TCS Daily : May 2005 Archives
Evolution's Poker Hand
As I type these words, my fingers fly across the keyboard -- albeit not as efficiently as I would like. For one thing, I have never really been a 10-finger typist. For another, I have only 10 fingers. Surely, I...
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Vive La Difference
With their vehement 'No' to the EU constitutional treaty in Sunday's referendum, the French people have, among other things, finally punished President Jacques Chirac for his foreign affairs mistakes. It may look like a repudiation of European political aims, and..
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African Drought and Global Warming
A new climate modeling study presented this week at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in New Orleans suggests that much of Africa will experience increasing drought as global warming progresses in the coming decades. This has been the most...
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On 'Legislating Morality': The Anti-Conservative Fallacy
The recent Terri Schiavo controversy has raised once again the question of whether government ought to be in the business of "legislating morality." Many liberals and libertarians accused conservatives who worked to get Mrs. Schiavo's feeding tube reinserted of try
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The Living Poem to Capitalism
The Gazette, a business journal for the counties of Maryland surrounding Washington, D.C. reported recently that Maryland's wealthy suburbanites are driving 25, sometimes 30 miles to go, of all places, to the grocery store. They motor past what would likely...
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The Day After
Non! Some 56 percent of French electors have rejected the European Constitutional Treaty. This is perhaps the most important of Jacques Chirac's failures, and surely the most disastrous in its consequences. France now faces a crisis on two levels. One...
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A Hard Look at the European Constitution
The French and the Dutch will hold referenda on the proposed European Constitution on May 29 and June 1 respectively. Regardless of the outcome, the Constitution will have many hurdles to overcome before coming into force. While the Czech President...
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'Medicalizing and Moralizing Matters of Fashion'
Editor's note: Paul Campos is the author of a new book released this month, "The Diet Myth: Why America's Obsession with Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health," an update of his 2004 book The Obesity Myth." Campos is a...
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Why the Runaway Bride Matters
Jennifer Wilbanks, the notorious runaway bride of Duluth, Georgia, was indicted Wednesday on two charges of lying to the police, and could face up to six years in prison. Some, no doubt, will find these indictments to be overly...
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Outsourcing Teaching
Outsourcing hasn't gone far enough: the U.S. should start using Indian-based teachers. Smart, inexpensive, English-speaking Indians already help Americans with software design, computer support and tax preparation. Through satellites and the Internet workers in Ind
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Wal-Mart Grows a Tail
When Wal-Mart announced its foray into online DVD rentals more than two years ago, business analysts predicted the beginning of the end for Netflix, which launched its online DVD rental business in 1999. Wal-Mart, after all, was the 800-pound gorilla...
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The Discount for the Future
Even if there is to be a sizeable climate change over the next hundred years, is it worth trying to reduce it? What would be the long-term benefit relative to the short-term cost? One can draw some very broad conclusions...
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Memorial Flags
Another Memorial Day. Open the swimming pool. Get enough hotdogs and buns. Pack the car. Judges and state representatives and various minor officials root around in their files for material for the speech up at the cemetery. Hope it doesn't...
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Snowpack in a Greenhouse?
Several scientific articles have been published in recent years suggesting that western U.S. temperatures are rising, snowpack is declining, and that greenhouse gas emissions are largely responsible. Here are some examples: From Mote, 2003*: "Trends during the 20th
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General Rent Seeker
The CEO of GE recently committed the company to "define the cutting edge in cleaner power and environmental technology" through increased R&D spending. He also pledged significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 2012 and doubling the revenue earned by cle
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The British Are Coming
When Richard Notebart, CEO of one of the remaining four regional Bell phone companies, wrote the Wall Street Journal in mid-May that the mergers of sibling Bell SBC with AT&T and sibling Verizon with MCI would create "two telecom behemoths"...
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Golden Years
Many politicians think the problem of pension systems deficits can be solved by just changing the parameters of the pay-as-you-go system. They believe it's necessary only to raise the social security tax rate, cut the replacement ratio or postpone...
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The News-and-Views Industry of the 21st Century
It's understandable that the New York Times wants people to pay to read its op-ed page, so its recent decision to begin having online readers pay to view content is not a complete surprise. It's not a charity, after...
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Intelligent Decline, Revisited
"All truth passes through three stages," Arthur Schopenhauer declared. "First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." As a proponent of the Intelligent Design (ID) theory, nowadays I am witnessing the...
