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Chicago Boyz*

Friedman Hayek Stigler Becker Sowell Buchanan Knight Fermi Epstein Strauss Simon Smith McNeill Coase Shils Shultz mashed or boiled?
*Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago boys including those pictured above, and others who helped to liberalize Latin American economies.

April 12, 2004

War Movies III

(This the third in an occasional series. (Previously here and here.))

By way of preface, I should say that I saw many, many war movies on TV up to 1981, growing up outside of Boston and watching Channel 56, which had a small but decent stock of films which it re-ran continually. Channel 38 and Channel 10 in Providence also had a decent supply of old movies. Since then I have, mostly voluntarily, not had regular access to a TV, and I don't own one now, though I do occasionally watch a dvd on the "small screen" -- our laptop. So, thinking about war movies is at least as much about childhood impressions of old war movies as it is about any mature appreciation of any of these.

The Korean War, the so-called forgotten war, has indeed largely been forgotten by Hollywood. But it did produce two good war movies which had a strong influence on me. Pork Chop Hill is a well-crafted combat film, with a stoic Gregory Peck at the center of a remarkable collection of character actors (Norman Fell, Robert Blake, Harry Guardino, Martin Landau, Rip Torn, George Peppard) playing the American grunts who capture the Hill and then have to hold off swarms of counter-attacking Chicoms. Gregory Peck’s troops are sent forward into battle, and then abandoned when the back-office decides it has lost enough men for a worthless hill. This cinematic depiction of betrayal and discarded courage and suffering has, I believe accurately, shaped my vision of authority ever since. The Bridges at Toko Ri is the tale of Navy aviator Harry Brubaker (William Holden) who served in World War II, and who voluntarily returns to service, leaving behind his lovely young wife (Grace Kelly) to go back into harm’s way. I first saw this movie when I was about eight years old. Holden is under-rated as one of the last, great Hollywood leading. Mickey Rooney is solid as a brawling sailor who has saved Brubaker’s life once already, and dies trying to do so again. The movie drags a little in the middle, but all is forgiven for the closing minutes. Gripping scenes as the aircraft are launched, and streak toward the target. The planes fly into a narrow valley, through a hail of flak, to take out the bridges. Brubaker’s Skyhawk is hit. He cannot make it over that last ridge to ditch in the sea. (A little kid in pajamas is sitting on the couch saying "oh no, oh no, oh no …", but the Navy aviators on the TV are all business.) His buddies try to keep the chicoms away from his crash site, strafing with guns and rockets. The closing scene, set in “a muddy ditch in Korea,” has stuck with me ever since as the true face of the sacrifices made for freedom.

Sometimes the good guys die.

Posted by Lexington Green at 05:56 PM | Comments (5)

The Scandal of DDT

The scandal is that we no longer use it, and for the wrong reasons. Scott Barnard forwards this good NYT article on the subject.

UPDATE: Jim Miller has more to say about the NYT article.

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 01:07 PM | Comments (0)

"Winning Hearts and Minds Inside the Beltway"

Mary Anastasia O'Grady writes that Venezuela's Chavez dictatorship is doing the same thing Haiti's Aristide did: paying large sums to American lobbyists to defend its indefensible policies. And it works.


How did Mr. Aristide, who was a known practitioner of violence get the U.S. to restore him to power in 1994 and then to tolerate his malevolence for 10 years? The answer is that he bought influence in Washington in much the same way Mr. Chavez is trying to do now.

Former Congressman Ron Dellums, Randall Robinson's wife Hazel Ross-Robinson and Florida lawyer Ira Kurzban are all crying the blues over Mr. Aristide's demise but not because of what the little defrocked priest did for Haitians. What each of these Washington operators lost at the end of February was an all-you-can-eat meal ticket.

Continue reading ""Winning Hearts and Minds Inside the Beltway""

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 12:56 AM | Comments (2)

Trust Us

Or maybe not (from the WSJ):


In a disclosure likely to rekindle privacy-concern fires, AMR Corp.'s American Airlines admitted giving information on 1.2 million passengers to outside research companies vying for contracts with the Transportation Security Administration.

