Now they tell us....

Shultz and Kissinger are using theWashington Post Op/Ed page to tell everybody that building a democracy in Iraq is difficult.

Question:

Why the fuck didn't they tell Bush so, before the war? Why didn't they tell anybody?

Schultz could have told us so in his September 6, 2002 Washington Post Op/Ed titled:Act Now;The danger is immediate. Saddam Hussein must be removed.

But he didn't tell us it would be difficult to establish a democracy in Iraq in 2002. In 2002 he told us:

The history of Iraq, the achievements of its peoples, its high civilization of the past, and its extensive natural resources all point to the possibility of a positive transformation once Hussein's yoke is lifted.

And:

The evidence is clear that Hussein continues to amass weapons of mass destruction.

How can it be the Post prints this drivel by two lying sons of bitches without a disclaimer?

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Men with high IQ less likely to commit suicide

Or so you'd think when you saw this (Dutch) headline.

Unfortunately, things aren't as clear as that (as the scientists who published their research in the British Medical Journal readily admit). Once again, the editor has made the headline promise more than the article can deliver. I hate it when that happens.

The researchers looked at the IQ-testscores that were kept in the Swedish military conscription register. 987,308 18-year olds were tested, 2811 of whom committed suicide later on (follow-up range: 5-26 years). Kids doing poorly in the test had a two- to threefold higher chance of committing suicide.

But doing poorly in an IQ-test doesn't necessarily mean you have a low IQ! There are two distinct theories that can explain the relationship between the test and suicide:

1. Kids who score low on the test are, well, stupid. They will be less succesfull in life and will have more trouble coping with adversity. Hence, more suicides.
2. Kids suffering from psychiatric disorders such as depression and psychosis are more likely to commit suicide. But these disorders also tend to ruin your concentration, make you uninterested, paranoid etcetera. They will score lower on the test because of the disease, not because of their innate low IQ. The same goes for drug addicts or alcoholics (this is Sweden we're talking about).
   

In all probability both theories are true. And no matter how you slice or dice the data, both theories can be applied to every imaginable subset of conscripts. Example:

The subgroup most likely to commit suicide consisted of "poorly performing offspring of well educated parents". Some of these kids are likely to have had an innate IQ higher than that indicated by the test. But kids with smart parents are also most likely to be burdened by great expectations.

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Calling O.J. on them!

First I read Mark Schmitt about George Lakoff and the need to reframe the debate in simple terms that will give Dems the advantage. "Indebting our children" instead of "tax relief", that stuff.

Then I happen onto Oliver Willis' blog. He links to this radio transcript posted by Onthemedia.org where a guy named Bob Garfield comes up with a gem. He's talking about Rathergate:

Doesn't really matter. What the public will see is smoking gun evidence of media bias, which means that any lies and misdeeds of the GOP, when exposed by an occasionally vigilant press, can be more easily dismissed. It's the modified O.J. defense -- it's the "bias" card. Pay no attention to my footprints, my flight from prosecution and the victims' blood in my car -- you're out to get me because I'm..."Republican."

And I just thougt: that's it! Every time some conservative slimeball plays the "liberal bias" card in a discussion, this should be the reply: "Now don't you go O.J. on me motherfucker!"

It's short, it's pejorative, it implies the other person is both guilty and a liar, and the dimbulbs who vote red are more likely to understand it than "pejorative". We've got to get this into the punditry jargon.

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Why American politics are fascinating

Sure, there is the difference in scale. When our smallfry Dutch politicians lie, a railroad track gets build for no reason at all that ruins the Betuwe at a cost of exactly zero lives. But we've got lying politicians an' corruption an' everything. So why is American politics so much more fascinating?

The Poor Man has the answer:

Bush didn't just lie and get elected - he lied, got elected, lied for four solid years, lied outrageously throughout the campaign, and then got re-elected. He lied about everything from the reasons for going to war to the way he likes his cheesesteak sandwich. So it's not like the lies are just coming out now. Pointing out that the President is mendacious misses the point, which is that, after four-plus years of lying, he received more votes than any presidential candidate in history. His lies have the imprimatur of the people. He is mandatious.

What is fascinating is watching the big lie in action.

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Social Security, part CXIII

Mark Schmitt has a theory that goes something like this:

1. Social Security privatization will most probably fail, and Karl Rove knows it.
2. If it doesn't fail, the transition costs will ruin the economy, so Rove probably wants it to fail.
   
3. Therefore, it's a setup. Rove wants something evil but less evil than privatization.
4. Knowing Rove, it might not even be legislation or benefit cuts. He just might want to corner the Democrats, put them on the defensive. Skew the idiom in the war of ideas even more in favor of Repub-speak, make the Democrats look like the big spenders and the Republicans the party for fiscal sanity.
   

But whatever the plan was, it has backfired. Like Schmitt says:

This sorry game is over. The challenge for Democrats is now to drag it out, to inflict maximum pain, to drag this out at least as long as the Clinton health care debacle was drawn out.

Word.

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Robert Samuelson, once again...

I feel compelled to go all Somerby on his sorry ass:

If Bush dodges these and other dangers (a slowdown in China?) [that might cause a US economical slowdown, j.e.], critics will still attack his budget deficits. In some ways, this is unfair. True, Bush doesn't plan on ever proposing a balanced budget. But most of his critics aren't any better. (John Kerry also pledged to cut the deficit in half.) Despite Social Security "reform," neither Bush nor Democrats face the spending explosion of the baby boomers' retirement costs. The reason is that the biggest increases stem from health care (i.e., Medicare and Medicaid).

Ehhh.... no?

Most of his critics are way better. Are you not, most of his critics?

Doesn't Samuelson remember Al Gore talking about a lockbox for Social Security? Doesn't he remember Gore talking about using the surplus to reduce the deficit, while Bush talked about tax cuts for the rich? Note to Samuelson: a smaller deficit is easier to halve.

And doesn't Samuelson remember all the talk during 2002 about "getting more bang for the buck"? That there was this disagreement-thing going on, on how best to stimulate the economy out of recession?

