TCS Daily : September 2006 Archives
Zombies Always Win
The zombies always win. That's why they're the scariest monsters of all. What you are, the dead were; what the dead are, you will be. Look at the bones and the rot and realize: you're looking at yourself. Death eats...
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The Sword Is Mightier Than the Pen
The demonstrators had extraordinary moral credibility. Last week in Kigali, Rwanda, survivors of the 1994 Rwanda genocide called on the United Nations and world leaders to act to end the continuing genocide in Sudan's western Darfur region. "We survivors stand...
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An Intelligent Reading of the National Intelligence Estimate
Reports in the Sunday editions of the New York Times and Washington Post that an April National Intelligence Estimate concluded that the Iraq War has increased the danger to the United States from terrorists created a media feeding frenzy. Critics...
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Taxi Cab Obsessions
Early last spring, I invited my new girlfriend to Rome for an extended week-end. For Scandinavians still trapped in a six months long hibernation, being able to sip campari and orange juice on the sidewalk in March sunshine is a...
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From Checklist to Checkmate
The Transportation Security Administration is partially lifting its ban on liquids brought on board aircraft. The AP reports: "We now know enough to say that a total ban is no longer needed from a security point of view," said Kip...
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From Far Left to Libertarian
The question of how I became a libertarian ultimately is a question about how I changed my mental model of the political system from one of "good guys vs. villains" to one of the importance of limited government, individual liberty,...
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Admit We're Peaceful...or Else
Addressing a packed St. Peter's Square during his weekly general audience last Wednesday, Pope Benedict XVI revisited his September 12 lecture to academics at the University of Regensburg. The pontiff, a celebrated university professor, explained that his controver
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A Pebble's Ripple Effect
Whether or not you believe that we're in the midst of an episode of anthropogenic global warming, it seems to me that burning fossil fuels when there are alternatives is obviously a bad idea. Leaving aside greenhouse gases, burning coal...
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Neuro Wine in Old Bottles
In the September 18 edition of The New Yorker magazine, writer John Cassidy leads a fascinating tour through parts of the new field of neuroeconomics, the study of the neurological underpinnings of economic decision-making. Sadly, a number of the economists...
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What Is The Cost of Compassion?
File this under famous last words, somewhere next to Herbert Hoover's pre-Depression promise that prosperity was right around the corner: "The only hope to stop the spending is to elect George W. Bush." Congressman John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) made this fateful...
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The Future of Higher Ed
The National Commission on the Future of Higher Education will release its final report today, with Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings giving the administration's response to the Commission's work. The Secretary should be pleased with parts of the final docu
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The Pen, the Sword and the Pontiff
Madeleine Bunting, writing in The Guardian, has sharply attacked the Regensburg address of Pope Benedict XVI. Among the points that she makes, there is one that deserves special attention, because it expresses the sentiment of all those who have criticized...
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Man-Made Volcanic Effect?
Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego has proposed one way to curb global warming (natural and/or man-made) is to purposely shoot...
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Whatever Happened to Media Consolidation?
Numerous writers and analysts have argued that large media conglomerates' purchases of movie studios, magazines, and book publishing companies over the past four decades have had a deleterious effect on the quality of production in these media, because it forced...
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The MacArthur Model
Playing to their historic strength, the Bush State Department released the latest statement on US policy for dealing with terrorism just after Labor Day. Entitled the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, it is being promoted by the Administration as an...
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Red and Blue America: Meet the Health Belt
The division of America into red and blue is a totem of our times. The red states voted for Bush, the Blue for the Democrats. The blue states are on the coasts, the red states are flyovers. More importantly to...
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Global Warnings from the Ivory Tower
The Royal Society of London, England's premier scientific society, has sent a letter to Exxon-Mobil asking that the energy giant stop funding organizations which have "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence." This unusual st
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Our Enemy, The State
ROCKAWAY BEACH, NY, Sept. 11, 2006 - Just two doors down from the Dunkin' Donuts where I'm writing this is Engine Company 268, which sacrificed 15 of New York's Bravest -- including its chief -- in the conflagration at the...
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'Shouting Hoo, Hoo, Hoo at the Tops of Their Tongues'
Back in the 1960s and '70s the Harvard Lampoon occasionally put together a parody version of some mainstream (I almost wrote "legitimate") magazine, such as Cosmopolitan or Time or Playboy. If memory serves, there was always a letter to the...