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Not for Hitchhikers
Having recently sat through the forgettable Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie, I was a bit wary upon opening a new book purporting to be a guide to things celestial. However, I am pleased to report that From Blue Moons...
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Why I Support the Filibuster Deal
The so-called Gang of 14's deal on judicial nominations aroused the ire of activists on both the left and right, but it is my friends on the right who seem to have been most disaffected. In contrast, I'm a proud...
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Saving Africa
The political left has for decades had a monopoly on defining Africa's problems. The poverty and misery there are blamed on capitalism, multinational companies, lack of foreign aid and an uneven distribution of the world's resources. Indeed there is...
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Eggs Over Easy? False Dawn for Stem Cell Cures
Many people focused on only one word in the banner headlines over news that Korean scientists have successfully cloned 11 embryos and created stem cell lines: cures. Spouses and parents of patients with diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and spinal cord damage...
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A Model of Self-Regulation
The attendees at last week's E3 show in Los Angeles are abuzz about some of the recent hardware developments, including the PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360. But as exciting as these platforms are, they rely on the software titles...
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Resolving the Clash of Civilizations
I recently returned home from Beirut, Lebanon, where I spent a month covering the democratic Cedar Revolution and Syria's withdrawal from the country after a 30 year-long occupation. Few places in the world beat Beirut as a foreign assignment. The...
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Product Designers with a Clue
I've written in the past about two problems: bad product design, and the tendency of companies to change user interfaces for no particular reason, leading to a phenomenon that I call "version fatigue" which sets in when you just can't...
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Cruise Control
What increases overall socio-economic welfare, improves economic competitiveness reduces environmental damage? Obviously, state control and taxes. Or at least that is the answer the OECD, EU transport ministers and even the US National Transportation Safety Board (
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Equality or Freedom
No matter which side prevails in this Sunday's French referendum on the EU constitutional treaty, the result will be the same: a victory for collectivism. This, of course, means that both sides have the same aim but not the same...
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Lord Have Mercy; What About Lord Vader?
1983: after defeating Darth Vader in mortal combat, Luke Skywalker walks away from his cringing foe, casting his lightsaber away to confront the Emperor with his newly-found self-righteousness, all while ignoring the screams of a small boy in the theater:...
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Aristotle, Jedi Master
My name is Pejman and I have a love-hate relationship with Star Wars. My (immensely geeky) critiques of the franchise are contained here and here in the event that anyone is interested in reading them. And yet, with the release...
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Operation Charm Offensive Towards Islamists
In the past few weeks, the Arab media have been buzzing with shocking news: the West is engaging in open talks with Islamists. While this is not really unexpected coming from the European Union, which has always been quite appeasing...
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Vouching for Gender Equality in Sweden
The World Economic Forum in Geneva has decided that merely providing Eason Jordan with an opportunity to kill his career is no longer enough. On top of their task of organizing the annual Davos summits they are now releasing...
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Can This Patient Be Saved?
You would think that it would be a time to review past successes and look forward to a progress- filled future of furthering global health. Instead, the 58th Annual World Health Assembly -- the policy setting body of the World...
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The Tragedy of Collapse
Jared Diamond is now well known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and more recently for his new bestseller Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The book's thesis is...
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Race, Immigration and the Problem of Hard Labor
Mexico's President Vincente Fox has apologized for saying that immigrants from his country who come to ours will do the kind of hard low-status backbreaking work that "not even blacks" will do -- what, for short, we will call...
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Stop Blaming China
For all their sins, foreigners should not be blamed for America's large trade deficits. China especially is doing nothing worse than producing goods that are cheaper than those produced elsewhere. Never mind the Chinese policy to keep their currency...
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No Phony Bologna
On 19 June 1999 a conference of 29 European education ministers met in Bologna, Italy, and forged an agreement dubbed the Bologna Declaration. It set forth sweeping reforms in European higher education with the goal of improving quality and...
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The Year of Living Competitively
Editor's note: This is the first in a series of articles on how new EU member states are doing one year after accession. It is not easy to evaluate the impact of the first 12 months of the membership of...
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Colonoscopies: Up Yours!
"Keep in mind that colonoscopy is the most accurate way to screen for colon cancer because it enables doctors to detect colon polyps. Detection and removal of polyps is crucial to preventing colon cancer because we know that, in the...
