Friday, November 1, 2002 05:51 p.m. Zoe wants to hear a libertarian perspective on Marriott Hospitality High. I ... don't know where to begin, if anyone better informed would like to field this one instead.
Friday, November 1, 2002 12:49 p.m.
I really don't understand why European politics isn't immediately centerist like in the US. But Europe's overwhemlingly socialist majority is not surprising when you look at it as a reactionary policy to the frightening alternative: Jorg Haider-style ultra-right. The Guardian explains even Norway, a country than exports more foreign aid than any other, has growing popularity for "the Progress party."
It advocates abolishing development aid to the third world because, it says, the money is spent on "arms and luxury goods" for the elite. And poverty, it argues, is a result of poor countries' inability to organise themselves...
Its symbol may be a juicy red apple but its policies are far from wholesome. While Norway's political elite believes that financial prudence should be the order of the day and that the country's oil millions should be invested for future generations, the Progress party advocates a more free-spending approach.
And? And? It looks like "right" is always "wrong," and has an immediate PR problem of getting routinely aligned with Europe's history of fascist and neo-fascists.
Granted, the Progress Party is not at all perfect. It holds dear a xenophobic anti-immigration position that is now an unfortunate precondition to conservativism. They are accused of wanting to have "proverbial cake and eat it." It does not advocate cutting any of Norway's welfare programs to amend for the enormous tax-breaks it encourages. But their growing popularity shows that Norwegians are unhappy with their super-sized state. Maybe somewhere off the chart is a populist alternative
Friday, November 1, 2002 12:28 p.m. Germany is strongly against Turkey's request to join the EU. "Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer compared the likelihood of Turkey's admission into the EU with Mexico and Central America's admission into the United States." Turkey is, of course, a backward country, with a scary prison system and a "long colorful" history of corruption, but I wonder if German's hold a deeper-rooted worry that their country will be seiged with Turkish immigrants. There is great tension between the Germans and Turkish immigrants, the latter taking to extremist groups,
as I have commented before
Also, there is an interesting article in the NYT comparing Germany's struggling economy with Japan
Friday, November 1, 2002 11:51 a.m. Francwa Sims for indymedia has an interesting post recommending the IMC and friends print out their own money as a means of exchange. Zoe wanted some background information on the points he brings up, so here goes:
The case for or against the gold standard rests mainly on how much faith one places in macroeconomics. I don't want to argue either way, but make some general points. The gold standard is commodity money. It is an interesting, but not fail-safe proposal that many notable libertarian thinkers like Murray Rothbard recommend as a way to curtail the influence of the Federal Reserve. It is important to note the difference between a representative commodity money from a pegged commodity. You can debase a direct commodity (ie shave a little off the top of a gold coin.) Still, representative commodity money has some of its catches. What if miners were to discover a hidden reserve of gold?
A main problem is that every commodity has a subjective value. Gold need not be any more valuable than any other commodity. If you're stranded in a desert are you going to value a hundred bars of gold over a glass of water? Value is inherently subjective; there is no inherent value in commodities. On the other hand, commodities may have finite price. If resources must be employed to procude a commodity, than its price may reflect on this.
So long as a body recognizes the exchange value of fiat money, it is valuable as means of exchange. We trust the dollar has value today, because it had value yesterday. Fiat money is in competition with gold. People are free to make choices and speculate whether our currency might devalue. They can invest in other currencies (such as the pound sterling or the euro.) International currency competion is a really wonderful thing.
Going back to Sims' point about competition to federal fiat money: there are many example of people doing this. But I really want to start in clarifying a common misperception: that printing out more money means _more money_ for everyone.
Seigniorage is the revenue from the difference between the value of money and the cost of production. So the government will print out more money to raise revenue for itself; this is also called an "inflation tax." Printing out more money leads to a surplus in dollars. When you have a surplus, the price falls. So more dollars means each dollar is valued less than it was before. We have monetary competition in the form of international exchange.
But as Sims pointed out, people are free to create a domestic competion to federal fiat money. In Ithaca, NY local businesses accept "hours," a local currency designed to keep business local.
Another example are the "Disney Dollars" you exchanges at the gate of hell -- I mean -- Disneyland. That's kind of a glorified gift certificate. But, no, there are no barriers of entery into the market of producing money. Money is basically costless to create, but there is a great task in establishing confidence and a market. Monetay policy is always easier said than done. Take a look at this article on Kabul
Thursday, October 31, 2002 12:03 p.m.
