TCS Daily : January 2004 Archives
'Fuzzy Math' and 'Risky Schemes' Emerge From the Primaries
As America confronts a rising tide of red ink, some taxpayers may be hoping that at least one of the remaining Democratic Presidential candidates can calm the turbulent fiscal waters. After all, each of the White House hopefuls has...
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Turmoil at the Sierra Club?
The Sierra Club is one of America's wealthiest tax-exempt organizations. In fiscal 2002, the Club reported $23,619,830 in revenues, and disclosed $107,733,974 worth of assets to the IRS. It claims a national membership of 700,000 people. As Sierra's website...
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Tech's Immediate Future
The Department of Commerce recently reported that "U.S. IT producers remain the most competitive in the world." This is good news for the moment, but many, particularly in Silicon Valley, are wary about the future. Eavesdrop on conversations at...
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From the Frozen Tundra of Mt. Laurel, NJ: NFL Films
After the crowds leave Houston's Reliant Stadium on Sunday night, crates of film will arrive at the Mt. Laurel offices of NFL Films, to be quickly transformed into the National Football League's official documentary of Super Bowl XXXVIII, which...
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Health Care and the Uninsured
Now that Washington has promised America's seniors subsidized pills, politicians have turned their focus to the uninsured. The presidential campaign season has produced a flurry of plans to solve, forever, the problem of the uninsured. This isn't going to...
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Europe's Enron
In mid-2001 Brussels was a very smug place, indeed -- some might say insufferably so. Especially if the issue was financial services. For not only was everything going so well for the Financial Services Action Plan, which was a...
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Voice Over the Internet: Let It Fly
A big reason the Internet has taken off is that government has kept out of the way. Hands-off is always the best policy for a new technology. It lets innovators innovate and investors avoid the extra risks of special...
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Driving Away Pollution
Your next new car or truck will be the cleanest-burning one you've ever owned. And it means the end to the already-diminishing problem of air pollution. This week Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Mike Leavitt unveiled seventeen model year...
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Searching for a Story
During a press briefing on Tuesday, a reporter asked White House spokesman Scott McClellan whether suggestive comments from ex-chief weapons inspector David Kay indicate "that when the President took the world to war against Iraq in March of last...
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My Escape from Ideology
Two things have happened to me as I've aged, and I'm not talking about the deplorable decreases in my bicycling and running speeds. First, I've become better at spotting ideology. Second, I've become less tolerant of it. By "ideology,"...
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Roadblocks to Prosperity
The other night at a friend's dinner party in Moscow I found myself in a heated debate with the hostess about "cheating." I had been talking to a very bright and precocious 15-year-old that day. Olga was extremely upset...
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Who's Afraid of WTO? Not Us
Editor's Note: This is the second installment in a two-part series on the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India. Part One may be found here. Part II: Who's afraid of WTO? Not us The rent-a-crowd WSF is only protecting...
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Look WHO's talking
Forget about taxes on "bad foods" and subsidies for "good foods," as the World Health Organization's draft report on a worldwide solution to obesity recommended before the evil Satan United States pointed out the science behind the plan was,...
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Late Trading and The Horse Race Fallacy
USA Today recently featured an Eliot Spitzer interview in which he made it known that his office "continue(s) to see platforms for late trading that are out there," and that these violations make more charges against mutual fund companies...
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Winter Weather Wonder
With record-breaking cold-spells striking North America, Siberia, Turkey and even Bangladesh, one would think that the rhetoric on global warming would momentarily soften. On the contrary, during the same week when many of America's homeless and the poor struggled
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A Tale of Two Nanotechs
It's the best of times for nanotechnology. Or is it the worst of times? There's evidence in both directions. On the upside, nanotechnology is becoming real, with increasing numbers of applications and breakthroughs. Even a dedicated observer of the...
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Shooting the Wounded
The turning point of the 1988 Republican presidential nomination campaign came just after the New Hampshire primary, where then-Vice President George H.W. Bush had bounced back from a humiliating third-place finish in Iowa to defeat Sen. Bob Dole by...
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Out of Africa
When I awoke on Sunday morning after a late and raucous Saturday night, I was dismayed to find not a single aspirin in my bathroom cabinet. The process of trying to buy a box of headache pills however only...