On the one hand, you had Bush claiming that tax cuts for the rich and tax cuts on dividends would do the trick, even if they were phased in after the recession and were going to cost money long into the future.

And on the other hand, you had 450 economists (10 of whom are Nobel laureates) claiming that the best way would be to have immediate and temporary measures, aimed at keeping consumers consuming. A temporary extension of unemployment benefits was proposed, or giving money to the states so they wouldn't have to fire all those state employed teachers and firefighters.

John Kerry would have repealed part of the tax cuts. He would have liked to spent that money on healthcare issues (using the government to insure people against "catastrophic" costs, thus making the rest of healthcare insurance more affordable), but a Republican Congress would have nibbed this plan in the bud. Kerry would still have vetoed the extension of (part of) the tax cuts. So either Kerry would do something about the looming healthcare crisis, or -more likely- he would restore fiscal sanity.

Either way he would have been better than Bush, who openly lies about halving the deficit - he won't - even if you let Bush keep the $ 2 trillion needed for partial privatization of Social Security off the books. Samuelson knows this (he writes it down, for God's sake). Why does he lie about it?

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J.D.Salinger

Here's a link that would have been nice for Judith to know about back when she was still writing her thesis on the guy: J.S. Salinger's uncollected writings

It's got a whole bunch of "underpublished" short stories online, as well as Nine Stories, The Catcher in the Rye, and Franny and Zoey.

Hat tip: Jeroen

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Economic news

Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, gives a critical appraisal of Greenspan's tenure at the Fed. Oddly enough, he does so in Foreign Policy (subscription only and a pdf - why bother).Roach thinks that Greenspan did too little to stop the IT-bubble of the '90s, while afterwards, Greenspan slashed interest rates too aggressively to dampen the recession, thus spawning new bubbles.

That cure may cause bigger problems down the road. Bubbles have developed in other asset markets (especially corporate bonds, mortgage-backed securities, and emerging-market debt). And Greenspan's rock-bottom interest rates have led to the biggest bubble of all: residential property. Annual inflation in U.S. home prices is now running at a 25-year high of 8.8 percent, with 15 states experiencing double-digit increases in residential property values between mid2003 and mid-2004.

...

Greenspan shares some blame for this problem [low US savings, j.e.]. It all goes back to the asset economy, his often expressed belief that financial assets can play an important role in sustaining the U.S. economy. He made that argument in the late 1990s when stock prices went to new highs, and he reiterated it recently with regard to surging home prices.

Being a baby-boomer in America sure ain't as easy as it used to be. Just a few years from retirement, and the value of your house is about to tank, your 401(k) still hasn't recovered from the 2000 crash and Bush is trying to save Social Security by destroying it. Luckily you still have your defined-benefit pension.

Oops.

This article (also subscription only) in the Economist is called: "Red and Redder; America's Pension Holes". A small excerpt:

According to Ms Chao [Bush's labor secretary, j.e.], corporate defined-benefit pension plans, which cover 34m Americans--one-fifth of workers--are underfunded by $450 billion. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the quasi-governmental insurer of these schemes, is $23 billion in the red, thanks largely to bankruptcies among steelmakers and airlines. States' employee retirement plans look just as bad. Wilshire Associates, a consultancy, reckons that their liabilities exceeded their assets by $366 billion in 2003, the latest available estimate. That figure excludes local-government schemes, which are also underfunded.

Not nice.

My investment tip for today: catfood.

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Dutch troops to leave Iraq

The Dutch government has decided not to delay the planned withdrawal of Dutch troops from Iraq (Dutch only).

The 1,350 strong detachment is stationed in the province of Al Muthanna, and responsibility for security in this province will be passed on to the British in the second half of March. A new, smaller crew of several hundred men will then dismantle the Dutch campsites over a period of six to eight weeks. So far, in five rotations over 6,000 Dutch soldiers have served in Iraq.

Only "unforeseeable circumstances" such as a delay of the elections in Iraq, might sway the Dutch government to delay the withdrawal that was first decided upon last summer.

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Anti-Semitism, here and there

Here are some Americans talking about Yurp:

Last February Rockwell Schnabel (the US ambassador to the European Union) spoke of anti-Semitism in Europe "getting to a point where it is as bad as it was in the 30s." In May 2002 George Will wrote in the Washington Post that anti-Semitism among Europeans "has become the second--and final?--phase of the struggle for a 'final solution to the Jewish Question.'"

And here are some facts about anti-Semitism:

According to the Stephen Roth Institute at Tel Aviv University, there were 517 anti-Semitic incidents in France in 2002 (503 in 2003) and fifty-one in Belgium (twenty-nine in 2003). These ranged from anti-Semitic graffiti on Jewish-owned shops to Molotov cocktails thrown into synagogues in Paris, Lyons and elsewhere.

Measured by everything from graffiti to violent assaults, anti-Semitism has indeed been on the increase in some European countries in recent years; but then it has in America as well. The American Anti-Defamation League reported sixty anti-Semitic incidents on US college campuses alone in 1999, 106 in 2002 and sixty-eight in 2003. The ADL recorded 1,559 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States in 2002 (1,557 in 2003), up from 906 in 1986. Even if anti-Semitic aggression in France, Belgium and elsewhere in Europe has been grievously underreported, there is no evidence to suggest that it is much more widespread in Europe than in the United States.

From the excellent Tony Judt's piece in the Nation. Go read it all. The ADL have a reply, but their website is down. Now there are a couple of things I'd like to say:

1. Anti-Semitism among Americans is comparable to Anti-Semitism among "European" Europeans.
   
2. Anti-Semitism among Muslim Europeans, especially among Arabs, is higher.
3. This Arab European Anti-Semitism is linked to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Were peace to break out in the Holy Land, it would probably diminish.

Could American commentators please stop talking about Anti-Semitism in Europe as if (i) it is far worse than in the US, (ii) it is one single entity, (iii) it is Anti-Semitism that causes European governments to deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict differently than the US government does. Our white-guys-in-suits or no more or less Anti-Semitic than yours, and our Arabs don't have any power.