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Dictatorships and Double Standards, Revisited
When Indonesia's president, an ex-general, visits Washington this week, he'll take heat for the Indonesian military's murderous abuses against its own citizens in East Timor and for foot-dragging on judicial and democratic reform. But while human-rights groups push
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"The Sun" Also Sets
Life presents us with some strange ethical issues, but few can be quite as bizarre as the debate that has erupted over the question of whether the popular English tabloid The Sun was right or wrong to have published photographs...
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Where Now for the Tories?
After a tireless campaign, with no prejudice left un-pandered to, Michael Howard tendered his inevitable resignation as leader of the British Conservative Party. Although the Labour majority in parliament was slashed by more than two thirds, the Conservative vote m
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Candid about Cameras, Redux
Earlier this month I wrote a piece called "Let's Be Candid About Cameras," in which I argued that civil libertarian concerns about municipal cameras are exaggerated and that debates about street cameras should center on efficacy, as well as costs...
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Uzbekistan's Not-So-Great Game
The revolutionary wave passing through Georgia (November 2003), the Ukraine (November 2004), and Kyrgyzstan (March 2005) has reached Uzbekistan. But for the first time since the current wave of democratic revolutions started, a dictator is violently trying to stop
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Gerhard Reign's a Gonna Fall
BERLIN - After seven years, Germans seem to have had enough of socialist Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. This past Sunday the German opposition won a landslide election victory in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, an industrial region regarded as the cradle...
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Youthful Heroes of American Muslim Protest
In a recent TCS column, I reported on complaints of domination by Islamist ideological extremists over the Muslim student organization in a leading American college system. A courageous American Muslim woman, Fatima Agha, charged that Islamic fundamentalists maint
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The Vulture Tax
For the first time in decades, Republicans in Congress have an opportunity to entirely repeal a federal tax -- squish it like a bug. We are speaking of the death tax, which has been around for about 90 years...
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The Rise of Pajamas Media
We've recently learned that Google News is seeking technology patents to rank stories on its news site "based on the quality of the news source." Naturally, this has caused concern among bloggers that their sites will be ranked lower --...
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World Health Assembly Coverage: The Fluff and Lies of the WHA
GENEVA -- When attending a United Nations meeting, there comes a time when you simply have to escape. After just four days at the 58th World Health Assembly in Geneva and after a persistent headache and increasing bouts of nausea,...
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Gimme Shelter
The blazing-hot topic at suburban cocktail parties this spring is whether there's a bubble in the residential housing market. No wonder. In 2004, existing home prices rose faster than in any year since the 1970s. Some markets are going bonkers....
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The Newsweek Libel
What was it that pro-war conservatives used to say about those who opposed President Bush's project in the Middle East -- specifically those who argued that the Arab world was not yet ready for democracy? That such a view was...
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The Mad Fatter
Since the CDC recently disclosed that fat people live longer than those in "normal" weight ranges, and considerably longer than thin people, those who want to control what you eat are suggesting that whether or not being fat kills...
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The Age of Therapeutic Cloning Dawns
"Humankind has now embarked into the 'Age of Therapeutic Cloning.' This is a scientific revolution of the first rank," asserts Bernard Siegel, executive director of pro-embryonic stem cell research Genetics Policy Institute in a press release. "This is a huge...
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The Nostalgia Party
There are the occasional Aha! moments in American politics, moments of mass clarity that require no spin, no explanation, they simply are. One such moment was Democrat National Committee Chairman Howard Dean's endorsement (since clumsily retracted) of Socialist Con
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The Problem Child
Imagine the following scenario: Tomorrow morning, an Arabic language newspaper of some stature publishes an article in which one of its investigative journalists claims that officers in the Pakistani Army had once used the Bible as toilet paper. Then imagine...
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Intelligent Decline
"What's all this I hear about Intelligent Decline? Decline isn't intelligent; it's sad. Sad or tragic. Who could think that it's intelligent? That's just...". "Excuse me, Miss Litella, but the phrase is Intelligent Design. Not Decline; Design." "Intelligent Design
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The True Liberation of Latin America
In recent days, I wrote a brief article where I complained about the bad leadership that Brazil is trying to exert in the Latin American context. I criticized its stance and practices in areas such as trade, integration and intellectual...