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The Present and Future of Blogitics
Howard Dean has been widely considered to be this year's Internet candidate, and his blog and Web presence helped propel him to one of the major candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. But his failure to win in Iowa...
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Bollywood Confidential
Editor's Note: This article is the first installment of a two-part report from the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India. Part Two may be found here. Part I. No to trade, yes to aid Aid-guzzling NGOs warn us of...
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Meet the Un-Enron: Banking's Next Top Gun
In the 1970s, three commercial banks dominated the world. Chase Manhattan. Bank of America. Citibank. Each sat atop more than $100 billion in assets and deposits. Just below the Big 3 in rank were a host of banking behemoths,...
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Supply-Side Swiss
In a recent contribution to National Review Online, Jerry Bowyer attacked the Bush tax cuts package for not doing enough to lower the tax burden of the rich. If the reality of the tax cuts had lived up to...
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Nitpicking Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology, the manufacture of materials and machines with atomic precision and size, is regarded as the next technical revolution. As the debate rages on its eventual capabilities, it is inevitably becoming a target for environmentalist attacks. The first maj
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Political Cabaret
MANCHESTER, NH -- It's impossible to know who's going to win here in New Hampshire -- although that doesn't stop a lot of folks from trying to know the future. However, it is possible to know who is going...
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Gained in Translation
The environmentalists have been defeated on a number of occasions in the last few months. First, the Kyoto Protocol is dead, as the Russians have refused to ratify it. Second, the case for solar activity as a main cause...
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Ideology Is Infrastructure
On the Tigris river in Northeast Iraq, American construction giant Bechtel busies itself repairing the span of the Tikrit bridge on the road to Kirkuk. Down south in Umm Qasr, Bechtel dredges the port, gateway to the Persian Gulf...
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Extreme Measures
James Hansen, one of the fathers of global warming theory, commented in the online journal Natural Science in September last year, "Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively...
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It's a Family Affair
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Policy responses to obesity can only address a very small part of the problem, the public part. And by focussing attention on that public part, they may divert attention from the real problem, which is that...
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Airport Profiling's Hidden Controversy
Airport security is making the news. An automated system for checking the identities of airline passengers against terrorist watch-lists is scheduled to begin operation soon. Proposals for implementing a second generation of the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescre
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Iraq's Future vs. The UN's Track Record
In the five years since the NATO intervention in Kosovo, the devastated former Yugoslav province has lost the attention of global media and political leaders. This is dismaying for its residents, who have grown to depend on the world...
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More Guns, Less Beeb?
For a group that holds itself up as champions of Democracy, Britain's chattering classes sure can get their knickers in a knot with the will of the people offends their liberal sensibilities. Case in point: a recent stunt by...
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Liquid Asset
A global water crisis is looming. More than a billion people worldwide lack access to clean and safe water -- with devastating effects: 12 million deaths annually and millions of others struck by disease and poverty. In 2003, more...
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What Wasn't Said
Of all the speeches a president delivers, his state of the union address is the speech that is subject to the most behind-the-scenes wrangling. Because nothing gets in to that oration by accident, one can learn a lot about...
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Turning Miners Into Custodians
Headlines about fishery fiascos in Canada are nothing new: the fisheries that have been historically most important, salmon on the west coast and cod on the east coast, have been in trouble for years. In 1991, the cod stocks...
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Hollywood's Idea Factory
The term "comic book movie" ranks as one of the most vitriolic epithets in the lexicon of film criticism. Critics use it to describe cinematic efforts filled with cornball dialog, simplistic plots of good versus evil, and an emphasis...
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Jobs Across the Water
Sitting at a computer talking into a head-mike advising the British traveling public of train timetables from Leighton Buzzard to Birmingham New Street Station, and calculating how long theyll have to wait for a connection up to Scotland, doesnt...
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I Dream of Techno-Genie
As watchers of ancient sitcoms know, a genie can bring you immense power but is also hard to control, and the granting of your wishes is not necessarily a good thing. As such, a genie can serve as a...
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Deficit Deceptions
Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary, is back -- and he's everywhere. He's written a book. He's delivered a paper before the prestigious American Economic Association. He's giving loads of TV interviews. Among Democratic candidates who realize the elect
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Go-Cup ` Go-Go
Alone it stands in one of the busiest streets in central Paris, bearing its unmistakable round logo like a shield. Starbucks, or as French newspaper Le Figaro calls it, the "Microsoft of coffee shops", has steamed boldly into France,...