That's all.

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Hidden savings

Business Week argues that although America saves less than other developed nations, it spends more on education and R&D.

Economists like savings, because when you save you or your bank or pension fund invest the money. This spurs growth.

However, education and R&D spending are not counted as "investment" spending, although they obviously are long term investments.

If you look at the numbers, it's like this:

The national savings rate for the US is 13.6 % of GDP. This includes household savings, corporate savings and government budget deficits. The number for Europe is 20 percent, and for Japan it's 25.

However, the US spends 9.6 % of GDP on education and R&D. The closest competitors are France (7.8%) and Canada (7.5%). That's a significant difference. And there's more:

In addition, conventional savings is like a commodity. When a European or Japanese family puts money in the bank, their euros or yen end up in the global savings pool, mixed with funds from other countries -- there's no competitive advantage.

...

Overall, the U.S. spends 7.3% of GDP on education at all levels, the highest among the major industrialized nations. The lowest is Japan, which spends only 4.6% of GDP on education.

So there you have it. Although I think that the smart people over at Business Week definitely have a point, I do have some caveats (being too lazy to do the math or look it up, I wouldn't know if these are minor or major ones).

First: pricing. Precisely because education (and R&D) are not commodities, it's not a given that you can simply compare spending patterns. The stuff might be very expensive in the US as compared to elsewhere. Indeed, education is very expensive in the US. And my guess is that researchers also are relatively higher paid in the US than they are in Europe or Asia.

Second: quality. How good is the product you end up with? Are people being taught useful skills? We all know the Japanese and South-Koreans excel in math and physics while European and American children prefer to take drama lessons, study philosophy or go to law school. Taking "higher education" as a proxy for "the sort of higher education that enables one to engage in R&D activity" might be very misleading. As for the R&D itself, the Americans spend a lot of money on military R&D. But they don't like to sell their all their advanced weaponry to foreign nations. From an economical standpoint, that's money down the tube, and this military R&D also raises the wages of scientists who engage in similar research towards more peaceful endeavors.

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Stingy - final post (hopefully)

Although right-wing commentators, from the Weekly Standard to the Washington Times and the National Review, have all lied about both the US goverment's generosity and that of the American people, they do have one valid point:

The U.S. Navy has done miracles to help those stricken by the tsunami. Far more than any European navy, or even the naval forces of all EU countries combined. Credit where it's due.

But..... there are two counterpoints here to be made. One has to do with the reasons Americans choose to have a very expensive navy, and one with the reasons the Europeans choose not to have a very expensive navy.

I. Why does America have a huge navy?

This navy does two things: it can wage war all over the world, and it can bring emergency aid all over the world. To decide if paying for a navy is a form of charity, you have to ask: why are Americans paying for it? To be able to wage war, or to be able to deliver aid? It can be both, of course, but would the Americans still want a huge navy if all it did was deliver aid? Conversely, would they still want one if all it had was the ability to project force on political adversaries from all over the world? The answer is pretty clear: the stick, not the carrot, is why Americans ponied up all those billions to get their assortment of nuclear powered aircraft carriers. If it were the other way around, the ships would be designed rather differently (maybe less guns?), would be deployed differently and the sailors would be trained differently. To pretend that the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln was built to help airlift flood victims to safety is ridiculous.

But you can make the point that the current deployment in the disaster region is a costly affair. Again, this is true, but for these large ships deployment in any region is a costly affair. There are real extra costs and the combat readiness will probably decline when sailors stop practicing for war and start aiding victims, but together I doubt that this will put a large dent in the Pentagon's budget or in the effectiveness of the navy as a whole.

I am sure the U.S. navy is saving thousands of lifes, but it's basically running on money that was already spent on defense. This might seem like hairsplitting, but those rightwing commentators are basically implying that when European nations spend 1.5 percent of GDP on defense whilst the U.S. spents 4 percent, the entire diffence somehow ought to count as "foreign aid" because that is the practical difference between protecting one's borders and being able to project force abroad. They conveniently forget that the main purpose of this ability is to protect and advance American interests. Very altruistic indeed.

II. Why do the Europeans lack a large navy?

Short answer: because it is very expensive. Much too expensive for individual European countries. Long answer: of course, the Europeans could decide to cooperate and form a joint navy, or let some countries concentrate on their armies and others solely on their navies. But they haven't. Why not? Let me count the reasons:

1. The Soviet threat needed to be countered with armies, not navies.
2. The USA already had a navy larger than that of the USSR, the Chinese and the Pirates of the Caribbean combined.
   
3. All militaries are bureaucracies. Getting rid of the Dutch army in order to increase the navy is a sensible idea. It's also impossible to achieve.
4. Forming a joint navy is easy. Forming an effective joint navy with a single command structure, a single operating language and a single culture is not.
   
5. The USA wanted the Europeans to focus on self-defense from a Warschau-Pact land attack, because no matter how trustful the US is about European intentions the US always preferred to be the only guy with "the big stick". Even the largely symbolical decission to one day start an Eu Rapid Reaction Force, meant (and probably to be equipped) for peacekeeping missions, had to be accompanied by assurances to the Americans that this would in no way diminish NATO.
   
6. The Europeans wanted to focus on self-defense from a Warschau-Pact land attack, because, well, hey, the threat was real. But it's also a lot cheaper to focus on nearby defense then on fighting wars abroad. You don't need a navy or lots of airlift capacity if you can just drive your tank to the battlefield.

The US always wants the Europeans to spent more on defense. But they don't want the Europeans to spent the money on anything really useful, such as the ability to invade countries that are, like larches, quite a long way away. But there is really no reason to spend more on defense if it's only for defense. Offense, on the other hand....

These rightwing commentators are blaming the Europeans for not having large navies, when they all the while endorsed the US policy of openly advising the Europeans to focus on their purely defensive armies on the grounds that the US already had the world's biggest navy and all the airlifting capacity the world would ever need.