The comments to this post on Stand Down reaffirm my theory that "liberals" are only potential libertarians that have no idea what they are talking about. One poster responds, "Radical Feminists and the Christian Right were on the same side of the abortion debate, and now Libertarians and Marxists are on the same side of the war issue. These kind of coalitions are usually very uneasy and very short-termed." Maybe this could change with the correct dosage of Adderall and Carl Menger. It's not that they disagree with us, it's that the left doesn't understand our position
Wednesday, October 30, 2002 11:12 p.m. Also in WQ is an essay on Georg Simmel, "the philosopher of money." He was ahead of his time (1858-1918,) explaining that a money economy (as opposed to barter) grows increasingly abstract. This abstraction leads to a method of thinking -- making calculated decisions rather than impulsive ones. He also theorized on specialization and the ever growing number of choices an individual can make in life. To Simmel, there was one great "tragedy" of these possibilities, and that is, "the frustration that comes of recognizing how much there is we would like to know but will never have the time or mental energy to master." But that's a good frustration -- one I cannot help but encounter day to day.
For example,
Machine Dreams Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science. Red Rock Eater has an excerpt of it here. Zowie.
Wednesday, October 30, 2002 09:32 p.m.
Events and Etc: Art-o-Matic tomorrow shouldn't be missed. It's free. It's fun. Friday, Lewis Lapham is giving a talk at Politics and Prose, the Black Heart Procession is playing at the Black Cat, and Zoe has a glam rock party (smoove.) Saturday, DC Skillz invades Tunnel in what will be the rave of the century. Then on Tuesday, Prof. Tyler Cowen is lecturing on "Why is Government so Big?" -- part of the Kaplan series. Ram tells me he's salivating over the Public Choice Semiars instead. Yeah, I wish I hadn't of missed
Rent Seeking and
the Roman Republic too.
Also, this needs to be posted -- somewhere, sometime -- just not here.
Wednesday, October 30, 2002 08:59 p.m. Russia's reveled the mystery gas and it's in doublespeak! The health minister Yuri Shevchenko insists the gas is non-lethel. He claims the starvation of oxygen and dehydration of the hostages made them much more sensitive to the gas, resulting in 117-120 deaths.
However, injected, skin patch and oral doses of fentanyl sold in the United States carry warnings that the anaesthetic can be fatal if administered in too high a dose, and that doses must be customised, taking into account the patients' size and to any previous exposure to similar drugs.
Many of the hostages that left the theater unharmed, had been hiding away from the main hall. The Guardian also had this interactive guide explaining how it happened.
Wednesday, October 30, 2002 08:46 p.m. I bet it isn't raining on the Dalmation Coast.
Wednesday, October 30, 2002 08:36 p.m.
Gulf War combat veteran Charles Sheehan-Miles for Alternet has this to say about fellow vets Robert Stewart Flores, John Allen Muhammed, "Paul Delaney, who stabbed his ex-girlfriend and mother of two, Colleen Chudley, 30 or 40 times. Or Staff Sergeant Frank Ronghi, a Gulf War vet who murdered and sodomized an 11-year old girl in Kosovo. Or Jeffrey Glenn Hutchinson, also a Gulf vet, who murdered his girlfriend and her three children on Sept. 11, 1998. Or Joseph Ludlam, who murdered his former manager in November 2000. And then there's the most famous Gulf War veteran of all, Timothy McVeigh, who killed hundreds of people in a homegrown terrorist attack in Oklahoma City":
You may decide it's okay -- your chances of being murdered by a combat veteran are still less than the risk of being killed in a highway accident. But as we send another few hundred thousand young men and women off to war, the odds are about to get worse.
Wednesday, October 30, 2002 10:14 a.m.
This week's US News has an interesting article on defense contracting.
the Pentagon does not even know how many contractors it uses. Last spring, Army Secretary Thomas E. White revived an effort to count all contractors under his purview. A preliminary report to Congress in April guessed that the Army contracted out the equivalent of between 124,000 and 605,000 person-work-years in 2001. Nor is there a reliable count of the contractors who provide "emergency essential" services on the battlefront and elsewhere, despite the urging of the Department of Defense (DOD) inspector general a decade ago. In an internal E-mail last fall, one colonel urged that the Army logistics chief review all field systems to see what contractor support they entail. It reads: "At the very least, he could count these little beggars in some fashion before they show up on the battlefield and surprise some poor commander with horrific support, real estate and security requirements..."
Yet contractors' ability to protect themselves, let alone the force they are deployed with, is severely limited. One Army War College report cited a Gulf War scenario: When an AH-64 Apache helicopter went down in a forward area, a civilian contractor was asked to go help fix it. The contractor said he would go if he could be issued a 9mm sidearm. The matter bogged down in such a legal wrangle that the contractor never went. Pentagon rules say that contractors may not be armed in international conflicts. The problem is that contractors are not combatants, and to engage in warfare would violate their status. Yet, under the Geneva conventions, their status is "civilians accompanying the force," and thus they may be legitimately targeted.
