2/06/2004 - 10:10:45
High-tech trade gap
Another sign that the U.S. is losing it’s leadership in science and technology?
For the first time on record, the United States has a deficit in high-tech trade, prompting concern about American competitiveness in key job-producing industries from biotechnology to aerospace. (...) The US (...) has seen its position erode from a record $60 billion trade surplus in technology, reached in 1997. A surplus in technology, experts say, could be vital to moving America’s huge overall trade deficit closer to balance.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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29/05/2004 - 20:18:54
America saves lives
This won’t get into a Michael Moore movie:
Sudanese peasants will be naming their sons "George Bush" because he scored a humanitarian victory this week that could be a momentous event around the globe — although almost nobody noticed. It was Bush administration diplomacy that led to an accord to end a 20-year civil war between Sudan’s north and south after two million deaths.
If the peace holds, hundreds of thousands of lives will be saved, millions of refugees will return home, and a region of Africa may be revived.
This comes via AtlanticBlog, who has more. The slaughter in Darfur will continue, because it is not affected by the peace accord. And the media isn’t giving near as much attention to this then to, let’s say, Israël, the personal shortcomings of Achmad Chalabi, or the newest documentary from Michael Moore. The new media isn’t much better sometimes...look at a "liberal" weblog like that of Kevin Drum, who is completely silent on the Sudan; he reads AtlanticBlog nevertheless, but apperantly is more interested in the geographical diffusion of softdrink names than in the Sudan. Maybe it’s because G.W. Bush is doing something too good for his taste? Luckily, this weblog sets the record straight.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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29/05/2004 - 19:55:37
Proof for Atkins
Here is proof that Atkins does work. But don’t forget: the evidence is biased, partisan and paid for by a party with lot’s of interest at stake.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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29/05/2004 - 14:33:02
Quote of the day
Matt Welch:
(L)iberalism - liberal science, open inquiry, basic human freedom and rights, free markets - is the best basic orientation for any society, and can always be improved upon and tinkered with to meet specific local needs and concerns.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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29/05/2004 - 14:28:58
Justice
This certainly is good news:
A Chilean court has stripped General Augusto Pinochet of his immunity from prosecution, opening up once more the possibility of his being tried for his part in the human rights abuses that followed his military coup in 1973. The appeals court in Santiago voted by 14 to 9 to remove immunity from the man who led the military dictatorship that replaced President Salvador Allende and remained in power until 1990.
Let me say this. If Chile is considered a developed country these days (and is resented for it by it’s less performing neighbours and by some left-wing idiots which rather want to see a poor Chile, as least as poor as the rest of Soutern Latin America), then we must acknowledge Pinochet’s role in getting there. Having written this politically incorrect statement, Pinochet was a tiran who violated human rights and no dictator, left-wing or right-wing, still in power or removed from power, should be save for justice.
(Hat tip: Norman Geras)
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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29/05/2004 - 14:11:13
Stralen GSM niet schadelijk
Weer een fabeltje dat nu hopelijk de wereld is uitgeholpen:
De straling die vrijkomt bij gsm-toestellen en gsm-antennes blijft ver onder de risicodrempel voor de volksgezondheid. Dat schrijft het consumentenmagazine Test Aankoop.Test Aankoop heeft zelf de straling van verschillende gsm-toestellen gemeten. De waarden bleven telkens onder de Europese norm van twee watt per kilo. De laatste jaren verschenen regelmatig alarmerende berichten over de gevaren van telefoneren met een gsm. Test Aankoop noemt nu de resultaten van zijn internationale onderzoek, dat in samenwerking werd gedaan met acht andere landen, "geruststellend". Over de gsm-antennes zegt Test Aankoop dat geen enkele studie tot nu toe enige schadelijkheid heeft aangetoond. Voor zover we weten, is de straling ervan dus onschadelijk, luidt de conclusie. Volgens het magazine komt dat in de eerste plaats omdat er in ons land een goede spreiding is van de antennes.
Eigenlijk komt dat vooral omdat de stralingsintensiteit snel in verticale richting afneemt. Onder een GSM-mast gaan staan met de antennes ettelijke meters boven uw hoofd is nog de minst schadelijke plek van allemaal.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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29/05/2004 - 1:47:10
The movie Bush does want you to see...