I doubt that the rightwing US commentariat would applaud the formation of a European strike force capable of doing what the US military is capable of doing: wack other countries. They shouldn't complain about Europe's lack of strength now in a hypocritical attempt to make the US look more generous than it is. The only thing they like less than a weak European military, is a strong one.

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In which we wonder: "Is Hugh Hewitt still an asshole?"

Short answer: "Yes, sirree".

Back in November/December, Hugh was going batty over the so called Groningen Protocol. For those of you interested in the ethics involved in euthanasia, I responded to Hugh Hewitt's drivel here, with a follow-up here.

Basically, Hugh Hewitt is calling the Dutch pediatricians nazi's for admitting that mercy killings of suffering children occur, not often but in the Netherlands for sure and most probably worldwide. Since infants cannot request death, it isn't euthanasia but the doctors felt the practice nonetheless should be bound by clear rules and out in the open. Hewitt's ethical approach to the matter is more a "NANANA!!! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!" kind of strategy. But he was deeply, deeply shocked and he accused the blogosphere of being "generally silent, which means, what, indifferent? Or embarrassed? Some of my favorite bloggers have said nothing. Nothing?" which explains why Hugh Hewitt has, after telling a few lies in early December, remained silent about it since.

So before I reveal the idiocy that is today's HughHewitt.com I would just like to say that mr. Hewitt has not quite been the defender of the innocents and man of principles he set out to be last December. His conscience must be killing him: over here in Holland nazi-doctors are killing babies and he just won't speak up about it anymore.

No matter, he was a lying asshole then and still is one today. Onto the subject at hand. Here's what the imminent author of "Blog" wrote last Sunday:

The Social Security Debate: Somebody Tell the Republicans It Has Begun.

Yesterday's Democratic response to the president's radio address was given by New York Rep. Charles Rangel. It is a wonderful example of what's ahead in the social security debate. Take these two paragraphs for instance:

"But the facts prove that there is no imminent crisis with Social Security. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says Social Security can pay full benefits for nearly 50 years. So, there is no crisis.. But there is a challenge, because people are living longer.

"Unfortunately, the President's proposal for privatized accounts makes Social Security weaker, not stronger. It drains $2 trillion from the trust fund, leading to drastic cuts in benefits of more than 40 percent." (emphasis added. [by H.H., j.e.])

What this tells you is that the Dems have decided that the best path out of the political wilderness is a full-scale assault on the fears of the American middle class and of course, American seniors in the context of the debate over social security reform. If Charles Rangel is actually willing to say on national radio that President Bush is proposing a 40% cut in benefits, then it is fair to conclude that the Dems will say anything to gain political advantage in this debate.

The Dems should of course be more than willing to say anything to save the nation from whatever it is Bush wants to do to Social Security. After all, it looks like Bush will wreck Social Security and wreck the rest of the federal government in one fell swoop.

But.... you guessed it: Rangel is telling the truth. Bush is proposing a 40% cut in benefits. (*gasp* from vast readership going "No?!?!?" followed by *sagely nod* from author going "Sadly, yes") In fact, Rangel only takes the conservative number. Hewitt's outrage is as fake as his concern for Holland's children.

After all, Bush and his stooges like to talk about the Ten Trillion Shortfall^tm. Which is the Social Security shortfall calculated when using the actuaries gloomy economic assumptions and when measured over infinity!

But when measured over infinity, any benefit-cut, no matter how small, would lead to a percentage cut approaching 100 percent.

Rangel is merely talking about the 75-year horizon. Why? Because the SS actuaries talk about it. The shortfall for this period is about 3.7 trillion dollars, not the Ten Trillion Shortfall^tm, but never mind.

Oh, and never mind that the Medicare drug program faces a 75-year shortfall of $ 8.1 trillion, and that the President's tax cuts will cost the government an additional $ 11.6 trillion over the next 75 years, and never mind that I found this information over at TalkingPointsMemo, the same blog that Hewitt scorns for whipping the Dems into line on the need to demagogue this issue.

Rangel is talking about the plan to start indexing benefits to prices instead of wages. (In the current system, the height of the first check is calculated using wages, and after that your benefits rise as prices rise to keep in line with inflation.) This plan is a cut because wages tend to rise faster than prices. And yes, if you project wage-defined benefits and price-defined benefits over 75 years, you start out with equal money but end up with a 40 percent cut.

Q: Is it reasonable to talk about a 40 percent cut if it only happens 75 years from now?

A: It is if the other side is talking about a shortfall that only happens a gazillion trillion years from now.

Conclusions: (i) Hugh Hewitt is still an asshole. (ii) Hugh Hewitt will still lie, even when the truth is staring him in the face. (iii) At least one Democrat has found the courage to fight hyperbole with hyperbole. In a civilized world, this would be bad. But we don't live in a civilized world. We live in a Republican one.

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One Nation under God

Even the letters the Economist gets are better....

SIR – It is incorrect to point at the use of the word “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence and say that “the place of religion in the public sphere has never been fixed” (“A hot line to heaven”, December 18th). America's founders attempted to establish a firm divide between religion and government. Evidence comes from Article 11 of the 1797 Tripoli treaty, which reads “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” When you consider that this was included in the treaty to dispel fears of a war arising from religious differences between America and Muslim nations, the actions and opinions of George Bush and his religious, war-hawking, hyper-patriotic supporters seem eerily ironic.

Evan Engstrom
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

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Giro 555

Here's a question for my American readers:

I read American newspapers and blogs. A lot of them, perhaps even most, have posts up or links to posts that tell you "how to give" for disaster relief in Asia. Haven't you got something equivalent to the Dutch giro 555?

Giro is shorthand for post office account, since in the olden days the post office used giros instead of cheques. And account number 555 is the national account for disaster relief. Whenever there is a disaster, this is the account you wire your money to. It's like 911 for disasters.