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Climate Change and the Demographic Shift
A great deal of ink and electrons have been wasted in trying to explain what it is or is not that we should do to try and reduce emissions of CO2 in the United States. One fascinating paper just published...
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Another Hungarian Uprising?
In 1956 Hungarians revolted against the yoke of communist domination from Moscow. In 2006, it appears Hungarians are revolting against the yoke of austerity from Brussels by demanding that the EU-leaning Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany step down. Already
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The Global Ambush
Remember the "Arab street," that riot-in-the-road featuring flammable Israeli flags, Saddam Hussein posters, clenched fists and chants threatening "Death to America"? The street may have lacked pavement and a fire hydrant, but it had beaucoup television cameras. Fl
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The Importance of DIY Movies
As a movie critic for TCS Daily, I sometimes feel like a bicyclist at a Harley-Davidson convention: My presence is tolerated, people are friendly enough, but I'm not exactly necessary. I know that most TCSers want to get their brain-motors...
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Sweden Has Learned From Its Own Lesson
The centre-right four-party Alliance won the elections in Sweden this Sunday, ending 12 years of Social Democrat rule. The Alliance promised to do stepwise market-oriented reforms, as opposed to the Social Democrats promise to do nothing. What conclusions can be...
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Pope Benedict and the Muslims
It seems to have been too much to expect that the educated West, in dealing with the challenge of Islam after the atrocities experienced in New York and Washington five years ago, would do so in a spirit of caution,...
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The Sex Strike
WASHINGTON -- A group of women have started a sex strike in Pereira, a city in western Colombia, to persuade their men to give up violence. They will make love again only when their husbands and boyfriends make peace. A...
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We the Sheeple? Why Conspiracy Theories Persist
Conspiracy theorists allege that the events of 9/11 are not adequately explained by the "official story" fingering Osama bin Laden and his network as the culprits. What really needs explaining, though, is not 9/11, but the existence of such conspiracy...
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A Military Strategy, Not a Marketing Strategy
In my response to my essay making the case for staying home in November on Election Day, I received a lot of pushback from voters who believe that the war on Islamic fascism justifies voting for Republicans, despite what one...
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Something Old, Something New
Since I was named editor back in late 2001, TCSDaily has grown in ways I could not imagine. And it has thrived in part because it has been willing to evolve in a tumultuous and challenging media landscape. That evolution...
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I Know You Are But What Am I?
The Senate race in my home state of Virginia between incumbent Republican George Allen and his Democratic opponent, former Reagan Navy Secretary James Webb, has gotten ugly even by the rather low standards of American politics. Unless you've been vacationing...
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Down on the Farms
As we mark the one-month anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, the best that can be said is that ceasefire between Israel and the Hezbollah terrorists who carved a state-within-a-state in southern Lebanon is holding. This is perhaps...
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Voting Early and Often
Can I call 'em, or can I call 'em? Nearly four years ago, I predicted charges of electoral fraud before the polls had even opened in the 2002 elections. I was right, and such charges have only grown louder as...
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Crazy for Work
Unemployed you say? We can't really offer you a job... but we could classify you as mentally disabled to improve our labor market statistics! That's the message 25-year-old Swedish citizen Jessica Pettersson got from the state unemployment office. Pettersson has...
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Cops and Warriors
This year, Iran's theocratic dictators celebrated Sept. 11 by banning several opposition newspapers, including Iran's leading "reformist" daily, Shargh. Shargh had committed political sin and published a cartoon that Tehran's robed dictators found insulting to Pres
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An Evolving Faith
Angela Rawlett is a college student facing a personal dilemma. Wanting to be a veterinarian, she had planned to major in biology. But this will involve studying evolution, which seems to be in conflict with her Christian faith. Angela's father...
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Pilgrims' Progress
Note: This is the first installment of a two-part series. What do historian Nathaniel Philbrick and Atlantic columnist James Fallows have in common? Both advocate similar but distinct approaches to conflict resolution and point the way toward potential success in..
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A Shot Across Many Bows
As expected, various and sundry Islamic leaders are criticizing Pope Benedict's Regensburg speech. The LA Times reports: "Pope Benedict XVI flew back to Rome on Thursday to face an international flurry of protest over comments he made critical of historical...
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Waiting Out Castro
As the summit of the non-aligned movement of countries continues in Havana today, those hoping for a reappearance of 80-year-old Fidel Castro may have to content themselves with the news that he reportedly gave UN's Kofi Annan and a few...
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Investment Spam Scams Work; What Should We Do About Them?