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Today Linux, Tomorrow the World?
The term "open source" is linked with software, and most particularly with Linux, the operating system which, it is hoped or feared, can challenge both Microsoft's position on the desktop and its ambitions to extend its empire into server...
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Pseudoscience and Globesity
When the Bush administration announced last week it will demand significant changes to the World Health Organization's initiative against global obesity, it sparked a flurry of international protest from special interest groups accusing him and the food industry o
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Crisis Management
Is it fair to judge a man by a single shriek? I am referring to the sound that Howard Dean made the night of his dismal third place showing in the Iowa Caucus -- a sound that National Review...
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A Solution to the President's Immigration Plan
President Bush should make his immigration plan community controlled. Bush has proposed issuing visas allowing some currently illegal immigrants to reside lawfully in the U.S. as guest workers, but his plan will face substantial opposition from communities that op
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Universal Mistakes
Last week, when a Committee on the Consequences of Uninsurance from the Institute of Medicine, held a press conference to announce that universal healthcare coverage should be the priority issue of the next six years, someone asked the inevitable....
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Privatization: The Ultimate "Lockbox" for Social Security
"Younger workers should have the opportunity to build a nest egg by saving part of their Social Security taxes in a personal retirement account. We should make the Social Security system a source of ownership for the American people."...
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When Bad Luck Is Good
Esther Rantzen, Britain's patron saint of victims, can now be found on-line advertising a service for the unlucky. The Homepage of the Accident Advice Helpline has a "Q&A" button containing this information: Q. What sort of personal injury can...
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Unforgettable, That's What You Are...
One of the big geek-news stories of last week was the release of LaCie's new 1 Terabyte external firewire hard drive. And it's easy to see why - a terabyte of storage in a package smaller than a cigar...
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The Goddess of Small Ideas
Reading Arundhati Roy's speech at the World Social Forum, reproduced in The Hindu, gave me a few uneasy moments. Why was I perturbed even momentarily by such exciting prose? The truth is that I am a "comprador consultant" looking...
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Our Lives in Snapshots
There is an old suitcase sitting in a room above our garage in Ligonier, Pa. It's one of those old cardboard suitcases with a "leatherette" covering. They used to be called "Please-don't-rain" suitcases. It belonged to my grandmother, Alice...
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"Exponential" Thinking for the Future
In 1913, Lee De Forest was prosecuted by U.S. government officials for claiming to potential investors that his company, RCA, would soon be able to transmit the human voice over the Atlantic Ocean. The prosecuting officials argued that his...
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Eco-imperialism: Green Power; Black Death
Despite the best efforts of historian, Niall Ferguson, to demonstrate the better side of the British Empire (see Empire, Basic Books, 2002) the overwhelming view of the American people to colonialism and imperialism is largely negative. So any charge...
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Taking Advantage
"England may be so circumstanced, that to produce the cloth may require the labour of 100 men for one year; and if she attempted to make the wine, it might require the labour of 120 men for the same...
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A Northern Strategy
Christopher Caldwell recently wrote in The Weekly Standard, on the decision of the French authorities to ban head-coverings by Muslim women in schools and other public facilities, "there is little historical evidence that Islam can be effectively or sincerely...
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The New New Deal Coalition
The Iowa caucus results show that Democrats -- enough of them, anyway -- are thinking hard about who can actually win a general election. And so while Howard Dean had been the "buzz" candidate for most of the last...
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Blinded With Science
Is Europe coming to its senses and choosing science over hysteria and political correctness? Don't bet your last euro on it, but there have been some encouraging signs of late. News of man-bites-dog proportions came last week with the...
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Protectionism and Pollution
OSLO -- Food and other agricultural products are at the heart of the battle over liberalization of world trade. The Cairns group of agricultural exporters and their allies are pressing for better access to foreign markets, but the EU,...
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Bold Temerity
Now that the first wave of reaction to President Bush's new immigration initiative has passed, we can go beyond the knee-jerks of the left and the right to probe both the details of the proposal and what it says...
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Mondo Euro?
