest route. Kerry isn't going that way, at least not on an issue I care about. So for me, my favorite list goes Gore, then Dean, then Kerry, assuming Gore runs. Other guy might also be inserted into that list, ahead of Kerry's position, as they annouce their candidacies and positions.

2002-12-06T19:22:00.000-05:00

Apparently, Trent Lott opposes anti-lynching laws. This sort of thing ought to get more attention.

2002-12-06T19:20:00.000-05:00

I notice a lot of liberals are saying that the Democrats should propose replacing Bush's tax cut with a smaller, more progressive tax cut. This is stupid. This will simply eat away money that can and should be used towards important and expensive things, like universal health care or even prescription drug coverage. It will also make it impossible to truly cut back on the deficit, especially if combined with any big new program. So any time you see someone suggest that they will replace the tax cuts for the rich with tax cuts for the rest of us, there are two questions to ask. One is, "Do you want any expansion of government spending for things like health care?" If answered in the affirmative, then ask, "Do you care about the size of the deficit?"

2002-07-29T14:27:00.000-04:00

Holy *ucking shit! I hope this is for real.

Update: I looked into this, and am pretty sure it isn't real. Too bad. I don't know what went wrong in Janes, to make it publish this story.

2002-07-23T19:29:00.000-04:00

Whoa. The end of the world might be on 2/1/19. A giant, 2 km wide asteroid is going to hit Earth on February 1, 2019. I hope the scientists are wrong. If they aren't, I hope we have enough time to stop this. Perhaps a global threat like this could even unite the Earth. Everybody would love the US if the US government blew up this asteroid.

2002-07-23T15:30:00.000-04:00

I get really annoyed when British people compare the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to the Northern Ireland conflict. There is a similarity, as Brad DeLong says that, "...just as the principal obstacle to peace in Northern Ireland was the IRA's apocalyptic and murderous fantasies that terror could produce the forcible absorption of Northern Ireland into the Irish Republic, so the principal obstacle to peace in the Middle East today is the PA's fantasy that suicide bombings would serve their interest." He's right. But there is something else besides that, that British people forget when they make such a comparison between Northern Ireland and the Middle East. It's that the most the IRA ever wanted was Northern Ireland. Even if they had won, the Protestants would have still have been UK citizens, and they could have went to live in Britain without much difficulty. It would have been similar to what the situtation would have been had Arafat accepted Barak's or Clinton's peace offer. Many Israeli settlers would of had to leave the West Bank and Gaza, but they still could have went to Israel. So things wouldn't have been so terrible if the IRA had won. So what's my point? The Palestinian terrorists didn't want to accept Israel, period. They wanted everything. The British comparison of the IRA to the Palestinian terrorists would have been apt only if the IRA demanded London as its capital, didn't recognize that Britain existed at all on maps, taught their children that the British were the decendants of apes and pigs, sent men to throw grenades at kindergartens in England and Scotland, etc.

So when people say the Middle East is the same as Northern Ireland was, they are wrong. For one thing, as Prof. DeLong says, the Northern Ireland conflict didn't end until the terrorists lost the fantasy that they could win. But besides that, what the IRA was after was a lot less than what the Palestinians are after.

2002-07-22T21:17:00.000-04:00

I read Steven Den Beste's site a lot. I disagree with a lot of his views, but he's a good writer. That's why a recent post seems so strange to me. He rambles on about how electric cars and hydrogen cars are not practical. He goes on and on with a big explanation of why solar power is bad. Why? Because he doesn't like how Gray Davis just signed a bill forcing car makers to reduce their greenhouse gas emmissions. He says, "...the only "feasible" way to do this is to reduce the size of cars, reduce their power, and thus increase their mileage, unless they can come up with some sort of way of coercing people into using them less." I think Steve ignores something here- hybrid cars. They are gasoline powered, but a lot more efficient. A good example is the 2003 Honda Civic, which gets 46 mpg city and 51 mpg highway. It has all the power of the normal Civic.

Besides that, when he says that we would need to reduce the size of cars, he implies that everyone would be driving little clown cars. That is just not true. Why can't we get rid of only the giant SUVs? Not even the normal sized ones, but some of these SUVs are just too big, they're like monster trucks. I'd love to have less of them on the road. They're scary, they're bad for the environment, they increase our dependence on Saudi Arabia, and there is no good reason at all for cars to be that large.

2002-07-21T16:58:00.000-04:00

A fusion power plant that produces ten times the amount of energy that is put into it. Can it be true? It might, according to the Economist, if the US funds it. I hope we do.

2002-07-21T15:27:00.000-04:00

I love this picture. It's so honest. Why don't all the evil dictators form a new worldwide organization, like the UN, but pure evil? They could call it the Evil International, or even The Axis of Evil. All the best (or worst) dictators and kleptocrats could join it- Charles Taylor, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, etc. The Secretary General could be Doctor Evil (oops, wait, that's a movie).