This is how it works:

The thing is run by nine different (Dutch branches of) charitable organisations: Doctors without borders, Kerk in Actie (the Dutch Protestant Church), Cordaid, the Red Cross, Oxfam, Stichting Vluchteling (literally Foundation Refugee), TEAR fund (Dutch Evangelical churches), Terre des Homme and UNICEF. They divide the money according to three simple rules:

1. The bigger organisations (with better logistics) get more than the smaller ones.
2. Those organisations with people or projects (or local sister organisations) already at the site of the disaster also get more.
3. If an organisation can't spend its allotted share immediately (usually because of a lack of manpower or transportation), it returns the money.

Every time disaster strikes these folks use the same account, Giro 555, to collect money, and because of this, both the media and the public know it. Works like a charm.

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Stingy - reprise

The Washington Times is still angry about the whole stinginess thing. So I thought I'd piss them off some more.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy has reported that by the end of the week private donations to American charities have totaled more than $300 million, or just $50 million less than the U.S. government and many times more than what individual European governments have pledged. This isn't to bash other nations' citizens — indeed, the whole world has come together on this — but critics of American giving must be answered with something rather extraordinary in contemporary debate: the facts.

The German government has pledged half a billion euros. That's something like $ 670 million. And private pledges in the Netherlands so far have totalled € 112 million, or about 9 times as much per person as in the United States.

Sorry Moonies, but as long as you are stingy lying pieces of shit the rest of the world gets to rub it in. You are only making things worse for yourself.

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Dumbfuck of the year: Mr. James P. Pinkerton

I was surprised that I had to wait a month to read the first good article on Theo van Gogh's murder (although since then, Ian Buruma has written another excellent piece). Well, imagine my suprise that it took two months to publish the worst one.

I could not help myself and sent this letter to the editors of the LA Times. Michael, are you listening?!?

January 7, 2005

Dear Sir or Madam,


Since the murder on Theo van Gogh two months ago I have resigned myself to the fact that American conservatives will from now on describe Dutch society only as if it is the world’s largest pack of bonobos: permissive, peaceful, and facing extinction.

However, what ires me about Mr. James P. Pinkerton’s January 6 commentary are not his opinions, but his errors. To wit:

• The Netherlands do not have 17 million, but 16 million inhabitants.
• The largest Muslim minority in Holland aren’t the Moroccans, but the Turks.
• When Mr. Pinkerton’s passport was not checked after crossing from Belgium into the Netherlands it was not due to permissiveness, as he claims, but to the 1990 Schengen Convention which established a customs union and abolished costly border controls.
• The name for downtown Amsterdam is not "Zentrum", but "Centrum" or
  "Binnenstad" (literally: inner city). Centrum is also the name of the
  borough, and the correct spelling appears on all downtown street
  signs.
• Not only did he manage to evade all street signs in a strange city, he also claims to have wandered for days in downtown Amsterdam without seeing a police officer on the street. I frankly do not believe this. I lived in the red-light district for five years. The police are nearly ubiquitous in that part of town. Furthermore, the greater Amsterdam area has 6.8 police officers per 1,000 residents. In 2003, the LAPD had 2.3 (although it must be said the LAPD distinguishes between “sworn officers” and “civilian personnel” while the Amsterdam police do not).
• · The exhibition of Moroccan culture he cites as “letting ethnic Dutch empathize with their new countrymen” was, in fact, an exhibit of more than 300 showpieces –“high” art rather than “native” art- lent by museums and libraries from all over Morocco. I suppose the gallery of Dutch Masters at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg lets the Russians empathize with the Dutch.
• His claim that “in the cities, more than half of schoolchildren are Muslim” is only true for the four largest cities, and even then only because most suburbs in this small country are independent towns and villages.
• Mr. Pinkerton writes that “in recent months, the right-of-center government has imposed new laws”. That is, of course, true enough. But only Parliament can make new laws in the Netherlands. The law he describes (concerning compulsory identification) was first proposed in 2002, with the final vote in the Senate on June 22, 2004. The main reason that the law went into effect only recently was to provide people with ample opportunity to get an ID if they hadn't one already.

Lastly, I beg to differ with his conclusion that “Hirsi Ali offers Holland its best hope for peaceful accommodation through tougher-minded assimilation”. Hirsi Ali is an apostate who has called the prophet Mohammed both a pervert and a tyrant. She has every right to say such things, and I agree with her, but is she really Holland’s best hope for peaceful assimilation of Muslims?

If you wanted to moderate the views of Evangelical Christians, would you start out by pointing at the four genocides God or His people commit in the Old Testament?


Yours faithfully,


Jasper Emmering
Amsterdam, the Netherlands

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email addresses of director sheep&goat food product in mali 2005

The text of the query someone conducted using Yahoo-search, courtesy of Statcounter. My site came up at number 11 of 32 results. Go figure.

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Shorter Tony Blankley

Because we treat our own soldiers like shit we shouldn't aid tsunami victims. And foreigners should not call us stingy.

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Anne Applebaum is shrill....

She tells us exactly what's wrong with the Bush attitude on torture:

By nominating Gonzales to his Cabinet, the president has demonstrated not only that he is undisturbed by these aberrations [the torture, although you can wonder if aberrant is the right term for something so widespread, j.e.], but that he still doesn't understand the nature of the international conflict which he says he is fighting. Like communism, radical Islam is an ideology that people will die for. To fight it, the United States needs not just to show off its fancy weapons systems but also to prove to the Islamic world that democratic values, in some moderate Islamic form, will give them better lives. The Cold War ended because Eastern Europeans were clamoring to join the West; the war on terrorism will be over when moderate Muslims abandon the radicals and join us. They will not do so if our system promotes people who support legal arguments for human rights abuse.

Like some guy once said (although he said it in French): "This is worse than a crime. This is a mistake."

UPDATE:
After a short moment of quiet contemplation (and definitely not after frantically Googling and scouring Wikipedia) I can now assure you that "some guy" was, in fact, none other than Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who said this in 1804 after he was forced by Napoléon to be complicit in the kidnap and execution of the Duke of Enghien.

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Shorter David Brooks

Europeans have short work weeks, long holidays, early retirements and low labor participation. Thank God I'm an American.