American is the third airline to acknowledge disclosing private passenger records, developments that have alarmed privacy advocates and drawn scrutiny from Congress and government investigators. In September, JetBlue Airways said it turned over passenger records to a defense contractor, and later apologized. And in January, Northwest Airlines said it secretly passed travelers' records to the government.

The disclosures of passenger records revolve around government efforts to boost air-transportation security following the 2001 terrorist attacks. The TSA, charged with aviation security, has been trying to develop more-effective passenger-screening systems, using information collected on customers by airlines.


Domestic security remains unserious. It is typified by overzealous attempts by government agencies to mine error-filled private databases, by jockeying for lucrative government contracts on the part of security firms claiming to offer bureaucrats painless ways to find terrorists without getting sued, and by private-sector executives who leap at chances to violate the trust of their customers. Meanwhile most of the real security is provided by airline passengers, by alert individual police officers and other government agents who perform informal profiling of suspicious people, and of course by the military, whose success overseas is the main thing that keeps us safe at home.

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 12:16 AM | Comments (0)

April 11, 2004

Happy Easter

The Easter liturgical season commences. Lent ends. And, therefore, so does my blogging fast. It has been difficult but purifying.

So much going on. I find that I have little to add about the key developments of day-to-day news, i.e. the war and the election. But I do hope to put up some posts over the next few weeks about books I've read recently, which may be of interest.

Go easy on the leftover chocolate bunnies.

Posted by Lexington Green at 10:57 PM | Comments (5)

Blog Changes

I streamlined the permalinks by putting each category of links into its own popup window. This makes it easier to find links by category, but also adds an additional step (you have to click on a category to open the popup menu) to each attempt to open a link. I'd appreciate comments as to whether this new link system is an improvement.

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 04:36 PM | Comments (0)

April 10, 2004

Response From The Independent Institute

David Theroux of The Independent Institute responded via email to my recent critical post about his organization's position on the war. I reproduce below, with David's permission, the text of his email response. (We have since exchanged additional emails, so I am posting his response in case other readers want to join the discussion.)
In reference to your recent comment about the Independent Institute on the Chicago Boyz blog, you may be interested in the following new article from our quarterly journal, THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW (Spring 2004). Here incidentally is the table of contents for this issue of the journal: http://www.independent.org/tii/content/pubs/review/current.html

"The Republican Road Not Taken: The Foreign-Policy Vision of Robert A. Taft," by Michael T. Hayes (Professor of Political Science, Colgate University): http://www.independent.org/tii/content/pubs/review/tir84_hayes.html

Also for clarification, the proper term to describe the proposal we have been making for U.S. foreign policy reform is "non-interventionism", not "isolationism." "Isolationism" was a smear term originally coined by Wilsonians ("liberal-progressive" interventionists) to denigrate their opponents (constitutional and otherwise). The Wilsonian tradition is one of government interventionism both domestically and internationally, a position that Robert Higgs and other scholars have shown is inseparably linked by foreign interventionism (warfarism) being the central public-choice engine that drives domestic statism (http://www.independent.org/tii/catalog/cat_crisis.html).

In contrast to "non-interventionism," "isolationism" properly defined requires a "Closed Door" (or autarchic) policy severely restricting the free flow of people and trade internationally.

Most nation states in the world today maintain a foreign policy of general non-interventionism based on the tradition of international law, and many also remain strictly neutral in world affairs while simultaneously pursuing very active trade, travel, cultural, and other exchanges. Meanwhile, almost alone among nations today, the U.S. government pursues a deliberate policy of preemptive covert and overt interventionism, and many scholars now consider such policies a major cause of economic and political instability and hardship, upheaval, and terrorism.

Attempts by the U.S. or any government to centrally plan and impose rule over people is exactly what classical liberals and libertarians have historically opposed. Non-interventionism is the traditional policy of the U.S. as a republic as described by Washington, Madison, Jefferson, and other Founders, based on the simple ethical and legal position that aggression against innocent, peaceful people is wrong and a rule of law should be applied universally to prohibit it. For your review, here is a web page with references that seriously discuss non-interventionism: http://www.onpower.org/foreign_non_inter.html

Further information on our program in this regard can be found via our Center on Peace & Liberty: http://www.independent.org/copal

Please advise me with any questions.