Side note: look at the evil smile on Robert Mugabe's face. Just by looking at the picture, you can tell he's evil. Castro just looks like an old guy, but look at the wicked smile on Mugabe. It's eerie.

2002-07-19T08:33:00.000-04:00

North Korea moves towards a market economy. Can this be true? I wonder how reliable any information about what is going on inside North Korea is.

2002-07-17T18:34:00.000-04:00

A lot of the right-wing bloggers hate the EU because they think it is a quasi-socialist organization. While the EU may have some bad ideas about foreign policy, it actually plays an important role in encouraging free markets, as this shows.

2002-07-13T12:02:00.000-04:00

I'm not surprised.

2002-07-13T11:53:00.000-04:00

Blogger has been broken, that's why I was just able to post the last few posts a minute ago, and why I haven't been writing much here lately.

2002-07-10T19:42:00.000-04:00

This NYT article is disturbing, if it's accurate. Apparently, the Israeli government shut down the office of the most moderate important Palestinian, Sari Nusseibeh. This is a man who has genuinely fought the suicide bombers. The Israeli government says that he can't be in sovereign Israeli territory, Jerusalem, because he is a "civil representative of the Palestinian Authority".

This is stupid in so many ways. The easiest hope for peace would be for a moderate Palestinian leadership that accepts the existance of Israel taking over the PA. I don't believe this is likely to happen. But there is no reason to make it less likely. If anything, the Israeli government should try to secretly give people like Nusseibeh money to promote their peaceful, moderate views and even to take over from the extremists. If a moderate Palestinian leadership does not arise, the only solutions I see to the current crisis would be for a reoccupation of the Palestinian lands, or a partial reoccupation with the rest of the land going to Jordan. Neither of these would be nearly as pleasant as dealing with a rational PA.

This is also a genuine problem with the Sharon government. In the past, it didn't really matter if Sharon's idea of a final peace settlement was not enough or at all reasonable, because the Palestinians can't be given land for terrorism anyway. So, it didn't matter if Sharon wasn't a peacemaker as long as there was no one to make peace with. I felt inclined to defend Sharon, even though I never believed he could be a peacemaker. But actions like this, and the other recent news of the Israeli government's support for a bill that would establish Jewish-only areas, have made me start to wonder if perhaps Sharon really is doing damage, despite Arafat's best efforts to make that damage irrelevant.

2002-07-10T19:23:00.000-04:00

What's happening in Zimbabwe is terrible. "If there is a breakdown of law and order totally in Zimbabwe, if we see tens of thousands of people taking to the streets and what amounts to a bloody civil war, then I think you will see pressure for military action"

I think maybe there should be some sort of foreign military invasion of Zimbabwe. Giving them food is just helping keep Mugabe in power; withholding it will starve millions. After Mugabe has been overthrown through an invasion, food can quickly be distributed.

2002-07-05T15:09:00.000-04:00

Very good Kristoff column today. Well written and right. I wish we had some politicians in this country with the courage to fight the agriculture lobby. Our farm policy is killing people, and it has to stop.

Stupid blogger. I had to edit this post to get it to publish.

2002-07-05T15:07:00.000-04:00

Yes! It really does look like Bush isn't wimping out. The image of 250,000 soldiers makes me think of the Imperial March. I hope this is for real.

2002-07-04T22:50:00.000-04:00

Hmm. 45 million people will get HIV over the next 8 years unless spending is dramatically increased. I think that here is a chance for President Bush to prove how compassionate he is. But he won't take it, because he isn't compassionate.

Besides compassion, not spending money to fight AIDS is stupid policy, period. There's going to be massive instability if all these people get infected. Plus, this much foreign infection will definitly spread to the US. So lots more Americans will die. We have enough money to spend about $45 billion more a year on defense (which I support), so we surely should be able to spend a few billion more to fight this global plague. I really can't think of any use of federal government dollars that is more important than preventing the spread of plagues, besides defense. And the truth is that we would have plenty of money to defend us against invasion or attack even if we spent a lot less on our military than we do now. The US spends on its military an amount equal to the next 16 largest military spenders combined (again, I favored the increased spending). So I can't think of any department's increase in spending, or any department that could not endure cuts, to pay for fighting plague. And I can't think of a tax increase (even regressive taxation, which I normally oppose), or an increase in government debt, that would not be acceptable if used to fight AIDS.

I don't know why this is not more of an issue. It doesn't seem to get much attention in the media, at least not as much as it deserves. Why aren't we doing our best to stop AIDS?

2002-07-03T19:37:00.000-04:00

While on a flight, I read a copy of the WSJ and was struck by this article about the bad effects of agricultural subsidies. All the warbloggers seem pretty happy now that Bush seems to have not gone wobbly on terrorism, with his big speech and all, but they completely ignore stuff like this. Do they not believe that terrorism might not have any root causes? Might it be a bad idea to impoverish millions of Muslims just to try to please a powerful but wrong domestic lobbying effort?