Let me guess what's inside your inbox -- or at least its spam folder. Chances are that 15% of your spam is made up of stock tips on numerous "microcap" stocks traded on Pink Sheets, an over-the-counter quotation system. These...
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Census and Sensibility
I'm giving you a red pill and a blue pill. If you take the red pill, your income will roughly double in the next ten years, but your neighbor's income will triple. If you take the blue pill you and...
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Drug Testing, Drug Hazards
A clinical trial that went badly awry at London's Northwick Park Hospital in March became the drug-testing community's worst nightmare. Six healthy volunteers ended up in intensive care after each received the first injection of a new drug called TGN1412,...
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Is Democracy the "Countercause"?
Tom Ricks' book FIASCO: The American Military Adventure In Iraq has been climbing the charts of late. Interestingly, Ricks cites another work called Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice by David Galula as being vital to understanding the fight in Iraq...
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From No Nukes to New Nukes
The six-month consultation period on the EU's Green Paper on a European Strategy for Sustainable, Competitive and Secure Energy comes to an end on September 24. But no matter what the accumulated public feedback reveals, recent news headlines underline some...
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Europe's New Religion
The leaders of the 25 member states of the European Union will meet in the Finnish city of Lahti next month to discuss the future direction of the bloc. The defeat of the proposed constitutional treaty by Dutch and French...
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What's The Big Idea? Podcast with Ryan Sager
This week's guest is New York Post columnist Ryan Sager, who discusses his new book, The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party, which explores the splits and potential fusions between fiscal conservatives,.
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Help Wanted
Five years after it spawned 9/11, Afghanistan is no longer under the control of the medieval Taliban and its al Qaeda partners. That's the good news. The bad news is that five years after 9/11, it doesn't appear that Afghanistan...
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Snuff Cinema
TORONTO -- Five years after 9-11, it's apparent that we all aren't getting along. And the political left is throwing plenty of mean punches. A case in point is that new Bush snuff movie, "Death of a President." Some might...
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November: The Case for Staying Home
"As a life-long Republican and occasional federal official, I must acknowledge a hard truth: I don't much care how a divided government is next realized. And, in 2006, there's only one way that's going to happen." -- William Niskanen The...
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'I Am a Man of My Time'
Politicians and boxers share a common trait: They never want to quit. The refusal of boxing champions to retire probably stems from an imperial complex. You don't renounce supremacy conquered through force until a greater force overpowers you. Politicians cling...
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The Angina Monologues
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (SATIRENEWSSERVICE) -- "How do we force women to wear burkhas? Torture their children if they don't! How do we clear a mine field in war? Promise thirteen year old boys they'll go to heaven if they get blown...
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What Left and Right Both Miss About the Wal-Mart Debate
Once again, Wal-Mart is being used as a political football. On the left, politicians and pundits use Wal-Mart as the poster child for living wages and mandatory health care benefits. On the right, Wal-Mart is held up as a paragon...
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Keep Your Grubby Mitts Off My Hard Drive
I'm a big fan of Amazon.com -- as my credit card statements can attest -- and I've watched their gradual entry into the online video world with considerable enthusiasm. If anybody can make that work, I figured, it would be...
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What Are the 'Dynamics of Economic Well-Being'?
Recently, the Census Bureau reported its findings on 2005 household income for the United States. The August 30 Wall Street Journal's headline for its story on these findings was, "Median Household Income Rises 1.1%." The line underneath (what journalists called...
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Something Ventured...
...most strange of all, right now the world's hottest tech stocks are traded not on Wall St but on Frankfurt's Neuer Markt... A stunted venture capital industry - that intricate network of entrepreneurs, investors and bankers which turns good ideas...
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China's Trade Dilemma
China wants to wear the white hat in global affairs. It is already trying on the hat for size, and feels that it fits. It has watched the USA don the black hat -- in the views of the opinion...
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Is There an Elephant in Here?
Editor's Note: A little over a year and a half ago, TCS Daily sent New York Post columnist Ryan Sager down to the 2005 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to observe the state of the conservative movement in the wake...
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Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
The World Bank and the IMF seem to have lost any capacity to defend their own interests or their core mission. They have criticized the Singapore Government for blocking entry to Singapore of NGOs clearly on mission to cause trouble...
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Free Time
But I like the giant metronome. It's a gigantic kinetic sculpture (for which outsize proportion matters) beckoning the city from its massive, gray plinth atop Letná Hill north across the Vltava River. The body is shaped simply to present a...