Every few years a big surge in the value of one of the major trading currencies sets off a prolonged period of navel gazing by economists and columnists, who are already prone to the practice. The recent rise in...
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France Launches a Global Culture War
Cultural creativity is big business in America. According to the most recent data from Economists Incorporated, U.S. "copyright industries" -- including recording companies and Hollywood studios -- export $88.97 billion worth of their wares each year. These indust
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Oops, They Did It Again
The Blogosphere continues to effectively critique and correct Big Media's coverage on stories of the day. Consider the latest manifestation of this phenomenon in the coverage of Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty, which critiques the Bush Administration through...
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The Viewer's Guide to the Iowa Caucus
Every four years, the presidential primary pulls on high boots and heads into the frozen cornfields of Iowa looking for a nominee -- or rather, more commonly, looking for those who will not be the nominee. No candidate since...
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Of Cats and Rats
When the first patient of the second SARS season was released from a Guangdong hospital in southern China shortly after New Year, journalists were on the scene. In fact, they had been there all along. The medical internment of...
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Resource Allocation and Sea-Level Rise
The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, warned in late September that by the year 2100 with the "ever-increasing emission of greenhouse gases" some environmental catastrophes may be possible, including "many small islands gone..." as sea levels ri
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Going Ga-Ga Over AGOA
It is being described as an "ocean of thanks," a "great phenomenon" and "unbelievable opportunity" given to Africa by the United States. The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), initiated by the administration of former President Bill Clinton, is...
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MLK, the Marketplace, and a Legacy of Freedom
While commemorating the contributions of Martin Luther King, we shouldn't overlook the connection between freedom and the economic progress possible only in a market economy. The expansion in freedom brought about by the civil rights movement under King's inspirin
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Islam Needs a Cromwell
Edward Feser's recent article 'Does Islam need a Luther or a Pope?' begs a reply. The article he writes is partly about whether Islam needs a Luther or a Pope, but is also a Catholic apologetic. He takes the...
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Natural Tremors, Political Temblors
The recent and horrifying humanitarian disaster in Iran -- which was brought about by an earthquake in the southeastern city of Bam -- has refocused attention on the country. Close to 30,00 have died as a result of the...
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Buy Space Bonds
President Bush's space initiative is a laudable blend of vision and pragmatism. Sending humans to the moon and Mars is a far more inspiring goal than sending them in circles around the Earth. But shooting for the moon first,...
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No Change in the Pecking Order
The end-of-year Merger & Acquisition league tables were reported on in last month's Wall Street Journal. The story by Anita Raghavan was mostly unremarkable; the major news being that while M&A activity has picked up, it's still down 57%...
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Shape Up, America!
Editor's note: Read part one of Sandy Szwarc's two-part series on exercise here. "Exercise to lose weight" is just one of the misconceptions about exercise. • Most of us think we have to be thin to be in shape...
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Peace Through Trade?
History has recorded many examples of war being waged to win trade. The English adventurers Jardine and Matheson contrived the Opium War between Britain and China to secure trade rights in China. A Japanese strategy in the Pacific War...
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WHO Guilty of 'Medical Malpractice'
As President Bush's speech writers begin working on his State of the Union address they should note a claim made today in the British medical journal, The Lancet, that medical malpractice is occurring in the supply of useless malaria...
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A Classic Blunder
NEW YORK, Thursday, Jan. 15 -- I was going to go to former Vice President Al Gore's speech today at New York's Beacon Theater where he was talking about the destruction being wrought by global warming and how President...
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The Morality of the Market
I began my book The Mind and the Market by noting that "Capitalism is too important and complex a subject to be left to economists." But I could equally have said that "morality is too important and complex a...
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Chemistry Lessons
Editor's note: What follows is a speech delivered to attendees of the Hayek Series in Brussels earlier this month. The title of today's discussion is "Did the EU get the Chemicals regulation right?" A title like that makes the...
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Development Aid Harms Development
As a regular subscriber to the Financial Times I have noticed an increasing amount of advertising by the United Nations Development Programme in the paper recently. Several well-respected development economists, including UCLA's Professor Deepak Lal, have noted th
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Mr. Trichet is No Alan Greenspan
Last week's decision by Mr. Jean-Claude Trichet, the new French President of the European Central Bank, to leave European interest rates unchanged does not augur well for the European economy under his stewardship at the ECB. For rather than...