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 03:06 PM | Comments (14)

April 08, 2004

RTFM

In the WSJ today, an interesting column about the Marine Corps' old Small Wars Manual becoming a hot ticket for U.S. troops.
From 1898 to 1934, the Marines fought a number of small wars, in the Philippines, Cuba, Honduras, China, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. They clashed with guerrillas, built constabularies and held elections. Then, in 1940, a group of Marines set out to capture in writing the lessons of those battles.
While we tend to associate the American military with conventional warfare on a massive scale, combined with the reuse of strategic Cold War weapons like the B-52, the country has known a thing or two about guerilla wars from its very origins. And fought quite a few more of those conflicts around the world before the 20th century reshaped its role and image. The Manual's original 1940 edition is also available in PDF format here. From setting up bivouacs and local constabularies to packing mules, it's all in there.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 07:13 AM | Comments (4)

April 04, 2004

The Independent Institute's Counterproductive Email List

Like Steven Den Beste, I also received (note past tense) regular copies of David Theroux's "would you please post a notice" emails, as I'm sure did numerous other bloggers. I had a more favorable impression of The Independent Institute before I started receiving these emails. It seemed that nearly every issue of the Institute's online newsletter contained at least one article from the why-do-they-hate-us school of libertarian isolationism. This eventually got under my skin and I asked to be removed from the list. Theroux et al are entitled to their opinions, but they aren't doing the libertarian cause any favors by associating it with opposition to the war against fundamentalist Islam. There is no contradiction between libertarianism and defending an imperfect liberal society against totalitarian aggression.

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 11:09 AM | Comments (7)

April 01, 2004

Adam Smith Institute

If you haven't already, you should check out the Adam Smith Institute's blog. run by Alex Singleton. For some reason, I had to leave France to start hearing about Frederic Bastiat; and the visionary genius and clarity of thinking of a man who, in the early 19th century, could write that :
There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.
Which one of our contemporary economists will still be relevant 150 years from now ? Academic monopoly of the field, combined with increasingly narrow specialization, has resulted in a growing army of career sycophants with no real-world experience, people who not only believe that "this may work in practice, but it doesn't in theory", but are allowed to get away with stating it over and over, when they are not given a government licence to force theoretical constructs into a reality they neither acknowledge nor understand. And slowly but surely, as Singleton reminds us,
[...] when a government tries to keep down the price of one thing, it finds itself drawn into more and more controls, until (to quote Mises): ...it will finally arrive at a point where all prices, all wage rates, all interest rates, in short everthing in the whole economic system, is determined by the government. And this, clearly, is socialism.
Socialism, that "nuanced", fancy word for collective, populist, authoritarian failure and misery. It is unfortunately a safe bet that in some parts - the European Union comes to mind - the consequences of overwhelming statism and recycled socialism will deepen and worsen longer still before free-market alternatives get the hearing they deserve and are currently denied mostly on ignorant, irrational, if not medievally religious grounds. On the plus side, the high priests and their political masters are inexorably discrediting themselves and their Dantesque theories, strengthening the case for freedom with every costly failure. Learning something the hard way is the longer, more painful alternative. In the long run, it probably is the more effective one too.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 08:44 AM | Comments (3)

March 31, 2004

Slippery Truth

Sometimes, it just, you know, slips out. A recent correction in The Australian :
A story headlined 'Syria seeks our help to woo US' in Saturday's Weekend Australian misquoted National Party senator Sandy Macdonald. The quote stated: "Syria is a country that has been a bastard state for nearly 40 years" but should have read "Syria is a country that has been a Baathist state for nearly 40 years." The Australian regrets any embarrassment caused by the error.

God bless spell-checkers.

(Via Samizdata)

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 07:51 AM | Comments (4)

March 30, 2004

Mortgages come to Russia

Good article about the burgeoning mortgage market in Russia.

"While the learning curve has been steep, analysts say the post-World War II example of the US - where government-backed credits, loans, and mortgages for GIs transformed the American economy for decades - is a lesson for the Kremlin.

"It's a huge effect [on] releasing spending power into the economy," says Gaige of Ernst & Young. In the past, "the money people needed to buy a house would have been taken out of the economy ... and their spending power would have been reduced" before and after the purchase by the effort to collect that money."