Wednesday, October 30, 2002 12:26 a.m.
über-bloggers Max Sawicky and Julian Sanchez have teamed to form Stand Down, a left-right anti-war coalition blog. Bookmark it into your 'check every fifteen minutes" folder.
Tuesday, October 29, 2002 11:49 p.m.
I am surprised more people aren't speculating, like this MSNBC article, whether or not "a larger net attack [is] on the way?" The denial of service attack last Monday sent overwhelming traffic streams to the internet's core 13 servers. But the reason no one ever noticed this was happening is because cache files stepped in while the servers failed. "Last week’s real-life test of this fail-over system demonstrated that even a completely successful attack on the 13 main domain servers would have to last for days before having any noticeable impact. And even then, it would be gradual, and only because the quality of the “cached” data would begin the degrade, as there would be no central authority for the latest domain address information. Most experts agree that such a prolonged digital siege is practically impossible." So that "attack" was "amateurish", but there are other ways and places to hack. Someone could crack the core routers, "which act as Internet air traffic controllers is considerably more fragile that the domain name system." Chinese hackers have cooled own, but a team of Islamic hackers have set to destroy us. Power-grids, air traffic control, and major financial institutions all run a risk to a certain extent.
One place especially vulnerable now is the US Navy. According to The Post, they're in the middle of a 6.9 billion project revamping computers so that all departments are on the same system. "The largest federal information technology project ever attempted" is of course, not going as smoothly as expected. "Some programs can't be merged into the new system. They are either too antiquated to be compatible with the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system or aren't in compliance with security requirements."
Tuesday, October 29, 2002 02:56 p.m. Williamette Week has an essay on Patrice Lumumba Ford, one of the "Portland Six," a group "U.S. authorities allege is a group of Qaeda supporters who desperately tried to reach Afghanistan to join Osama bin Laden’s men."
In reality, the indictment does not suggest that the group ever communicated with al Qaeda. Nor does it accuse Lumumba and his co-defendants of "terrorism"--which has been defined by the U.S. State Department as featuring a willingness to kill noncombatants.
In hearings last week concerning Lewis and Battle, prosecutors said Battle was intent on fighting U.S. troops. But aside from contemplating killing Jews at a synagogue, an idea that Battle subsequently dropped, the most threatening specific pieces of evidence they unveiled were vague emails as well as possession of books on jihad.
"If this is the best evidence the government has," attorney Jack Ransom said in the hearing, "I would suggest, your Honor, that there is a weakness of evidence."
Tuesday, October 29, 2002 02:18 p.m.
A while back, Samizdata posted the unbelievably weird Metropolitan Police posters proclaming "Secure beneath The Watchful Eyes." Jesse Walker for Reason has something on DARPA's example of Big Brother-imposed graffic design. But the peek of absurdity for the week is the EU's intention to rename itself, The United States of Europe
Tuesday, October 29, 2002 01:31 p.m.
Brenden O'Neill for Spiked, has an essay on the Moscow seige. His blog, btw, is excellent.
The response to the Moscow siege also captured the gap between rhetoric and reality in the war on terror, and the increasing surrealism of demands to attack Iraq. Somehow, some commentators managed to link the 'bloodbath in Moscow' (caused by Russian troops, remember) with the Bali bombing (caused by persons unknown) with the alleged threats from Iraq and the 'newly nuclear' North Korea. Everything was thrown together as evidence that we live in an 'age of terrors', which the 'civilised world must confront'.
This should have sparked an interesting debate. Instead it's another example of neo-con pundit filibuster. Max Sawicky says,
"The implied ratio of acceptable damage in the Russian debacle -- kill one to save six -- makes me very nervous. We're veering towards destroying the village to save it."
To get clued in, The Guardian's been doing a great job. Here are some recent articles:
Tuesday, October 29, 2002 12:35 p.m.
In an effort to avoid another epidemic of veterens with bizarre ilnesses, the Pentagon has issued only FDA-approved drugs may be used on American soldiers abroad. Did they ever figure out what the deal was with Gulf War Syndrome? This site says they all were given Prozac for it.
The United States army is investigating a series of disturbing murders at one of its bases in North Carolina. Four military wives have allegedly been killed by their husbands in the last two months.
More remarkable still is that three of the soldiers thought to be responsible had recently returned from active service in Afghanistan.
Anti-malaria drugs were cited as a probable culprit. I'm skeptical, but I don't know all the details to the story
Monday, October 28, 2002 09:17 p.m. 60 Minutes had a story on Sibel Edmonds last night -- too bad I missed it.
Take the case of Jan Dickerson, a Turkish translator who worked with Edmonds. The FBI has admitted that when Dickerson was hired last November, the bureau didn't know that she'd worked for a Turkish organization being investigated by the FBI's own counter-intelligence unit. And they didn't know she'd had a relationship with a Turkish intelligence officer stationed in Washington who was the target of that investigation.