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Dr. McClellan's Weak Medicine
"Just when we thought sanity was emerging at the Food and Drug Administration, the scaremongers win again," begins the Wall Street Journal's January 13th editorial, "Breast Beating at the FDA." The piece laments the FDA's decision to continue a...
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Pushing Iraq to Socialism or Capitalism?
Is it possible that 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall the United States will impose socialism on Iraq? I hope not, but the Wall Street Journal reported on its front page earlier this month:"U.S. and Iraq...
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Are You Eating Cancerous Salmon?
Smoked salmon with capers and onions was featured at brunch at a friend's house this past Sunday. I dug in and enjoyed two helpings, despite last week's dire headlines that I was recklessly gambling with cancer. Those alarming headlines...
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A Clear Mistake
The Clear Skies Initiative, President Bush's big environmental bill targeting power plant emissions, appears to be stalled in Congress. In an effort to get around this impasse, the administration now plans to implement similar provisions via EPA regulations rather
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Buying Into Tech
High-profile technology M&A deals, such as Oracle's $7.5 billion hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft, may steal all the headlines, but the best technology-related M&A deals of 2004 may be those that do not involve traditional technology companies located i
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Why Nader Should Run
Citizen Nader, as much as Republicans such as I appreciated your 2000 Presidential run, it wasn't enough because America needs you to run again in 2004. Indeed, the justifications for your competing in the next presidential election are even...
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No More Free Ride
Politicians continue their misguided -- and dangerous -- attempts to circumvent federal law in order to bring large quantities of prescription drugs into the United States from Canada. In the latest episode, Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich asked U.S....
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Virtual Israelis
Writing in The Guardian Peter Beaumont outlines the demographic facts which could lead to the end of Israel as a Jewish State. Crucially, however, the figures show that despite financial incentives for couples who have more children, the population...
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All Politics Is Local
Most of the torrent of opposition to the FCC's modest proposal to loosen media ownership restrictions last year stemmed from fears that they'd lead to information flow and entertainment programming falling into the hands of just a few behemoth...
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Free Trade at Low Tide
The 2004 election is likely to offer America an important choice about global trade. It is, alas, a choice between different orders of badness. On one side, we have a president who has imposed tariffs on imports of steel,...
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Back to the Future for Automobiles
What kind of cars will we be driving 50 years from now? What will power them? How much faster will they be? What will their electronics be like? What will the seats be like? Will we still use steering...
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This New Ocean
Terraforming Mars. Finding alien life, intelligent or otherwise. Preventing the next big asteroid from striking Earth, and saving humanity. Technological innovation and resource exploitation. New societies on new worlds that will get it right this time, freed from
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Cowboys on Mars?
This week, President Bush is expected to lay out a plan to send humans back to the Moon, and to Mars. Those are goals I favor, as I've written before - see this column, or this column, or, for...
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Dual Benefits
Nasdaq took out a two-page ad in today's Wall Street Journal to announce that six NYSE listed companies, including Hewlett-Packard (HWP) and Charles Schwab (SCH), have entered into an agreement to simultaneously list their shares on the Nasdaq Stock...
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Meet Ayaan Hirsi Ali
'Ayaan Hirsi Ali?' 'Never heard of him.' 'It's a she.' 'Never heard of her.' Born in 1967 in Mogadishu (Somalia), Ayaan Hirsi attended secondary school in Kenya. From the middle of the nineties she studied political science in Leiden...
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What's Right on Immigration?
It's been a very long time since U.S. politicians addressed illegal immigration in anything approaching a comprehensive way. President Bush came into office planning to change that through negotiations with Mexico and new legislation. Those plans got derailed by..
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Stock Trading Transformed by Technology, Competition
For months, domestic and international media have been a-twitter with the tale of George Soros, global hedge fund speculator, and his transformation into the angel of the Democratic party and the broad American left. How a man once associated...
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"Climate Risk to Million Headlines"
The usually staid BBC ran a rather sensational (if somewhat grammatically challenged) headline, "Climate risk 'to million species'," on January 7, 2004, announcing a global warming "study" in the journal Nature. The lack of words like "possible" or "may"...