Wish I could participate. The only thing worse is watching VIP go from 56 to 100 and not holding any shares...

Posted by In-Cog-Nito at 04:09 PM | Comments (2)

Views From The Past

I'm feeling kind of blogged out and decided to post something different. I've been going through a batch of family photos that no one has looked at in years. It's like a time capsule. A few of the pictures may be of general interest. I really like the ones below. A relative of mine made them when President Nixon visited Jerusalem in 1974.


parade route
Parade route with Monastery of the Cross in background.



Rehavia street
I don't know where this was. It may have been across the street from the prime minister's residence.



outside the PM's residence
Outside the prime minister's residence.

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 12:01 PM | Comments (1)

March 28, 2004

"Late Night Live With Pervez"

On March 18, we learned that Pakistani forces were fighting a tough battle with militants. From a television interview given by President Pervez Musharraf, it was assumed that al-Qaeda's number two might be caught in the net. I was as excited by everyone else at the prospect but things turned rather weird and dubious very quickly.

First, the timing. The interview and the final operation started even as Colin Powell ended his visit in Islamabad, as part of negotiations to extend Pakistan's status as a major non-NATO ally. Coincidence ? After the Abdul Qadeer Khan imbroglio and with the U.S. Secretary Of State in town, this "pitched battle" with al-Qaeda was most opportune indeed.

Second, the details. The militants were immediately alleged to be "cornered". But then it quickly emerged that they were "cornered" in....a nineteen square mile area. I don't know what kind of field games the Pakistani play but you obviously need a lot of space if it has corners this large. Cricket with T-72 tanks maybe ? Initially, hundreds of Pakistani troops were said to be involved. Which deepened my worry. You don't corner a 19-square mile area with hundreds of troops. It all started to sound very dodgy.

Then dubious timing once again. As Powell came back to the U.S. and their new status was made official, the Pakistanis suddenly voiced serious doubts about Ayman al-Zawahiri being in the area; and, as a graceful and faithful ally, they made it sound as if we foolish westerners had all too enthusiastically inferred his fortuitous presence from their entirely sober press briefings. You see, they heard Uzbek and other odd languages on their field radios.

So what happened in Waziristan ? Did the Pakistani military and intelligence services stage a show ? Did they screw up and got whupped by al-Qaeda ? All of the above ?

Regular readers know my bias when it comes to Pakistan. Given the country's record, I find the very concept of trusting them as an ally disturbing, if not patently insane. As facts emerge around this incident, I cannot quite decide whether to laugh or to cry. First, it turns out the "remote" cluster of villages involved was in fact located 10 miles from a major Pakistani army base. So either hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters can quietly settle down close to Pakistani army bases without being noticed for weeks or months. Or they believe they can do so. (I wonder why ?). Or there never were al-Qaeda and/or Taliban fighters there in the first place....

When the Pakistani army eventually got to their target - four days after what was supposed to be a 48-hour deal - it turned out that there were tunnels several miles long that allowed many to escape. So much for Pakistani-style cornering. And according to the New York Times :
Pakistani officials said the house had been raided in December, but no militants or tunnels were found.
The plot thickens. Not only did hundreds of militants settle close to an army base, but they also built miles of tunnels in a few weeks. One can only imagine what Boston mayor Thomas M. Menino could have done with those guys : the Big Dig tunnel would extend all the way to New York by now.
One American intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, estimated that the majority of the members of the Pakistani army and intelligence services were sympathetic to the militants and that many were helping them.
You don't say !?! Reminds me who needs enemies with allies like those ?

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 01:00 PM | Comments (25)

"News Is A Conversation"

Some journalists get it. More are starting to. Here's a thoughtful essay by one of them. (And he's a blogger, though he fails to link to his blog.)


It is this power and influence that drives mainstream journalists to look at new media types, especially bloggers, and describe them pejoratively as the "vanity press," "self-important," or worse. The question, of course, is if bloggers derive their sense of importance from themselves, then from whom does the mainstream press derive theirs? You see, there exists within journalism today a belief that this power and influence of theirs is a right, a guarantee given to them by some higher authority, and therein lies the rub.

