While Columbia may not have much to be smiling about, the “Day without Cars” (“Dia san Coches”? The article doesn’t say.) is a warm fuzzy. Can you imagine if a city like Los Angles or New York did this? That would be wild!
Older link to an article about conditions at Guantanamo Bay and the lunacy of the captured terrorists.
Here’s a nice duet of stories on why police aren’t necessarily better than civilians (even kids) when handling guns. (By way of InstaPundit.)
I read an article a few months ago (alas, I cannot find it now) about how economic conditions in Egypt’s socialist-style economy were so ridiculously depressing that it was driving many well-educated Egyptians to fundamentalists mosques. They spend years in school and then can’t find a job in their field, thanks to the government’s incredibly naive employment policies. So, they waste away working at menial jobs while becoming ever more bitter, until they grow up to be Mr. Atta (who was well-educated, and flew a jumbo-jet into a building, in case you forgot). Obviously, the thing to do is let Egypt’s economy shake-down and get into some sort of reasonable free-market system. Egypt has in fact been trying to do this very thing, but every little bump in the road makes people want to revert to the safety of the old system (in which you could never get fired).
This seems to be an excellent scenario for Ralph Peters’ concept of favorable instability. But, as Mr. Peters points out, the US has a knee jerk reaction to keep the status quo, even to the tune of a couple billion dollars. I doubt our return on investment is going to be very high on this.
Another prime example of how the US is changing from “for the people” to “for something else“, in this case “government for the government”: Dale L. Watson, in Statement for the Record of Dale L. Watson, Executive Assistant Director, Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence, Federal Bureau of Investigation on The Terrorist Threat Confronting the United States Before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Washington, D.C., tells us that
The use of commercially available, non-recoverable encryption products by individuals engaged in terrorist and other serious criminal activity can effectively prevent law enforcement access to this critical evidence. Law enforcement’s inability to gain access to the plaintext of encrypted communications and/or computer evidence in a timely manner seriously impairs our ability to successfully prevent and prosecute terrorist and/or other serious criminal acts.
This significant challenge to effective law enforcement poses grave and serious public safety consequences. Unless the FBI enhances its ability for gathering and processing computer data obtained through electronic surveillance, search and seizure of computer evidence, and its ability to gain access to the plain text of encrypted evidence, investigators and prosecutors will be denied timely access to valuable evidence that could be used to prevent and solve terrorist and other serious criminal acts.
Now, I’m not saying that terrorists should get a free ride here, but as of a few years ago, I had heard that the FBI had very few wiretaps which were foiled by encryption. This draws me to consider two alternatives:
Either way, I don’t think this is a good thing. Historically, the people of the US have had a veil of privacy which the government could pierce if they had sufficient cause and could justify the effort necessary to do so. I’m convinced that the new view of the government is that the veil should be pulled back so they can peek whenever they want to. “Don’t worry, we’ll only look when we’re legally allowed to.” they tell us. But such a fundamental shift in socio-political philosophy must not be allowed to occur without direct debate on the issue. These changes, championed in the name of the “war” on terror (much as these same proposals were championed in the name of the “war” on drugs in the 80s and 90s), reflect not the efforts of the FBI to maintain the status quo, but to radically reshape law into a statist tool instead of a shield for liberty.
Perhaps I’m wrong; perhaps the FBI has had constant trouble with wiretaps and other surveillance measures being stopped by encryption. If so, I welcome verifiable evidence, which will be published here if produced. But these debates need to be based on the sound evaluation of objective evidence, not political posturing from high ranking officials in a federal agency.
A new study of Vietnam has gathered evidence that globalized free trade may reduce child labor in developing companies. The Dartmouth College research found that, as summarized by CNN/Money:
In 1989, the Vietnamese government imposed a rice export quota that kept rice prices low relative to the global rice market. After that, however, it gradually began loosening restrictions until, in 1997, rice trade was fully liberalized and subject to global market prices. As a result, between 1993 and 1998, the price of Vietnamese rice jumped 29 percent.
During that same period, the rate of Vietnamese children between the ages of 6 and 15 working at least seven hours a day fell to 38 percent in 1998 from 57 percent in 1993, according to the Vietnam Living Standards Survey of 4,000 households.
But higher rice prices couldn’t have directly led to all the reduction in child labor in Vietnam, Edmonds and Pavcnik pointed out, since families in urban areas had to pay more for rice without getting any of the benefit from higher rice prices that rice-growing families enjoyed.
Adjusting for such factors, Edmonds and Pavcnik estimated that higher rice prices accounted for about 45 percent of the drop in child labor between 1993 and 1998 — in other words, about 1 million of the 2.2 million children who stopped working during that time did so simply because of higher rice prices.
The full research paper is also available online at the National Bureau for Economic Research.
NOTE: I had a copy of the revoked kickidle.com PGP key posted. The correct key has been posted. You should update from the keyservers to ensure that you have the latest signatures.
Hmm, apparently Natalija Radic is considering becoming a vampire slayer. Personally, I think she’d be better than Buffy. As much as I enjoy seeing Ms. Gellar on the screen, I doubt that she could match the intellect, poise, and stunning good looks combined in Ms. Radic. I hope whomever produces Buffy the Vampire Slayer is reading blogdom….
I went looking for books by Karl Popper at the local Waldenbooks and the public library. None available. The library didn’t even have an entry in the card catalogue for Popper, Karl, or for libertarian. So, I guess if you’re in Bridgeport, WV and want to learn about libertarianism, you have to have an internet connection. Thank god for Amazon.com.
P.J. O’Rourke is on the short list of authors who can make me actually laugh. His cynical insights into life are unmatched.