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Crash Test Smarties
Gone may be the days synthetic mannequins strapped with sensors and electrodes are hurled at break-neck speed into walls for the very purpose of breaking their necks. Researchers at the University of Iowa College of Engineering are currently developing...
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El Norte, In the Year 2054
Washington Nuevo, Districto de Colombia, January 7, 2054 -- In our chronicle of the formation of the North American Union, we must pay special attention to the period half a century ago, at the beginning of the 21st century....
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The Open Society Institute and Its Enemies
For months, domestic and international media have been a-twitter with the tale of George Soros, global hedge fund speculator, and his transformation into the angel of the Democratic party and the broad American left. How a man once associated...
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A Russian Revolution
On December 2, 2003, Andrei Illarionov, Russian President Vladimir Putin's chief economic adviser, stunned green activists the world over when, speaking on behalf of the President, he announced that Russia would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change...
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Needed: The Atkins Diet
Paul Atkins yesterday became the first SEC commissioner to criticize openly a proposal to require companies to treat employee stock options as current expenses. Atkins began by questioning whether the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which has aggressively pu
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"A View That Must Delight the Terrorist"
Despite the jaw-dropping magnitude of what the Americans have achieved in Iraq, including winning an entire war in a few weeks and ferreting one tiny fugitive out of the vast desert wastes, there is still a substantial segment in Britain...
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In Praise of Non-Violent Solutions
"Stop the Suicide Bombings? End the Occupation!" is the response Palestinian advocates have to condemnation of attacks by Palestinian militants. If you want to stop the injustice of suicide bombings, the claim goes, you should stop the unjust occupation...
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Virtually Extinct
It seems that virtually every news organ in the English language has carried the story of new scientific claims published in Nature magazine that by 2050 over a million species will be doomed to extinction owing to the effects...
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The Flim Flam Artist
Charles Berlitz, who just died, was known as one of the world's top linguists and grandson of the founder of the Berlitz language schools. Yet his true claim to fame was as author of "truth is stranger than fiction"...
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Let's Play 20 Questions
One of the most frustrating parts of watching the Democratic presidential debates is the poor questioning from moderators, journalists, and fellow debaters. The questions tend to be vague, predictable, too focused on the "horserace" aspects of the campaign, and...
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The Terror War's Inevitable Fog
Ridgway turned to Humphrey and said there was one thing about the war which puzzled him. "What's that?" Humphrey asked. "I have never known what the mission for General Westmoreland was," Ridgway said. -- David Halberstam, The Best and...
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Not Such Strange Bedfellows
Recently, Professor Michael Scott Doran, who specializes in Near Eastern studies at Princeton University, wrote this essay in Foreign Affairs on the domestic situation in Saudi Arabia. It included the following very interesting observation: . . . Radical Sunni...
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Getting Exercised About Exercise
To combat the obesity epidemic our government wants us to get into shape. Former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop's Shape Up America! has been updated with Shape Up & Drop 10™ and Surgeon General David Satcher's 10,000 Steps...
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EU Roadblocks on the Digital Highway
As the New Year starts so does the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA). EU leaders may have failed at their December 2003 summit to produce a European Constitution, but they did manage to agree that ENISA should...
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Does the SEC Know When Enough Is Enough?
The Securities and Exchange Commission is now considering proposed regulations designed to allow shareholders to nominate directors and, moreover, to require the incumbent directors to place the shareholder's nominee on the company's own proxy statement and ballot
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The Mustache on the Left
As a Bush re-election later this year looks increasingly likely, some left-wingers worry that Howard Dean is too risky a candidate to put up against a popular President. There is, of course, the obvious comparison to McGovern and the...
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Climate's New Model Army
Climate scientists are claiming that 2003 was the hottest year Britain has seen since record-keeping began in 1659; most blame man's emissions of greenhouse gases as the prime cause. The truth is that we still don't know that the...
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Year of the Car?
American automobile manufacturers have been talking about 2004 being the "year of the car," marking a change in focus from trucks and sport utility vehicles to the sedans and coupes that were once the unchallenged backbone of the business....
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Give the Gift of Life
During the recent holiday season, many of us were focused even more than usual on helping people and making the world a better place. Seemingly endless solicitations bid us to support causes that seem eminently worthy. Well-fed, safe in...
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Is Friendster the New TIA?