Julian Sanchez has seen The Day After Tomorrow:
I just saw a midnight showing of The Day After Tomorrow, the mother-of-all-disaster-flicks that MoveOn is billing (with help from Al Gore) as "the movie George Bush doesn’t want you to see."
(...)Having seen it, I now want to be the first to say: are you fucking kidding me? George Bush should be buying people tickets to this movie. It’s preposterous from start to finish—maybe the D.C. audience has an unusually ironic sensibility, but the crowd was laughing from start to finish, during many of the ostensibly most dramatic scenes. Partly it’s because of the movie’s hyperformulaic, throw-in-everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach (A wave of hypercold is about to descend, freezing our heroes, and then... wolves! Words fail, seriously) and logic-defying plot contrivances (one of the world’s most brilliant climatologists is required to act like a thorough moron to get the final act’s drama going). But the movie’s earnestness provoked some of the loudest howls, as when the film’s Dick Cheney character issues a mea culpa for his previous skepticism about global warming, followed by a chastened, misty-eyed thanks to "what we formerly called the Third World" for taking in refugees from North America.
I still think i’m going to read a book tomorrow (sorry, George). No ice age in sight.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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28/05/2004 - 13:50:57
Nuclear power is good for Gaia
In the wake of James Lovelock’s plea for nuclear energy, Philip Stott sums up the advantages of nuclear power:
(a) Nuclear power (currently 17% of the world’s electricity supply) has the safest record of any major form of energy production. In the West, it has killed no one and injured no one. An analysis by The Paul Scherrer Institute of the number of serious accidents worldwide (i.e., they killed at least 5 people) in the energy sector between 1969 and 1996 gives the following telling results:
Oil = 334; coal = 187; natural gas = 86; LPG = 77; hydropower = 9; nuclear = 1.
(b) Nuclear weapons require enrichment of over 90%; nuclear power needs less than 10%. Most nuclear waste is useless for making weapons.
(c) Nuclear power stations release no ’greenhouse gases’. Over the whole energy cycle audit, they release lower levels of ’greenhouse gases’ than any other energy source, including solar power and those dreaded wind farms.
(d) The radiation from a nuclear power station is less than that from a coal-powered station or from a large hospital. (And there are fewer superbugs too, despite the jokes!)
I think Lovelock’s scaremongering on the Earth’s imminent demise is vastly overblown (we’ve heard it before, many times), but i happily let the Greens try to prove him wrong about our energy supply.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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28/05/2004 - 13:33:20
Q moet ook de Amerikaanse bureaucratie aanpakken
Na The Wall Street Journal heeft de website van Vincent Van Quickenborne, kafka.be, ook het Amerikaanse blad The Week gehaald. De weblog van het tijdschrift Reason, Hit and Run, bericht erover. Het idee van Van Quickenborne wordt wel gesmaakt door de Amerikanen, die nu naar believen kunnen hakken op de Europese bureaucratie (ten dele terecht overigens). Dat blijkt zeker ook uit het commentaar die een aantal mensen hebben neergepend. Sommigen vinden het een goed idee om het ook in de V.S. toe te passen. Want laten we nu vooral niet denken dat dat land vrij is van administratieve rompslomp.
Hoe dan ook, proficiat Vincent! Ik zie het Xandee nog niet nadoen.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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28/05/2004 - 13:19:05
Contrasting views
Here comes Joseph Stiglitz:
The problem with globalization today is precisely that a few may benefit and a majority may be worse off, unless government takes an active role in managing and shaping it.
Probably this is the reason why he has written a whole book about the mismanagement of globalization by the IMF. And the IMF, well, isn’t that a governmental institution Joe? Why would government suddenly do all the things right in the future when they did it so many wrong things in the past?
And here is William W. Lewis:
Innovations already exists around the world, which if applied in the poor countries through globalization, would make them rich. However, rich countries of today have given the poor countries a curse. That curse is not globalization. It is big government.
(The Power of Productivity, p. 19)
And Lewis points out that elites are responsible for big government and that they reward themselves richly through it. So indeed the few may benefit and the majority worse of, IF government takes a big active role.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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27/05/2004 - 9:41:12
Saturday
Were will i be the day after tomorrow?