(The article is from the WSJ but I had to link to the copy on Prof. DeLong's site because the WSJ site requires a subsciption.)

2002-07-03T19:31:00.000-04:00

I've been on a long vacation, actually, two vacations next to each other. I'll try to write more now that I'm back.

2002-06-19T23:07:00.000-04:00

I just looked at The Onion, and found something that seems funny but is a good way of explaining something about economics. Here is The Onion short article:
"U.S. Middlemen Demand Protection From Being Cut Out
WASHINGTON, DC—Some 20,000 members of the Association of American Middlemen marched on the National Mall Monday, demanding protection from such out-cutting shopping options as online purchasing, factory-direct catalogs, and outlet malls. "Each year in this country, thousands of hard-working middlemen are cut out," said Pete Hume, a Euclid, OH, waterbed retailer. "No one seems to care that our livelihood is being taken away from us." Hume said the AAM is eager to work with legislators to find alternate means of passing the savings on to you."

2002-06-18T22:49:00.000-04:00

I just found this post on a blog I had never seen before. The whole blog seems good, and the post is great. I wish I could think of something like this.

2002-06-18T13:16:00.000-04:00

Good article on the U.S.S. Pork in the NY Times. I thought Republicans said that they were against wasteful spending? Turns out that the only spending they ever feel is wasteful helps the poor and disadvantaged. They have no problem with spending more than a billion dollars making a scrap heap in Mississippi.

2002-06-18T12:36:00.000-04:00

I think this NY Times story about Zacarias Moussaoui is interesting. It shows yet again, if anyone needed to be shown again, the evil of the enemy the US has.

2002-06-18T12:15:00.000-04:00

What is it with the EU and terrorism? Why must these fools befriend every terrorist alive? Do they have no shame? Now they're cozying up to Iran.

2002-06-18T12:07:00.000-04:00

This NY Times editorial hits the nail on the head when it says this: "...any Palestinian official who stepped forward to fill a vacuum created by the forced exile of Mr. Arafat would be dismissed as a collaborator." It's right. Putting Arafat into exile would not change the fact that he would be the only Palestinian that anyone could negotiate with. Yet negotiating with him is pointless. That's why he needs to be killed. After his death, there might not be anyone worth negotiating with in power. But so what? That's the situation we're in now. I honestly do not believe a settlement or peace deal is possible in the near future, regardless of leadership, because opinion polls show that the majority of Palestinians want to destroy Israel and kill as many Jews as they can. I think this is largely because of Arafat's propaganda and education system. I think what needs to happen is that Israel needs to kill Arafat and destroy the Palestinian Authority, reoccupy the Palestinian areas, and then reeducate the population with the ideas that murder and hatred are bad, and that Israel is permanent and a good friend of peaceful people.

Side note: The editorial calls Arafat "one of the few Arab officials who was actually elected to his post." Is the NY Times serious any longer? No one could consider Arafat's "election" which was how long ago, six or seven or eight years?, to have been free and fair if they look at it. Arafat had a huge loyal security apparatus and total control of the media. Zimbabwe's recent election was more fair than the one that made Arafat the head Palestinian. The funny thing about this is that Arafat almost certainly would have won a fair election. That shows what kind of character Arafat is- he opposes putting himself up for fair elections even when he would almost certainly win them. He has that little respect for democracy.

2002-06-18T11:56:00.000-04:00

I can't believe that Bush will announce support for a Palestinian state. It just seems so stupid, and he would be ignoring the advice of everyone who gives him advice, except for Colin Powell and the State Department. I'm really hoping that his speech will surprise the world, and that he will announce the opposite of what Powell wants. I would like to hear him call Arafat a corrupt terrorist dictator and a liar, and explain why the Palestinians cannot be given a state until they abandon terrorism.

It would be great if in response to the latest terrorism Sharon said to hell with the State Department and just killed Arafat. After all, what could Powell do? He might not be able to even convince Bush that this was the wrong move, because in his heart Bush would sympathize with the killing. Even if he did convince Bush, Bush couldn't do anything about it because Congress is overwhelmingly pro-Israel.

2002-06-17T22:58:00.000-04:00

I just read on Steven Den Beste's site that some people got killed fighting a fire in California. I wonder if the person who started the fire in Colorado might be prosecuted if anyone dies fighting it. This looks like a good question for a smart law professor...

2002-06-14T21:17:00.000-04:00

Right now I'm watching Godfather II on TNN. The scene now is the one with the traditional Italian parade (Good Friday I think, but I'm not sure), before Vito kills Don Fanucci. Man this is a great movie.

2002-06-14T21:15:00.000-04:00

Tapped mentions how American dependencies are allowed to compete with national teams of their own by FIFA. He wonders what FIFA is up to. I find it interesting that I see no other colonies, places like French Guiana, the Falkland Islands, or French Polynesia, on that list. Is this anti-Americanism? Or do I not know something?