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NEWSFLASH: Bruce Bartlett lies to make US look prettier

Bartlett to the rescue!

To debunk the myth that the United States are "stingy", Bruce publishes the same piece in both the National Review Online and Townhall.com. Holy Batmobile! Townhall and NRO?!?!! Surely, then, it must be true!

Sadly, no.

In fact, it is such a giant falsehood that it merits a thorough debunking of its own. Here is the entire piece:

The other day, a United Nations official accused the United States of being “stingy” in terms of aid to tsunami victims in South Asia. After criticism from the State Department, the official clarified his position. Americans are not being stingy in helping tsunami victims, only stingy in terms of overall foreign aid as compared to other countries.

The official is called Jan Egeland. He wasn’t talking about the US being stingy, he was talking about “rich countries”. And he wasn’t talking about the current disaster relief effort, he was talking about disaster relief and development aid lumped together. He later clarified his position because both the media (especially the Moonie Times) and the State Department (i.e. Colin Powell going on talkshows) were too lazy to read what he had said. His clarification wasn't a euphemism for backing down, but a real one. Some people were too stupid to actually read what he had said and had jumped to all sorts of conclusions. So he clarified things.

This is a familiar attack, which comes up annually when the foreign aid appropriations bill is before Congress. But let’s look at the facts. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, in 2003, the world’s major countries gave $108.5 billion in combined foreign aid. Of this, the U.S. contributed $37.8 billion or 35 percent of the total. The next largest foreign aid contributor was The Netherlands, which gave $12.2 billion, following two years in which it was actually a net recipient of foreign aid.

First off, I am very surprised that the Netherlands were so generous in 2003. According to this official government site, our government’s goal is to spent about 0.8 percent of GDP on foreign aid. Apparently our government accountants have accidentally misplaced a couple of billion euros. Oh well. Better luck next time.

I am also quite surprised to find that the Netherlands needed foreign aid in 2002 and 2001. Our last natural disaster worthy of the name occurred in 1953. But I sure am grateful to the rest of the world for sending us money. Please send more, our government is squandering our resources on foreign aid.

Oops. Bartlett isn’t talking about foreign aid at all. He is talking about total net money flows. He just calls it foreign aid. If Nike sets up a sweat shop in Aceh, Indonesia, it would be a good thing for the locals. But would it be aid? According to Bartlett, it is. But if you run with these numbers for the US, wouldn’t it be better to compare them with Japan and the EU instead of just with Holland?

	Amount ($ billions)	% of GDP
USA	37.9	0.34
EU	49.3	0.47
Japan	6.3	0.14

The US still comes up short. (And never mind about Japan.)

The claim of stinginess, however, comes from a different calculation—foreign aid as a share of national income. In 2003, U.S. foreign aid came to just 0.34 percent, well below the world leading Dutch at 2.44 percent. Other big contributors are Ireland (1.83 percent), Norway (1.49 percent), and Switzerland (1.09 percent). The U.S. would have to triple foreign aid just to reach the lowest of these contributors.

He simply isn’t talking about foreign aid. He's talking about money flows.

But let me try. There is government foreign aid, and there is the foreign aid that’s collected from private citizens and corporations that NGOs get to spend. Bartlett will start yammering about private charities further on, so I’ll just give you the numbers for official government foreign aid. This is the number the Dutch government tries to keep at 0.8 percent of GDP (the OECD recommends 0.7 percent. By the way, it’s from the very same OECD Excel-sheet Bartlett used to look up the net cash flows. I wonder why he didn’t simply take these numbers?

	Amount ($ billions)	% of GDP
USA	16.3	0.15
EU	37.1	0.35
Japan	8.9	0.20

Yup. Even worse than the Japanese.

The first thing one notices when looking at the big foreign aid contributors is that they all spend very little on national defense. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in 2002, The Netherlands spent just 1.6 percent of its gross domestic product on defense. Norway spent 2.1 percent, Switzerland spent 1.1 percent, and Ireland spent a piddling 0.7 percent. By contrast, the U.S. spent 3.4 percent—and this was before the Iraq war. It’s easy to be generous with foreign aid when another country is essentially providing your defense for free.

I don’t want to come over as a thankless piece of shit, but now that the Cold War is over, hasn’t the situation, you know, changed?

I live in Amsterdam. Back in the olden days (1989) the nearest non-allied, non-neutral country was East-Germany, about 250 miles away from Amsterdam, where the Warschau-pact had stationed several armies ready to march through the Fulda Gap to, well, Amsterdam. The Soviet Union had 287 million inhabitants and plenty of allies.

Nowadays, the nearest non-allied, non-neutral country of any importance is Russia. Unless they station all their armies in Kaliningrad, they will have to march something like 1250 miles to get to Amsterdam, and even from Kaliningrad it’s a long way. Russia only has 144 million inhabitants and a lot of them are alcoholics. If they haven’t got AIDS or tuberculosis as well. It's only ally is Belarus.

There is no need for large armies in Europe, and no need for lots of defense spending.
There is, however, a large need for troops that can be deployed outside Europe, such as in Africa or the Middle East. I would call that offense instead of defense, but never mind. The trouble is, to get your troops from Europe to somewhere else in a hurry, you need a lot of very, very expensive stuff, such as a navy with aircraft carriers, army bases on foreign soil, large numbers of transport airplanes etcetera etcetera. The small European countries simply cannot afford all this, so stop whining about it.

But I agree that the US military keeps shipping lanes safe and keeps bad guys from getting worse. That's worth something. But how much? Bartlett sort of implies that it's worth the difference between Europe's and America's defense spending. Yeah... right.

Another thing one notices is that the foreign aid data are only for “official” (i.e., government) aid. The data are sketchy, but by all accounts Americans are far more generous in terms of charitable contributions than the citizens of any other country. A 1991 study found the United Kingdom to have the second largest percentage of private charitable giving. But in 2003, charitable giving amounted to 8.6 billion pounds or 0.8 percent of GDP in the U.K., according to the Charities Aid Foundation, compared to $241 billion or 2.2 percent of GDP in the U.S., according to the American Association of Fundraising Counsel.