Well, the weather will be hot saturday, so i think i’m going to sit in the garden, reading a good book. Seems a better idea than going to some kind of disaster movie.
Gepost door/Posted by: The weatherman
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27/05/2004 - 9:38:32
Who want’s .tv?
Tuvalu Islands’s comparative advantage:
Tuvalu Islands’ annual GDP: $12 million
Tuvalu Islands’ annual income from sale of right to use .tv domain: $4 million
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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26/05/2004 - 20:29:08
From Kosovo to Iraq
Matt Welch observes:
Of all the historical precedents that paved the way for President George W. Bush’s war against Iraq, the most directly relevant was Bill Clinton’s 1999 bombing of the rump Yugoslavia. Like Gulf War II, the 78-day NATO air campaign in Kosovo was waged without the explicit authorization of the United Nations. (Of the two, the Iraq war had much more of a U.N. mandate, through Resolution 1441, which gave Iraq a "final opportunity" -- one it did not take -- to comply fully with all previous Security Council resolutions or else face "serious consequences.") Like Iraq, Yugoslavia was a sovereign country that was bombed into submission for essentially internal infractions. Both wars were expressions of American exasperation at European impotence in the face of dictatorial slaughter. Slobodan Milosevic, like Saddam Hussein, was described as a modern-day Adolf Hitler, eager to practice genocide against minority tribes while scrambling for horrible weapons to menace peaceful neighbors. Supporters of both wars frequently invoked the Munich Agreement of 1938, in which the West appeased Hitler rather than defend allied Czechoslovakia. Opponents of both wars warned that the target countries were colonially conceived multi-ethnic basket cases not conducive to postwar democratization. And the United States led the fight against both dictators despite urgent warnings from antiwar activists and multilateralism enthusiasts that each new bomb would lower the threshold for waging modern war. Kosovo made Iraq possible.
These are the similarities between Kosovo and Iraq. The difference? The modern war against Milosevic was waged unilaterally by Democrats who are castigating Republicans for waging war against Saddam unilaterally.
Read the rest.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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26/05/2004 - 20:09:06
An independent Kurdistan
Peter W. Galbraith, a former staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who uncovered and documented Iraq’s "Anfal" campaign against the Kurds, writes:
In the north the Kurds prefer almost unanimously not to be part of Iraq, for reasons that are very understandable. Kurdistan’s eighty-year association with Iraq has been one of repression and conflict, of which the Saddam Hussein regime was the most brutal phase. Since 1991, Kurdistan has been de facto independent and most Iraqi Kurds see this period as a golden era of democratic self-government and economic progress. In 1992 Kurdistan had the only democratic elections in the history of Iraq, when voters chose members of a newly created Kurdistan National Assembly. During the last twelve years the Kurdistan Regional Government built three thousand schools (as compared to one thousand in the region in 1991), opened two universities, and permitted a free press; there are now scores of Kurdish-language publications, radio stations, and television stations. For the older generation, Iraq is a bad memory, while a younger generation, which largely does not speak Arabic, has no sense of being Iraqi. The people of Kurdistan almost unanimously prefer independence to being part of Iraq. In just one month, starting on January 25 of this year, Kur- dish nongovernmental organizations collected 1,700,000 signatures on petitions demanding a vote on whether Kurdistan should remain part of Iraq. This is a staggering figure, representing as it does roughly two thirds of Kurdistan’s adults.
If the U.S. wants a pro-American, secular and democratic regime, which can be an example for the rest of the Middle East, they must search no longer. It already exists, under their very noses: Iraqi Kurdistan. When the British "invented" Iraq in the 1920’s it became an undemocratic unitary state dominated by a minority, the Sunni’s, and later on by a minority of that minority, the clan of Saddam. With the - admittedly reluctant - help of the Americans, Iraqi Kurdistan became a (rather imperfect, but nonetheless) democratic enclave in the midsts of Saddam’s cruel and totalitarian regime. And it’s the only part in Iraq were there is general gratitude for America. Maybe the U.S. should admit that there quest for a democratic Iraqi nation is a failure, at least for the immediate future. Maybe the U.S. should concentrate on that part of Iraq where a genuine democracy seems possible, if not already present. Why not liberate the Kurds further and grant them their independence?