The idea of centralizing data to find patterns and links among people is no longer limited to governments or corporations. Individuals are now getting into the game with "social networking" web sites, the hottest thing in Silicon Valley. Friendster,...
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Conservatism's Journey Away From Me
Several months ago, TCS developed a point-counterpoint format, which enables writers to respond to an article previously published on the site. Using this format, I now respond to Keith Burgess-Jackson's recent article "My Journey to Conservatism." My comments are
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The Problem: Liberals, Conservatives, and Independents
The subtitle of Matthew Miller's book The Two Percent Solution promises that it will "fix America's problems in ways liberals and conservatives can love." Love is a strong word. "Accept under certain conditions" would be more accurate. The idea...
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What's Wrong With Income Inequality?
We've been hearing a lot lately about growing income inequality in the United States. There's a good deal of disagreement about the facts on the ground: A lot of people are invoking Gregg Easterbrook's assertion that American income inequality...
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Whither Innovation?
Generally considered the hub of innovation and entrepreneurial activity in the world, Silicon Valley is seeing its once insurmountable lead in technological innovation slipping away to competitors such as India and China. Most distressingly, world-class technology
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My Journey to Conservatism
"A young person who's conservative has no heart; an old person who's liberal has no brain." Have you heard this saying? There are two ways it can be interpreted: as a statement of fact (about people's actual political trajectory)...
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Providence and Al Gore
Those seeking to find evidence of God's providential intervention in the affairs of men need only to reflect upon the political career of Al Gore. This is a man who had four chances to become President. First, he might...
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Bush Gets Machiavellian on Pyongyang
It is strange to hear of goings-on in Pyongyang. The city features all the kitsch propaganda of an isolated but cocky regime. Mass rallies and military displays recently marked the birthday of the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-Il. The pariah...
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Time for an Extreme Makeover
The Endangered Species Act recently turned 30 years old and it's high time we closely examine the results and consequences of the Act. After three decades, and billions of dollars of spending by private parties, as well as local,...
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If At First It Doesn't Succeed, the Trial Lawyers Will Come Again
What is MTBE and what does it have to do with national energy policy? A gasoline additive, MTBE (methyl tertiary-butyl ether) effectively cuts down ozone pollution and airborne toxic chemicals generated by motor vehicles. Shouldn't that be cause for...
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A Shocking Prediction for 2004
Byron Wien, the veteran Morgan Stanley strategist, is one of my favorite market seers. Annually since 1986 he has sent clients a list of "ten surprises" he expects for the year ahead. The list for 2004, released this morning,...
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Public Opinion vs. Public Policy
"How can you tell whether a whale is a mammal or a fish?" a teacher asks her third-grade class. "Take a vote?" pipes up one of the pupils. This idea might be amusing coming from a child, but it's...
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Building a Better Banana
In a new wave similar to the overwhelming interest the Internet and mobile telephony have excited among African youth, biotechnology farming is spurring grown-up farmers eager to increase their farm crop production efficiency and volumes. In Kenya's Nyanza, Mount.
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Give Me Referendum or Give Me Death
The EU's proposed Constitution may be down for the count after last month's failed summit, but it will get back up again, and the only chance to knock it out completely is with national referenda. More and more countries...
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Updating Tom Wolfe
"I call Las Vegas the Versailles of America, and for specific reasons. Las Vegas happened to be created after the war, with war money, by gangsters. Gangsters happened to be the first uneducated...but more to the point, unaristocratic, outside...
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An Anti-Terrorism Defense Fund
"The terrorists will seek to convince American voters that the War on Terror is failing, paving the way for the electoral victory of a weakling and allowing them to surge back into vacuums created by an American retreat. Their...
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Go West, Ukraine
Last November, the European Parliament at its plenary session in Strasbourg adopted a resolution on "Wider Europe-Neighborhood: New frameworks of relations with our Eastern and Southern neighbors". The answer came from Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych in
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Trial Lawyers vs. the Armed Forces
One of the greatest public health advances in the past century -- the conquest of infectious disease by immunizations -- is slowly but surely being undermined in this century thanks to the efforts of a few determined trial lawyers....
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Barbarians Invading
The Barbarian Invasions is an impressive Canadian film. (Yes, we do make them). The movie won two awards at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival: Best Screenplay and Best Actress, and is currently playing in a number of US cities....
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