True. A couple of caveats, though:

First, when you look at net money flows, as Bartlett just did, all the private foreign aid is already in there. Bartlett is trying to count the private money twice.

Second, Americans spend a lot of charity money on other Americans, because poverty is more extreme in the USA than in Europe. Conversely, Europeans, with their socialist health care and eurosclerotic unemployment benefits, don’t need to be so charitable towards their own.

When –talking about the US now- you try to look at sketchy data that have to do with foreign aid, the 241 billion is rather misleading. In 2002 USAid published a 169 page report called Foreign Aid in the National Interest. In it, they estimate the total private assistance in the year 2000 at somewhere between 33.6 and 43.7 billion dollars. Bartlett overestimates by a factor of six.

Oops. The 43.7 billion also includes 18-20 billion in remittances. That’s foreigners living in the US, sending money to their foreign relatives. Does that really count as foreign aid? It is not targeted at either development or disaster relief. It’s not even paid for by Americans. (Just remember that whatever you think is proper, including the money as "aid" or not, the money was already counted by Bartlett with his net money flows).

But even this estimate of charitable giving by Americans is low because it counts only cash contributions and omits volunteer work. According to Independent Sector, in 2003, they contributed an additional $266 billion worth of their time to charitable enterprises. This is based on a value of $17.12 per hour of time. But even if one assigns a value equal to the minimum wage, this noncash contribution still comes to about $100 billion.

I’m sure that Bartlett is well aware of his generosity towards the Third World when he is coaching his daughter’s soccer team. Even if he could compare this number to a European counterpart, it would still be ridiculous.

In the area of international aid, the official data also exclude private transfers such as remittances by foreign workers in the U.S. According to the Inter-American Development Bank, remittances to Latin America alone amounted to $38 billion in 2003—more than all official assistance combined. And $31 billion of that came from the U.S. In some countries, foreign remittances came to more than 10 percent of GDP, thus having a significant impact on economic growth and poverty alleviation.

This Enron-accountant doesn’t know when to quit, does he? Again, once you take net money flows you can no longer add remittances to the number because the remittances are already in there.

But still, a comparison between Europe and the US might be useful. How much do the Turks and Moroccans of Europe send their families each year? How much do Brasilians living in Portugal send home? How about Phillipinos or Argentineans living in Spain? Indians in the UK? Algerians in France? Surinamese in Holland?

Counting remittances as "foreign aid" is dubious enough. But Bartlett compares America with remittances to Europe without them.

Former U.S. Agency for International Development official Carol Adelman attempted to calculate a total of all private foreign aid in 2000 in a 2003 Foreign Affairs magazine article. She found that private foreign aid greatly exceeded that provided by the U.S. government. Official aid came to $22.6 billion that year, but private aid came to $35.1 billion, including $18 billion in remittances, $6.6 billion from private voluntary organizations, $3.4 billion in aid from churches, $3 billion from foundations, $2.8 billion from corporations, and $1.3 billion from universities.

Oooohhh, so after mentioning 241 billion in charity money, another 266 billion in volunteer work, and 38 billion in remittances, Bartlett now quotes someone who puts the total of non-government aid at 35.1 billion. This kind of begs the question:

WHY THE FUCK DID BARTLETT FUCK AROUND WITH ALL THESE OTHER NUMBERS??

Might it be to leave the impression that Americans are more generous than they really are? Might it be to hide the simple truth (the results of Adelman’s study) behind obscure nonsense? Speaking of nonsense, there’s more:

But even this understates the extent to which Americans help developing countries, because it excludes private investment and trade. According to the Institute of International Finance, in 2003, Americans invested $124 billion in emerging market economies, three-fourths in direct investment such as plant and equipment and the rest in stocks and bonds.

Americans also buy a considerable amount of goods from developing countries. This year, about a third of all our imports will come from developing countries, providing jobs and incomes for millions of poor people. This is probably less than most protectionists think. The bulk of our imports still come from industrialized countries such as Canada, Japan and Germany.

In short, the charge of stinginess is unfounded. The U.S. carries much of the world on its back, providing other nations with security, aid and much of their investment and income. It also pays for a fourth of all the salaries of U.N. bureaucrats.

Wow! When you fill up your car with oil from Nigeria, it’s aid! I’ve never felt so good about myself.

Note that once again, Bartlett finds a portion of the net money flow that he can count twice because it’s American.

If you cut the bullshit, and define foreign aid as “stuff that rich people give to poor people living abroad to placate their rich consciences” then you find that, according to USAid and Carol Adelman, in the year 2000 the total of US government aid (22.6 billion including lots of military stuff for Israel and Egypt but never mind that) and US private aid (15.6 billion not including remittances) was about 38.2 billion dollar, or about 0.4 percent of GDP.

That’s half what the Dutch government was spending, less than half compared with the Norwegians. Never mind whatever money the Dutch or Norwegian people were giving to the Red Cross or Medicin sans Frontiers.

Once again, in an international sympathy penis comparison, the US has a slightly smaller one than average.

UPDATE:
Kristof over at the NY Times quotes different (probably more recent) OECD numbers. He finds that US government aid amounts to 0.15 percent, whilst US private aid amounts to an extra 0.06 percent.

FURTHER UPDATE:
Mr. Bartlett, please go fuck yourself.

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Stingy?

"We outmatch the contributions of other nations combined; we'll continue to do so."