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World Health Assembly Coverage: Beware Deadly Pools
GENEVA -- Just when you may have thought that the global debate on the role that drug patents play in access to medicines had died down, it rose again in prominence at the 58th World Health Assembly (WHA) meeting...
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Are Newt and Hillary on to Something? Sort Of...
"Longtime political foes Newt Gingrich and Hillary Rodham Clinton joined cheerfully yesterday to promote legislation on healthcare changes... The 21st Century Health Information Act would create regional health information networks to help transfer health data quic
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What a Week for 'News'
If loose lips sank ships during World War Two, then what's the equivalent today, in the wake of the Newsweek story about Koran-flushing at Guantanamo? How about "loose reporting loses wars"? That's not much of a rhyme, but it might...
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Tipped!
A few weeks ago, I suggested that we might have reached a tipping point, after which the influence of Big Media would rapidly decline. "Big deal," you may have thought. "Techno-avant-garde types like Reynolds are always waving their hands and...
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Holding Experts to Account
Though it is the resentment of the frustrated specialist which gives the demand for planning its strongest impetus, there could hardly be a more unbearable and more irrational world than one in which the most eminent specialists in each field...
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Howard's End and Britain's Choice
At the polls earlier this month, Tony Blair saw his majority in the House of Commons reduced from 161 to 67 seats. Though the Conservatives captured 33 seats, Michael Howard, the party leader, felt compelled to announce his resignation. Howard...
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The Uzbek Dilemma
It is difficult at this point to know what is really happening in Uzbekistan, but at first glance the scenario would appear to be one with which we are all too familiar from the history of authoritarian governments. A spontaneous...
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World Health Assembly Coverage: The Ratsbane of Our Existence?
GENEVA -- One of Shakespeare's characters sputters at an adversary, "I would the milk thy mother gave thee when thou suck'dst her breast had" contained ratsbane, a poisonous chemical. According to activists, it's not breast milk but infant formula that...
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World Health Assembly Coverage: The Costly Diversion
GENEVA -- Critics of trade say it is heartless -- it delivers profit and growth but ignores the human dimension, like the HIV/AIDS crisis. Getting the World Trade Organization to focus on this dimension has been Africa's contribution to the...
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World Health Assembly Coverage: Who Needs WHO?
GENEVA -- The World Health Assembly began this week for many people with a long and boring wait in the rain in order to register. The queue that snaked along slowly was made up largely of hundreds of Taiwanese, waiting...
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The McLes Experiment
I have finished my own version of the McDonald's diet, and not everyone is happy with the results. I'm happy, though. After eating only McDonald's food for 30 days, I lost 17 pounds and my blood cholesterol is down. I...
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In the Grand Tradition of Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose
Several months ago, if you care (and there isn't any reason you should), I failed to renew my decades-long subscription to Newsweek, after realizing that I wasn't interested in the "lifestyle" features that the magazine was increasingly filled with, and...
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Free the Grapes?
Both oenophiles and constitutional law scholars eagerly awaited the Supreme Court's decision in Granholm v. Heald, in which the Court was expected to decide the constitutionality of state bans on direct-to-consumer shipments of wine (and other types of alcohol). On
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World Health Assembly Coverage: If Wishes Were Horses, This Would Be the Kentucky Derby
GENEVA, Switzerland -- The 58th World Health Assembly (the World Health Organization's policy-making body) under way here brings to mind the cliché about the contestants in the Miss America pageant who, when asked what would be their one wish if...
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Road Trip, Part Deux (Unrated Version)
As a devoté of The Atlantic Monthly, I read with amusement the May issue's first installment of Bernard-Henri Lévy's trek across the United States, purportedly "In the Footsteps of Tocqueville." A few days later, I read with even greater delight...
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Norway to Treat a Lady
Norwegian corporations will have to make significant changes to their governing boards or face liquidation by the hands of the Norwegian state. Sound scary? Wait for the really scary part: By July 1 of this year, the law mandates that...
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The Most Important Fifth Wheel
It's the steering wheel, of course. Lot of buzz about steering wheels at all the auto shows this winter and spring. It's suddenly been discovered that the wheels are "command centers," laden with all kinds of controls for our increasingly...
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A New Approach to Personal Social Security Accounts: "Your Own Trust Fund"
When the First Continental Congress proclaimed that it stood for "Life, Liberty and Property," it was linking ownership of property to liberty in a free society. Personal Social Security accounts as vehicles for the expansion of ownership are very much...