The themes of the essay are second-nature to bloggers, but it's still nice to see the ideas spread.

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 01:21 AM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2004

Weapons Of Self Destruction

Quoting Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski, Andrew Sullivan states in a concise paragraph what I have been trying to put into words for too many weeks. (Emphasis mine)
"But naturally I also feel undomfortable due to the fact that we were misled with the information on weapons of mass destruction." Although I hope Poland stays the course in Iraq, I do think he has a point. And he's not the only one. A considerable number of Americans - including many in the pro-war camp - believe this administration has not been forthright enough about the reasons for the intelligence failure. What the president should have done, in my view, was give a talk to the American people a few months ago, tell them exactly what we had and hadn't found, and explain that, although some of the intelligence turned out to be flawed, he still took the right decision in the circumstances. Bush made too much of the WMDs before the war as a casus belli not to confront this issue directly when it emerged we were wrong. Instead, he acted defensively. He first denied there was a problem, then he dismissed the problem, then he justified his actions regardless, without taking full responsibility for the errors. In a word, it made him look insecure and weak. Yes, there was a risk in fessing up directly to an intelligence failure. But it turns out that the risk of simply ducking and spinning was greater. The reason he has lost standing is because insecurity is not something people look for in a war leader. There were many times that Churchill had to tell Britons of mistakes or failures or difficulties. When confronted with errors of the kind that Bush's intelligence made in Iraq, a good war leader steps up to the plate. When asked about the lack of stockpiles of WMDs as opposed to evidence of possible WMD programs, such a leader doesn't irritatedly respond, "What's the difference?" Part of the Aznar lesson is that people don't like being bamboozled. If Bush doesn't learn that soon, he may learn it the hard way in November.
And given the amount of denial among Republicans as to the possibility of such an outcome, one wonders what it would take for them to wake up and smell the coffee.

Aside from a Kerry victory.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 09:23 PM | Comments (31)

Quote of the day

"Wealth is the only thing that can cure poverty. "

From Thomas Sowell's random thoughts article today.

Posted by In-Cog-Nito at 12:52 PM | Comments (2)

March 24, 2004

Killer Chick

Among other goodies, Amazon just delivered The Iraq War: A Military History, a book that was reviewed back in November by Robert Kaplan. It looks pretty good. A lot of amazing pictures - including some combat pictures from the battle for Curly - and the one of the left. Captain Kim Campbell, checking out the damage on her A-10. More details can be found here.
After sustaining the hit, she said the aircraft immediately became uncontrollable and she noticed several caution warnings -- all over a very hostile territory.

"I lost all hydraulics instantaneously, so I completely lost control of the jet. It rolled left and pointed toward the ground, which was an uncomfortable feeling over Baghdad," she said. "The entire caution panel lit up and the jet wasn't responding to any of my control inputs."

Captain Campbell tried several different procedures to get the aircraft under control, none of which worked, she said. At that point, she decided to put the plane into manual reversion, which meant she was flying the aircraft without hydraulics. After that, the aircraft immediately began responding.

"The jet started climbing away from the ground, which was a good feeling because there is no way I wanted to eject over Baghdad," she said.
Good looking, young, a pilot, serious nerves...where do I sign up for a date ?


Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 03:31 PM | Comments (9)



Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 09:54 AM | Comments (4)

Double Standards

An astute reader e-mails Glenn Reynolds :
Anybody notice how many people are, almost simultaneously, berating George Bush for not taking out bin Laden, and berating Sharon for taking out Ahmed Yassin?
Well, now that you mention it...

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 06:46 AM | Comments (12)

March 23, 2004

PC Brainwashing

Excellent article by Dennis Prager.

Posted by In-Cog-Nito at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)

March 22, 2004

Quote Of The Day

"People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs." (Anonymous)
Common sense. Same thing with the fashionable anti-semitism among some European elites, especially among French stand-up comedians. Nobody there ever got beaten up, shot or car-bombed for making sick racist jokes about the Jews. But voice the mildest criticism of the Arab world, and you'd better get yourself lawyers and bodyguards pronto.