- Bush spokesman Trent Duffy, on the subject of U.S. aid to tsunami victims -

Congratulations go to Jan Egeland, who almost singlehandedly managed to raise the amount Bush has pledged for disaster relief in Asia from $35 million to $ 350 million dollars. That's $315 million for the victims and all Egeland has to endure is a bunch of angry Freeper e-mails and a lot of lies from the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy:

President Bush yesterday announced that the United States will commit $350 million to help tsunami victims in the Indian Ocean region, more than the combined contributions of Europe's richest nations.
- James G. Lakely, the Washington Times -

But let me borrow a term from The Poor Man and compare the size of Bush's sympathy penis to that of others:

Sympathy Penis Size (SPS): current disaster
US government pledge (as of Jan 4th)	$ 350 million
Bunch of EU nations (as of Jan 1st)	$ 376 million
The Netherlands (as of Dec 30th)	$ 37 million
European Union - the organisation, not the members (as of Dec 30th)	$ 68 million
Rest of EU nations	Look it up yourself
Japan (as of Jan 3rd)	$ 500 million

Looks like Bush only has a couple of inches worth of sympathy. Nothing to be ashamed of, but nothing to brag about either.

01.05.2005 UPDATE:
Germany has just raised its pledge for disaster relief from $ 27 million (included in the "bunch of EU countries" total) to $ 661 million. According to the BBC, that is. If you take today's rates, however, half a billion euros will buy you 12 million dollars more. Australia has pledged $ 765 million (American dollars) to Indonesia over 5 years.

The BBC has put up a nice "Who's giving what" page up on their Website. Stingy stingy stingy Americans.

01.23.2005 UPDATE:
US private donations: $ 480 million (about one dollar and 66 cents per person)
Dutch private donations: $ 190 million (about eleven dollars and 88 cents per person)

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Happy New Year!

And best wishes and so on and so forth.

But now, well into the new year, it's time for a nice, fat an juicy linkfest!

Why? Well, I've got issues, you know? And one of my favorite hobbyhorses has just been the subject of an article in the Economist!

So before I dazzle you with all my links on this -obsessively interesting- topic, I get to quote approvingly:

Ever higher society, ever harder to ascend

Most Americans see nothing wrong with inequality of income so long as it comes with plenty of social mobility: it is simply the price paid for a dynamic economy. But the new rise in inequality does not seem to have come with a commensurate rise in mobility. There may even have been a fall.

The most vivid evidence of social sclerosis comes from politics. A country where every child is supposed to be able to dream of becoming president is beginning to produce a self-perpetuating political elite. George Bush is the son of a president, the grandson of a senator, and the sprig of America's business aristocracy. John Kerry, thanks to a rich wife, is the richest man in a Senate full of plutocrats. He is also a Boston brahmin, educated at St Paul's, a posh private school, and Yale—where, like the Bushes, he belonged to the ultra-select Skull and Bones society.

Mr Kerry's predecessor as the Democrats' presidential nominee, Al Gore, was the son of a senator. Mr Gore, too, was educated at a posh private school, St Albans, and then at Harvard. And Mr Kerry's main challenger from the left of his party? Howard Brush Dean was the product of the same blue-blooded world of private schools and unchanging middle names as Mr Bush (one of Mr Bush's grandmothers was even a bridesmaid to one of Mr Dean's). Mr Dean grew up in the Hamptons and on New York's Park Avenue.

The most remarkable feature of the continuing power of America's elite—and its growing grip on the political system—is how little comment it arouses. Britain would be in high dudgeon if its party leaders all came from Eton and Harrow. Perhaps one reason why the rise of caste politics raises so little comment is that something similar is happening throughout American society. Everywhere you look in modern America—in the Hollywood Hills or the canyons of Wall Street, in the Nashville recording studios or the clapboard houses of Cambridge, Massachusetts—you see elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves. America is increasingly looking like imperial Britain, with dynastic ties proliferating, social circles interlocking, mechanisms of social exclusion strengthening and a gap widening between the people who make the decisions and shape the culture and the vast majority of ordinary working stiffs.

Yup. The Economist is griping about the direction the US society is heading in, namely, the wrong direction. The difference between poor and rich is getting bigger and bigger, while at the same time it gets harder to move up the ladder in America if you start out at the bottom rung.

And, as a consequence, it's getting easier to remain on top if you are are lucky enough to start out on top. First, a new class of rentiers is growing. Paris Hilton and other trust-fund teenagers are just the vanguard of more to come. But second, and far more important, is the plight of the sons and daughters of not-quite-loaded-but-definitely-upper-class parents. They still have to prove their own worth, and in this they face intense competition. But mostly competition from amongst themselves. At Ivy-league universities, you are 25 times as likely to run into a rich student as a poor one. The median family income at Harvard is $150,000.

And now, linkfest time. First up: me. I've written about this stuff a couple of times before. And I've contended that this class system will hurt America's growth. Why don't the Republicans stop hurting America? Read about it here, here, here and even here.

Then, almost as brilliant, we've got Paul Krugman. Sure, he writes in The Nation. He's probably a communist. But he's quoting Business Week.

In fact, he's quoting this article from Business Week. I don't know if you can read my link or not, but it's a December 2003 article called: "Waking Up From The American Dream. Dead-end jobs and the high cost of college could be choking off upward mobility"

And that's not the first time those socialists at Business Week nagged about how unfair America is. There is this (1996) article, called: "IS AMERICA BECOMING MORE OF A CLASS SOCIETY?", which pretty much says it all.

And then you have this 1992 article about globalization, which has this paragraph:

CLASS WARFARE?

The impact [of globalization, j.e.] will reach much further than that. Declining pay for the bottom half may not slow U. S. growth, since average incomes should rise as the top half does better. But widening inequality poses other problems. The poverty rate could stay up. The tab for welfare and unemployment could mount, inflating taxes. Ultimately, resentment of the wealthy could reach a boiling point, leading to ferocious attacks on executive pay and even to more riots like last May's in Los Angeles. ''One possibility is for us to become a class society like those in Latin America,'' which have unequal distributions of wealth and chronically unstable governments, says Richard B. Freeman, an economist at Harvard University. ''That's the direction we're headed.''

I don't know if all my links will work for you, because I am sitting behind my elite university top notch computer with acces to the library's e-subscriptions and LexisNexis whilst you are not, but the gist of all this is easy enough. WalMartization at the bottom of society creeping up, and ParisHiltonization at the top trickling down and in the end the US will have become the world's biggest banana republic. The Republicans sure are trying to make it happen.

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