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Fat, Flabby and Forgetful?
They're back! Not long after the furor caused by the Centers for Disease Control's revised "figures" which showed that not 400,000 but about 26,000 Americans died annually from obesity and that being overweight might well be protective against premature death,...
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Campaign Money for Bloggers
In elections, ideas matter more than repetition. So, rather than spending their money to repeat the same ads over and over again, rich George Soros-like political partisans should use their dollars to fund the production of ideas. And, as the...
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Solar Tower of Power
In a recent speech, President Bush addressed the need to start building more oil refineries, nuclear power plants, and natural gas terminals to meet the growing demand for energy in the U.S. While improved fuel efficiency for cars was...
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WHO Papers Over Problem
As the World Health Assembly prepares to meet in Geneva next week, delegates truly interested in promoting child health might take a cue from Michael Crichton's novel, Disclosure. "Solve the problem." That was the anonymous advice, delivered by e-mail, to...
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The Law of Proportionate Belief
Liz has said that there is not a shred of evidence for the biological factor, that the evidence against there being an advantage for males in intrinsic aptitude is so overwhelming that it is hard for me to see how...
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Nukes and the New Monasticism
Editor's note: This article is the second of two parts. Last week we noted that the "pebbles" of nuclear proliferation are starting to slide into an atomic avalanche. Thus, for this week: a guide for the plutonium-perplexed -- what to...
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Global Health: A Kind of Insanity
Next week in Geneva, delegates from 192 countries will gather for the 58th annual World Health Assembly -- a giant confab that sets policies for the World Health Organization (WHO), an arm of the United Nations. The WHO faces a...
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Profit or Loss?
First it killed the much-needed Bolkestein directive on liberalization of services to preserve its own domination of this market. Then it shot down EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson's proposal to grant to preferential tariffs Asian countries hit by the tsunami.
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American Muslim Youth vs. the Wahhabi Lobby
The Center for Islamic Pluralism in Washington, of which I am the Executive Director has been interested for some time in the situation of American Muslim students in the Rutgers University system -- the state university of New Jersey. Young...
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Where No Geek Has Gone Before
The last new Enterprise airs tonight, and soon Star Trek will be, in a sense, dead -- but we should all have such a rollicking afterlife. Forget the five-year mission; Star Trek has succeeded in its forty-year mission to be...
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Photoshopping the Apocalypse: The Gods Are Angry with Michael Crichton
The gods are angry with Michael Crichton. "State of Fear" has left global warming only marginally cooler than tossing virgins in volcanoes or serving parboiled PETA directors as hors d'oeuvres. But what's really put Gaia on Prozac is seeing science...
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The Useless Blood of May
What do you do when you're Islamothug Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and you're running out of "front line" fanatics to handle your suicide bombings? You lie. You get some pathetic shlub who's just come over the border from Syria with an...
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The Bermuda Triangle of American Politics
PAGET PARISH, BERMUDA -- The aftershocks of the 2004 election still resound in this outpost of "Benedict Arnold CEOs." Yes, long after the Swift Boats Vets exited stage left and the pundits exhausted their unique takes on the real significance...
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Blair and the Quest for Mid East Peace
Unless Tony Blair makes a sudden and unexpected withdrawal from public life or cedes the premiership to his powerful chancellor Gordon Browne, Labour's third successive election victory provides him with one final chance to contribute to a solution to the...
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Union Blues: How Big Labor Flouts the Law to Harm Its Members
The AFL-CIO got a rude awakening last week when the Department of Labor delivered a stern warning: labor pension funds are not to be used for political purposes. The directive was a blow to organized labor, which attempted to...
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On Not Getting the Koran
Yesterday that recently vanquished cliché, the Arab street, returned to remind us that there are some things that even the most enlightened Westerners don't get about Muslims -- their fanaticism about the Koran. Newsweek, which had only a few months...
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Let's Be Candid About Cameras
Has the Big Brother trope gotten too big? As more municipalities adopt video surveillance in lieu of beat cops, more civil libertarians have become outraged. But why? Most people who oppose them say it just feels creepy. Others whip out...
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Best for Mothers, Best for Babies
New mothers are besieged by people telling them what is "best" for their babies -- and pressures to breastfeed have become among the fiercest of all. Ardent breastfeeding advocates once just made mothers feel guilty if they didn't breastfeed, accusing...