Islam is a religion of peace.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 04:05 PM | Comments (19)

Debugging, Israeli Style

We are delighted to add Sheikh Ahmed Yassin to the 2004 terrorist frag count. So delighted, in fact, that we are considering sending some pizza and soda to the men and women of the IDF.



Ain't the Internet grand ?

In the unfortunate comment department, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw :
"All of us understand Israel's need to defend itself against terrorism which affects it, within international law."

But he said this did not entitle Israel to carry out "this kind of unlawful killing, which we all condemn".
Isn't it interesting that you never hear this kind of comment from European leaders when scores of innocent Israeli civilians are blown to bits in a bus ? You would think that international law would apply to both sides, and that killing women and children at random would be at least as unlawful as assassinating the leader of an organization advocating and practicing mass murder. To paraphrase one Jacques Chirac, Mr Straw missed one hell of an opportunity to shut up.

On such occasions, the BBC can always be counted on to plumb of the depths of moral corruption, and this one is no exception. Here is how it rewrites Jack Straw's statements :
UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the killing of an elderly man in a wheelchair was "unjustified" and "very unlikely to achieve its objective".
Note that Mr Straw never referred to Mr Yassin as "an elderly man in a wheelchair". This is typical, slavishly pro-Palestinian BBC embroidering, meant to pass Yassin as a weak, innocent victim. Of course, when elderly Israelis and their grandchildren are murdered by the dozens by Yassin's fanatical minions, that's tough luck for them. They were at the wrong place, at the wrong time. Too bad. Try and find the BBC asking whether that's "justified", or if it makes it more likely the Palestinians will achieve their "objective". Never mind the "objective" of Hamas and the others who rule on the ground is the destruction if Israel. Obviously, that's an acceptable goal. That Israel might feel the same way towards its declared enemies is, on the other hand, beyond the pale.

And when the founder of a terrorist organization whose Charter's article 13 states :
Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.
is finally eliminated, not only are his age and health implied to be mitigating factors, but they prove Israel to be responsible for the continuing conflict.

On a lighter note, this other BBC story is a good one; to summarize, the U.S. are accused - by those progressive champions of constitutional democracy, the Saudis - of ignoring the Arabs' ability to handle their own affairs. How certain officials can accuse others of ignoring something that doesn't exist, and still expect to be taken seriously, is somewhat amusing.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 01:17 PM | Comments (14)

Zero Tolerance

Andre Glucksmann, one of the French anti-anti-americans, in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.
Except this time the assassins can proclaim they have won. It took them three days to sway popular opinion. The Popular Party of Jose María Aznar, the expected winner, got trounced. "Punished!" they said. But by whom? What's the point of political campaigns, meetings, reports, programs and debates if within a few hours, the bombing of packed train cars can reverse the result? This final landslide, which no polls had predicted, is entirely due to the Atocha station catastrophe and the terror it spread. How could the terrorists not assume that they are the decision-makers, and that terrorism is now stronger than democracy? If the Socialists brought to govern Spain keep their pledge (made before the massacre) to withdraw from Iraq, they will confirm the killers' innermost conviction: Crime pays--and the greater the horror, the more efficiently.
Thanks to Gerry Adams, Yasser Arafat and others, we already knew terrorism paid. If you persist murdering innnocents for long enough, the well-thinking sophisticates will eventually forgive you - for crimes that had no consequences for them - and grant you international status and diplomatic immunity. With them, terrorism somehow became respectable. (For reasons we can't fathom, getting a Nobel Peace Prize made Arafat a good man in the eyes of many; when his dubious "achievement" - a lifetime spent killing Jews - should discredit both the award and himself) With Spain, it has proven the most potent political weapon against Western democracies.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 07:14 AM

March 21, 2004

Too Much Excitement

Is your life too exciting? Then check out the dullest blog in the world.

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 10:15 PM | Comments (6)

March 20, 2004

Did Poland Really Waver In Its Support Of The War?

Apparently not. Moira Breen has the rest of the story.

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 07:05 PM | Comments (3)

March 19, 2004

Predictive Fumble

In last week's Economist, on the Madrid bombing :
Coming just three days before a general election which the ruling conservatives now seem even more likely to win...

[...]