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Snake Oil Policy
Washington has hundreds of pending bills dealing with energy, and it's difficult to predict which ones will move in a Congress under pressure to do something about $3-a-gallon gas before the November elections (even though average prices have recently fallen...
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A Conservative Case for Immortality
One of the sharpest dividing lines we experience as human beings -- the difference between life and death -- has long been a part of American politics. In the abortion debate (and related), the battle lines have been drawn, with...
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The Grand Tax Illusion
You will have seen, around and about, a lot being said about how the current recovery just isn't feeding through to the average man and woman out there. Wages don't seem to be rising; in fact, Paul Krugman recently made...
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We Are Not Safe (And That's Okay)
Polling data tell us the American public feels less safe than it did pre-9/11. American soldiers are dying daily at the hands of insurgents/terrorists in streets of Baghdad and the mountains of Afghanistan. We just learned that terrorists were coming...
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The French Climate Skeptic
Skeptical voices in the international global warming debate are predominantly Anglo-Saxon, with occasional smatterings of Nordic, Russian, Italian and Dutch. But the French are conspicuously absent. How come? French intellectuals are reputed for their independence
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From Communism to Keynesianism
While it seems that China has escaped from the economic disasters of the bad old days of communism, it is succumbing to the theories and policies of warmed-over Keynesianism. Beijing is giving up class struggle and central planning to apply...
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"Luck is the Residue of Design."
On Sept. 11, 2001, Al-Qaida's terrorist hijackers implemented an audacious, imaginative, and well-designed -- but risky -- attack. Al-Qaida's 9-11 planners and hijackers believed audacity and vicious execution would minimize the risk of failure. But they all counte
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The Victory of September 11, 1565
By the middle of the 16th century, the Knights of Malta had been for decades a particular irritation to the Sultan of the Empire of the Ottoman Turks, then the world's premier superpower and the imperial power of the Jihad....
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Stranger in a Strange Land
"Oh it gets so lonelyWhen you're walkingAnd the streets are full of strangersAll the news of home you readJust gives you the bluesJust gives you the blues"-- Joni Mitchell I was kind of anesthetized that summer, nestled in the hills...
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Who's Going to Win?
During the Cold War, some of the fiercest anti-Communists believed their cause was likely to fail. The writer and former Communist Whittaker Chambers sought to rally the West against his erstwhile comrades, but wrote that in making his break from...
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Big Oil's New Conspiracy
We have heard much in recent months about the plot by oil companies to gouge consumers at the pump. Now, I am writing to report another insidious plot on the part of Big Oil. They are scheming to lower prices....
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Yemen: A Glimmer of Hope?
In the midst of a barrage of disheartening news from the Middle East, there's one bright spot that should hearten cynics, realists and idealists alike. On the Arabian Peninsula, below the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, next to the Sultanate of...
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To Live and Die in Toronto
Why is it so dangerous to be a reporter these days? Why are so many journalists being targeted? Two Fox News reporters were grabbed in Gaza, held for nearly two weeks, exploited for propaganda purposes, and then released. They were...
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Europe in Hibernation
As Madeleine Albright once said, "To understand Europe, you have to be a genius - or French." John Gillingham, author of Design for a New Europe, is definitively not French - as a matter of fact, he is an American...
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Europe Rising?
We might forgive Europeans a little gloating in recent weeks over some economic news of the man-bites-dog variety. It seems the EU outperformed both the US and Japan in the last quarter, posting a 0.9 percent growth rate (with an...
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The Showa War?
Ever heard of the Showa War? If not don't worry - you're not alone. In fact most people outside Japan have probably never heard of it either. Yet this is the name that has been chosen by Japan's most widely...
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What's The Big Idea? Podcast with Dierdre McCloskey
This week's guest is former Marxist Dierdre McCloskey, a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago who argues that capitalism - rather than being evil or even neutral - tends to improve people and to even encourage art! To listen...
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Rain on the Economic Forecasters' Parade
Investors are keenly interested in the pronouncements of economic forecasters, judging by the massive amounts of ink and airtime allotted to them by the media. It doesn't necessarily follow, however, that heeding the prognosticators is useful in selecting securitie
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Lifestyles of the Superrich and Not So Famous
When I lecture to teenagers and twentysomethings here in the United States, I often ask members of the audience to "raise your hand if you're wealthy." Except for the young woman years ago who announced that her father owned a...