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A Passage to Indian Health Care
We know that it is routine for x-rays and many diagnostic tests to be interpreted overnight by medical professionals in India. In a fairly new development, though, it's not just the tests that are headed off to the subcontinent for...
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We May Be Europeans, But Please, We're Not That Damn Stupid
One of the advantages of middle age (maturity as we old geezers prefer to call it) is that one gains insights into oneself, little bits and bobs of self-knowledge make themselves apparent. A slightly disturbing one of these reared its...
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Climate Cycle or Climate Psychic?
In light of the general hysteria over global warming, it's nice, once in a while, to be able to couch our current and ongoing climate changes into some larger perspective. We keep hearing about historically warm years, warm decades,...
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On Bluffs and Nuclear Options
A Two Hundred Year Old Tradition? Democrats tells us that the filibuster tradition is two hundred years old, making it almost as old as the United States itself. Just Google the phrase "the filibuster tradition" and up will pop...
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I Want a New Drug...
Europe's pharmaceutical market is changing. The transformation has been under way for a long time, but recently a major change occurred: the Swiss giant Novartis acquired Hexal, the second largest generics company in Germany, and its strategic partner Eon Labs....
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"Oh Woe" the WTO
MELBOURNE, Australia -- If corridor gossip in Geneva is right, The WTO is about to become the "Oh, Woe" or the "Whoops, there we go again" World Trade Organization. Pascal Lamy, the former EU Commissioner for Trade, seems likely to...
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No Star Wars for Oil
BRUSSELS -- I just saw a press screening of the new Star Wars movie, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and here's my capsule review: It's superb; the last 15 minutes are better than anything George Lucas has ever done;...
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When It Comes to Patents, Small Is Beautiful
WASHINGTON -- There's a reason that juries are often sequestered. It's to separate discussions of the truth from the comparatively superficial environment of media and politics. In an attempt to apply this theory to the public policy world, we piled...
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Judge Not
While planning last week for my next seminar for federal judges, to be held in July by the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment, I was disheartened to read that several distinguished judges had felt obliged to distance...
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Who Should Define What's 'Reasonable'?
Politicians are always looking for a new goose to pluck to win the political favor of their constituents. Today everyone from congressmen to city councilmen treat the drugmakers like a flock of geese. At least Congress has national jurisdiction....
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Climate Models and Consensus Science
It is fairly easy to calculate the likely rise of global average temperature DT for the purely theoretical situation where atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is doubled but nothing else about the atmosphere is allowed to change. The answer is about...
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Only in America: Activist Medicine
"The trouble started innocently enough. I had something in my eye, so I rubbed it. As any mother or eye doctor can tell you, that didn't help. Three days later my left eye was swelling visibly and growing more painful...
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Europe Adds Headache to Blair's Post-Election Hangover
When Tony Blair was reelected British Prime Minister last Thursday, he was entitled to a celebratory glass of champagne. Despite all the sound and fury over the Iraq war, the British people returned him to office with a majority with...
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Applying the Clinton Standard for Bolton
In his memoirs, George Stephanopoulos revealed that President Clinton was subject to "purple rages" and that Stephanopoulos oftentimes felt that his job was to get yelled at by the President in the morning so that the President would not go...
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WHO's Latest Initiative: Blame Avoidance
Policies pursued by South Africa on HIV-AIDS have been spectacularly flaky. Even now, while state facilities are treating 42,367 patients with life-prolonging antiretroviral medicines (ARVs) , the health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang warns that patients should
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The Iraq Museum, Reloaded
Archaeology is once again making news in Iraq. Iraqi archaeologists trained in England have returned home to begin excavations of mass graves. More mass graves are being discovered weekly, including those of Kuwaitis murdered during the first Gulf War. And...
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Immobility Risk
Some questions just come too late. So do some answers. Such was the case at a recent American Enterprise Institute forum on capping the mortgage-backed security (MBS) portfolios of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the congressional chartered, secondary mortgage market..
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A New Sheriff In Town
New administrator Mike Griffin has apparently ridden into NASA town with guns blazing. Not surprisingly to anyone who's been following his career, he's a man in a hurry to break the nation out of the low earth orbit quagmire in...
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Are Blogs Busting Loose?
Last weekend I attended the BlogNashville blogger conference, held at Belmont University in Nashville. It was the third conference of that sort I had attended, and it underscored the way blogs, and blogging, are changing. In 2002, I went to...