The Socialists will not make such claims now. But their chances of taking office next week, in Madrid, look even slimmer.
Oh well. For all the differences between this country and that one, there is a lesson and warning here for Republicans about assuming too much. Not that they seem to care, of course.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 12:34 PM | Comments (11)

If we could only get back into good graces with the French...

That great beacon of freedom continues to shine.

Posted by Andy Bizub at 10:46 AM | Comments (10)

Free Trade



Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 06:19 AM | Comments (1)

March 18, 2004

Size Matters

Harley Davidson might have to rename the Fat Boy. The Roadog makes it look like a puny Italian moped. Even a Hummer cannot compete with its manly 110 feet turning radius.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 01:12 PM | Comments (5)

A Moment Of Truth

After expounding on the unnecessary evil the State can so casually inflict on individuals, we will now give it some credit for this burst of raw honesty :
By a wide margin, the Senate on Thursday approved a measure that would prevent most civilian federal agencies from outsourcing jobs to contractors working outside the United States.

The measure, introduced by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., as an amendment to a corporate tax bill, also would prohibit agencies from procuring goods or services from companies that send work abroad, with some exceptions. Senators endorsed the bipartisan amendment by a vote of 70 to 26.
In other words, the government wants to forbid itself to provide the best possible value-for-money to its taxpayers. When you cannot, or do not want to fix an endemic problem, you might as well make it illegal to try.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 10:28 AM | Comments (9)

Mad Cow Disease Outbreak In London

Most libertarians will tell you that the State has long ago eclipsed the capitalist robber barons when it comes to sheer greed, rapaciousness, paranoia, reach, corruption and ambition. Having grown up in a country where the government swallows about 54% of GDP on any given year, you can imagine how I came to regard places like New Hampshire as the Promised Land. ("No VAT ? No income tax ? How do you mean ? Is that legal ? I don't pay a tax and I stay out of jail ? Radical !")

An experience which also led me to believe France was undoubtedly in the top league of statist decadence. No longer. Our neighbors and favorite historical rivals across the Channel have suddenly sped far ahead of us in the Hall Of Shame, in a move as stunning as it is insane, by any standard (emphasis mine).
WHAT do you give someone who’s been proved innocent after spending the best part of their life behind bars, wrongfully convicted of a crime they didn’t commit?

An apology, maybe? Counselling? Champagne? Compensation? Well, if you’re David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, the choice is simple: you give them a big, fat bill for the cost of board and lodgings for the time they spent freeloading at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in British prisons.

On Tuesday, Blunkett will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than £3000 for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted. The logic is that the innocent man shouldn’t have been in prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation grey blankets.

Blunkett’s fight has been described as “outrageous”, “morally repugnant” and the “sickest of sick jokes”, but his spokesmen in the Home Office say it’s a completely “reasonable course of action” as the innocent men and women would have spent the money anyway on food and lodgings if they weren’t in prison. The government deems the claw-back ‘Saved Living Expenses’.
I will admit I don't even know where to begin with this one. The absurdity of seeing Labour Party officials, people who believe they have a monopoly on caring for the poor, who never miss an occasion to pompously lecture their sheepish audience about the moral evils of money as a "social yardstick", inflicting such reckless insult and injury on individuals who have been hideously wronged and abused, and are most likely to come from the poorer parts of society, all in the name of plain, cold, morally void bean counting. And, presumably, those who cannot or do not pay would be sent back to jail for a while. And leave yet again with a new bill for the additional "savings" the government graciously "loaned" them. Including, of course, the old bill with interests.

Bottom line : if capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, then socialism clearly is its opposite.

(Link via Perry De Havilland)

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 10:01 AM | Comments (9)

March 15, 2004

Al Qaeda 200, Spain 0

For all intent and purposes, the Spanish electorate has successfully been terrorized into voting Jose Maria Aznar's People's Party out of office. Socialist leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero announced last Thursday that should he be elected, he would withdraw his country's 1,300 troops from Iraq if the country was not under U.N. control by June 30, telling his interviewer that
"the negative situation in the country will not improve unless the United Nations take control with the support of neighbouring Arab countries, and unless a committment is made to develop the sovereignty of the Iraqi people."
The people have spoken. And their answer is fear and denial. Next.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 08:23 AM | Comments (71)