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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26/05/2004 - 19:32:10
A political quiz
Who said this?
working with other countries in the War on Terror is something we do for our sake, not theirs
John Kerry or George W. Bush?
And who said this?
I believe in the international institutions and alliances that America helped to form and helps to lead.
John Kerry or George W. Bush?
You can find the aswers here.
Gepost door/Posted by: The quizmaster
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25/05/2004 - 9:29:09
An act of idiocy
Brad DeLong call’s this an "act of idiocy":
A U.S. trade panel gave final approval on Friday to steep anti-dumping duties on more than $276 million worth of color televisions from China.
The U.S. International Trade Commission voted 5-0 that low-priced imports of 21-inch (52-cm) and larger color televisions from China threatened to harm U.S. producers.
To justify implementing the duties, the commission had to determine that the imports from China materially damaged, or threatened to damage, the domestic industry.
The Bush administration proposed a 78.45 percent anti-dumping duty on nearly $300 million worth of televisions from China.
The vote was the final bolt in the process of imposing the levy which will go into effect by early June until its review in five years, said John Greer, an ITC spokesman.
"Because of various factors, they can have low prices and low prices can bring injury to the United States," Greer said. "This (levy) is nothing special. It’s not a gigantic amount of money."
Low prices for color tv’s can bring injury to the United States? Indeed, idiocy.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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25/05/2004 - 9:18:08
Disunited Nations
United Nations = U.S. + Israel against the rest of the world.
MORE
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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23/05/2004 - 19:12:31
The revenge of Dr. Atkins
The Economist reports that the Atkins diet - a high-fat low carbs diet - seems to work. Two studies found that people on an Atkins diet lose weight faster. One should be carefull however as in the end people don’t lose more weight, they only lose it faster. Besides, one of the studies was sponsored by the Atkins Foundation. I think weightloss is rather straightforward: less calories in (less eating) and more calories out (sport) normally leads to less weight. It’s really simple as that. If the Atkins diet implies less intake of calories weightloss of course is possible. But I doubt that subsituting carbs with fat and proteins, without restricting calorie intake will lead to weightloss. Indeed even the studies reported in the article do not "prove" that weightloss is bigger with the Atkins diet. So the discussing will continue. Atkins himself died while being overweight by the way. However, non other than Achilles is a devotee of the Atkins diet. So maybe it does work. Like I said, the debate won’t stop anytime soon.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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20/05/2004 - 17:37:03
The day the truth died
Bjorn Lomborg has seen the "extremely enjoyable" movie The Day After Tomorrow, and finds it’s message not only wrong but also amoral:
If politicians were to see The Day After Tomorrow and act on its agenda, what would happen? Implementing the Kyoto agreement on climate change would cost at least $150 billion each year, yet would do no more than postpone global warming for six years by 2100. That is to say, it would cause temperatures to increase slightly more slowly - the temperature we would have reached in 2100 without Kyoto, we would now reach in 2106. Those families in Bangladesh who will get flooded will have an extra six years to move. Even if the film’s creators are right - and the scientists are wrong - and the Gulf Stream current does collapse within a decade, then Kyoto would have made no difference.
There is another reason why it is wrong - I would even say amoral - to overplay the case for combatting climate change. We cannot do everything. Our resources are limited, and our attention is quickly diverted from one fashionable cause to another. We must ask ourselves if spending $150 billion every year for the rest of the century to postpone warming for six years is really the best use of that money.
For the cost of implementing Kyoto in just one year, we could permanently provide clean drinking water and sanitation to everyone on the planet. Of course it is unlikely that Emmerich will cast Brad Pitt as a sewage engineer in Kenya for his next glamorous movie. Nor are there many good plotlines to be made from tales of a government which invests in malarial vaccines, or of a global conference called to remove trade barriers. But these are real options that policy-makers face every time they spend a dollar with the intention of easing human suffering.
(...)
In an ideal world, we would be able to achieve everything - we should halt global warming and eradicate corruption, end malnutrition and win the war against communicable diseases. Because we cannot do everything, we need sound reasoning and high quality information to defeat the hysteria of Hollywood. I believe there is more hope in truth than in hype.
Gepost door/Posted by: Ivan
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