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How the West Can Win Iran
Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has announced he will run for the Iranian presidency. Iran analysts mostly agree that he will be elected. For some time now, Persian émigrés have been saying that Rafsanjani, even more than the supreme religious...
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The War on Capitalism
During the week of May 1 - Germany's Labor Day - it was clear that the recent "capitalism debate" in Germany has spun out of control. The chairman of Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD), Franz Müntefering, by comparing foreign...
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Highballs and High IQs
These days it is widely known that moderate consumption of alcohol has beneficial effects on health. Whether the drink is red wine, beer, or distilled spirits, the benefits are seen. The risk of dying in any given year is about...
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The Digital VIP Room
As innovative companies continue to bring self-publishing and other content-creation tools to the masses, technology is once again cool. It's not only Joe Consumer who is discovering the magic of creating and distributing content: bona fide celebrities from the wor
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Eliot Spitzer, At It Again
New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has been compared to Tony Soprano in that, as Stephen W. Stanton has put it, "He breaks the law. He lies. He intimidates. He makes his own rules, and he gets what he...
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The Finnish Revolution
Finns do not top of the list of people known for hot-blooded radicalism. You look in vain in Finnish history books for stories of citizens storming a Bastille just to let authorities know how they feel. Yet time and again...
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Things Look Brighter on Planet Earth
Another day, yet another report on global warming and climate change, this time a joint one from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, published in Science. The essential point that I take from...
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The Worm Turns
EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes argues that antitrust and state-aid regulation in EU countries must be reinforced in order to spur competition. The same idea is rather widely elaborated in the revised Lisbon Agenda for growth and jobs. True, increased...
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The Left Catches On
Something remarkable is happening as a Republican Congress and president move to crackdown on 527 groups like the MoveOn.org Voter Fund and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: Liberals are realizing that something's fishy. Three years after the passage of McCain-Feingol
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The Military, the Supreme Court and a Solomonic Judgment?
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, the Justice Department's appeal of a circuit court decision striking down the Solomon Amendment - a 1994 measure that bars federal funding to...
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The Rumblings of an Atomic Avalanche
Editor's note: This article is the first of two parts. Since 9-11, concern about nuclear proliferation has, shall we say, gained momentum. But whereas the subject of proliferation is interesting, and even morbidly entertaining, the legal underpinnings of non-prolif
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The Shores of Tripoli
A significant anniversary has just passed us by, and if there was any mention of it in the press, I missed it. It's probably too late to hang up bunting and arrange for a parade to mark an event that...
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In Germany, a Plague of 'Locusts'
Now that the specter of American military hegemony has apparently worn thin, Germany's Socialists have rummaged around deep in their collective closet and dug out a bogeyman straight out of their dog-eared copies of Das Kapital to blame for the...
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What Is the Future for Investors?
Wharton Business School Professor Jeremy Siegel is one of the world's most important scholars on stock ownership and investing. His 1994 book "Stocks for the Long Run" became an instant classic. His extensive original research found that over periods...
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Haste Makes Waste of Resources and Lives
HIV is a hugely successful organism; it replicates rapidly and easily develops resistance to incomplete or inappropriate therapy. A resistant strain is vastly more difficult and expensive to treat. For this reason the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that
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How Britain's Conservatives Have Undermined the Atlantic Alliance
Just when the US and allies such as France and Germany are patching up their differences and letting bygones be bygones over Iraq, the hottest ticket in Britain's elections seems to be anti-Americanism. Nothing illustrates this trend better than the...
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What Bush Must Do In Moscow
Josef Stalin, no slouch in the paranoid-suspicion department, took an extra day in May of 1945 to confirm Nazi Germany's surrender in World War II because he thought his British and American colleagues would pocket the May 8th surrender on...
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Korea's Jobless Recovery?
Analysts from the Bank of Korea and various private economic research institutes speak often about a "jobless recovery". Similar concerns have been raised in the US and elsewhere. Indeed, it appears that it may be a global phenomenon. According to...
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Does "Non" Mean No?
On May 29, France will have all the power its leaders ever wished it to have. Some 40 million French voters have the opportunity to decide the future for 450 million Europeans. Of course the formal policy from other EU...
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A Painful Application of Medical Ethics
The blogosphere has been increasingly active regarding a young woman, Amanda Twellman-Dieppa and her battle with cancer (see, for example, this post on Hugh Hewitts website). She has been petitioning Medarex Inc. to provide her with their experimental drug MDX-060.