According to Edmonds, Dickerson tried to recruit her into that organization and insisted that Dickerson be the only one to translate the FBI's wiretaps of that Turkish official.
When Edmonds refused to go along with her plan, she says Dickerson threatened her and her family's life.
Edmonds also says that when she reviewed Dickerson's translations of those tapes, she found that Dickerson had left out information crucial to the FBI's investigation – information that Edmonds says would have revealed that the Turkish intelligence officer had spies working for him inside the U.S. State Department and at The Pentagon.
Edmonds says she complained repeatedly to her bosses about what she'd found on the wiretaps and about Dickerson's conduct, but that nobody at the FBI wanted to hear about it – she says not even the assistant special agent in charge...
Edmonds was fired after bringing these and other charges to the attention of FBI supervisors and a top official in the bureau.
Monday, October 28, 2002 10:06 a.m. Instapundit says, "I'm prepared to be convinced that using the gas was a mistake. But those who take that position ought to suggest what else Putin should have done under the circumstances." Gosh, I don't know... negotiate? Or at least, do nothing at all. It's hard to imagine that left to their own devices, the "terrorists" would have killed one hundred and fifteen hostages. Dennison writes, "I suppose there is a practical side to this however. What use will hostage taking be from now on if we just deside to kill the hostages ourselves to make a point?" This tragic event should be a wake-up call to the world that might have mistaken Russia with a Western-style democracy. Instead it has brought US and Russia closer. "Our war against terror has become a war against dissent and the desperate acts of helpless people who are slaughtered in their beds." Well said, Dennison.
Sunday, October 27, 2002 04:10 p.m.
Also in the new WQ are two dissenting views on that old bother, Globalization. Of course I take the side of Tyler Cowen, GMU's Renaissance economist. A quick perusal of his personal page shows no stone is left unturned in his intellectual persuits. Still, Amy Chua's piece makes some good points. The Yale Law professor is a great writer beginning her essay with a suspensful account of her Chinese aunt's murder by her chauffer in Manila. Crimes against a "ruling" minority --such as the Chinese by the Filipinos-- are not uncommon, but Chua jumps the gun in suggesting that globalization will perish because of "market-driven minorities." The idea of a minority-ruling class is something Thomas Friedman has been dwelling on lately in regards to Oil Barons in the Middle East. There's a better term for it, and that is "corruption." Corruption should not be ignored as it is a major stumbling block to free society (just look at the ex-communist states.)
That's the key aspect she has right: "democracy" won't come out of nowhere. Democracy must be established, it cannot be transplanted. Without history, infrastructure, and what-have-you, corrupt people -- nomenklatura -- will exploit "democracy." Yet, Chua's dismissal of Robert D. Kaplan's suggestion to "hold off democracy until free markets produce enough economic and social development to make democracy sustainable," shows her weakness. Despite her eloquence, Chua doesn't address the economics or even the definition of globalization as a process of trade -- mutual exchange of goods and services. She's paranoid of the "raw, laissez-faire capitalism" we are "exporting." Maybe Cowen's piece will push her in the right direction
Sunday, October 27, 2002 03:25 p.m.
The new Wilson Quarterly has a few interesting essays on Germany. One article details its economic crisis since the reunification ten years back. Chancellor Gerhard Shroder has used his stern refusal to back US assault on Iraq as a way to detract attention from the country's large and growing unemployment problem.
The second article, "The Puzzle of Leni Riefenstahl," makes her sound like Germany's answer to Tammy Faye Baker. The 100 year old former Hitler propagandist is routinely ridiculed by German press who call her near "autistic" in her "narcissism." The writer Steven Bach refers to her as a Holocaust memorial, "not some smooth stone you turn to when you feel like it, but this decaying, ungainly monument, forever spewing out the same old reminiscences in unending variations -- the monument we really deserve."
The best article is by Guardian reporter John Hopper, about the architectural and cultural curiosity that is Berlin. It's emptiness and lack of "bustle" -- something Hopper mistakenly sees as a neccessity for a great European city -- is preciscely why Berlin is my favorite city. No one elbows into you, you can get a table without waiting at cool cafe, and you can take a walk among skyscrapers and have the place to yourself. It is "empty," but those who do live there are wonderful; as though a Brita filter perserved all the artsy, thoughtful, unbelievably gorgeous people just for me. An interesting asside note said that years ago, Western Germany exempt Berlin residents from military service, thereby attracting the cultish counterculterists and jump-starting its still thriving art scene. Later after unification, artists could afford enormous apartments on the East side. Its a pity the excitment within the city is so self-contained, as its undoubtably ephemeral. Damn, I wish I could live there now