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Poverty and Spending on Health Care
One of the most persistent myths about the U.S. health care system is that poor people lack access. While we allegedly provide luxury health care for the rich, we do much less than other countries for those in poverty. However,...
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Too Controversial Because He Is Too Conventional
Democrats, bureaucrats, retired diplomats, and a host of activists object to the nomination of Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton to the post of America's Ambassador to the United Nations. Superficially, the objections
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Continents Adrift?
With the possibility of John Bolton becoming U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the transatlantic rift that many politicians have been trying to talk away is resurfacing in a more pronounced way than ever before. Long-standing differences regarding mission, pur
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The Politics of Garlic
The otherwise messy world of Estonian politics enjoyed some clarity this April. Every Estonian taxpayer must pay one percent more personal income tax in 2006 and two percent more in 2007. This overhaul of an already scheduled tax decrease seems...
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The Social Security Trust Fund is Irrelevant (Or How Al Gore Was Right)
One of the least-noted, but most important, statements about Social Security President Bush made in his April 28 press conference is "by 2041 Social Security will be bankrupt." In so saying, President Bush seems to have caved and moved away...
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Bored of Elections
This is possibly the dullest British election campaign in anybody's memory. There is hardly any campaigning going on, for one thing. Most people have not caught sight of any of their candidates and three days before the election not all...
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You'll Never Condo in This Town Again
As Saul Steinberg taught us many years ago, from the perspective of New Yorkers, Hollywood might as well be Japan. Well, let us now observe, from our perspective out here in the land of Arnold, that New York might as...
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'Murder on Patients'
The yanking from the market of both Vioxx and Bextra, members of a new generation of pain relievers called COX-2 inhibitors, has critics ripping raw flesh off the Food and Drug Administration. Inevitably, the agency and pharmaceutical companies are both...
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Ahead of Their Time
It is not uncommon for people to make important intellectual or artistic achievements and be recognized for them only long after the fact -- indeed, sometimes long after their own lives. Johannes Kepler formulated the laws of planetary motion, but...
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Working Time Blues
The EU's Directive on Working Time, which is currently undergoing a review with a first reading in the European Parliament due on 10 May, is perhaps one of the Union's most controversial measures in the social field. Originally agreed in...
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Bulls#@* and the Academic Left
Graham Larkin, a Stanford humanities professor, injects the words "bullshit", "bullshitter" and "BS" a total of 14 times in his recent 1,192 word op-ed piece in Inside Higher Education, the unintentionally illuminating title of which is "David Horowitz's War on...
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Our Town
Wal-Mart is the world largest retailer and the most criticized. Critics contend that the company destroys competition or that it is too successful a competitor. It is criticized for outsourcing and labor and hiring practices. Perhaps the most persistent criticism..
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State of the Scare
Reporting on air quality has improved, but not by nearly as much as air quality itself. The American Lung Association's annual State of the Air report has also improved, but not by nearly as much as air quality reporting. Despite...
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Global Warming: The Smoking Gun?
Last week's publication of a new climate modeling study (1) investigating the evidence for man-made climate change is destined to have more than the average impact on the global warming debate. The study's lead author, Dr. James Hansen, has been...
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The Unbearable Rightness of Nick Denton
A couple of years ago, Nick Denton, inspired by Howell Raines' problems at the New York Times, warned that the power of the blogosphere might have anarchic consequences: "In the turmoil at the Times, there's a broader
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Why Now?
Democracy, it seems, is resurgent. Yes, it is too early to tell whether the winds of change that have been blowing in the former Soviet republics and the Arab world in recent months will result in sustainable gains for freedom...
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The Ideological War Over Intellectual Property
Intellectual property, once a dry, technical subject, has been cast as the villain in a modern day struggle between darkness and light. Free Culture and open source advocates argue passionately that intellectual property rights harm us all by locking up...
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World Bank-rupt
All too much of the discussion of Paul Wolfowitz's recent nomination to be President of the World Bank has focused on one issue. How effective can the architect of the Iraq war be in working with countries that might be...
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The Technology of Medieval Peasantry to the Rescue?
One of the delights about the way my life is currently working out (soon to be followed by the inevitable disaster, I am sure,) is that there is a neat connection between what I actually do for a living and...
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