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'I Buy Goods From Poorer Countries'
Editor's note: How long can Europe keep further globalization at bay? Jason Miks talks to Madsen Pirie, president of the Adam Smith Institute, about the EU's need to reconsider labor mobility, free markets, and immigration TCS: The British trade secretary...
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Path to Prosperity
On May 1, 2004, eight ex-communist countries joined the European Union. Time will show whether EU membership will improve or harm their economic prospects, but 17 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is clear that economic transition...
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Help Wanted: Leadership in World Trade
The position of world leader in free trade that was occupied by the United States since the end of the Second World War is now vacant. While there is still a chance that the United States can regain the mantle,...
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Will Broadband Kill the Broadcast Star?
Katie Couric made her debut as the anchor of the CBS Evening News last night, and if there was something historic about the broadcast, it might be this: you didn't have to watch it on TV. CBS had announced that...
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A Tolstoy Economy
Leo Tolstoy wrote that while happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The same might perhaps be said of the unwinding of major global economic imbalances at different times. For while the serious...
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The Indy Music Comeback
Independent music is making a comeback. Or, perhaps more accurately, it's taking the next step along a path that looks like bad news for traditional record labels. Some time ago, I mourned the demise of MP3.com, the original independent-music portal...
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Naming Our Enemies
"Ideally, in the case of a right (for example, the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures) that could be asserted against government measures for protecting national security, one would like to locate the point at which a...
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Bosnia's Big Picture
Reuters is reporting that Richard Gere will start shooting his new movie in Sarajevo later this month. Flak Jacket, based on a true story, follows an American war correspondent's quest to uncover the hideout of Radovan Karadzic, the wartime leader...
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Property to the People
In October 1995, a Chinese peasant named Li Xinwen traveled to Beijing from rural Anhui province. After being forced from his land to make way for an expansion of the local bureaucracy, he sought justice from the central authority. He...
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Back to Work!
Is the stereotype of the vacation-loving European an unfair one? A new poll published in the Financial Times suggests it may very well be. The survey found that a majority of the continent's workers would actually like to work more,...
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Beating Swords Into Soccer Balls
Lost in all the hype surrounding the recent war between Hizbullah and Israel are the human interest stories. I don't mean the pictures of particular dead children, fleeing refugees or cramped bomb shelters. No, I mean human interest stories in...
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Countdown to Genocide
The final countdown for Darfur looms. Back in April, in a widely commented piece on TCS, we warned both that the impending Darfur crisis was a calamity of overwhelming proportions and that it was intrinsically linked (despite the irony of...
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Science in the Media Sausage Grinder
Recent weeks have offered a rich harvest of new "health" threats with splashy headlines warning us about the supposed dangers from processed meats, hair dyes, and tanning parlors. While all of these stories are all a little odd, perhaps the...
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Commodifying Life and Its Critics
In Marxist theory, capitalist drones afflicted by false consciousness are constantly indulging in the fetishism of commodities -- placing material possessions on an absurdly high pedestal. Likewise, critics of the practice of obtaining patent protection on life for
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Prison Break?
British prisons are, once again, bursting at the seams. While the Home Office is doing its best to accommodate "future bookings" (8,000 new places), humans rights activists and prison reformers have mounted a concerted media campaign over recent months aimed...
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'These Staff Reductions Are Due, In Part, to Our Productivity Initiatives'
The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity -- the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the...
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Attack of the Lifesaving Tomatoes
Five years ago, Dr. Eduardo Blumwald of the University of California announced that he and his team had succeeded in genetically modifying tomato plants so that they could grow in soil with a high salt content. Not only that, but...
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The "Scoop" on Lieberman
While there is no doubting the vitriol that Democrats feel for Sen. Joseph Lieberman nowadays, there is certainly a great deal of doubt concerning the strategy of isolating Lieberman. Or at least, there should be. Not only are Democrats in...
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The Straight Dope on 'Medical Marijuana'
The medical marijuana controversy rages on. Is it a "medicine?" Does it work? Is it safe? Are claims of medical benefits merely a ploy for legalization?The FDA weighed in several months ago by endorsing a multi-agency study that found "no...
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Got to Admit It's Getting Better...
In two major newspaper articles, one in last Monday's New York Times (August 28, 2006) and one in last Wednesday's Washington Post (August 30, 2006), two of the nation's leading newspapers do their readers a huge disservice. In the Times...
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The Residual Value of Marshawn Lynch
By all accounts, Marshawn Lynch is the real deal. Overshadowed last season by Heisman winner Reggie Bush, the Cal running back is himself ranked among the leading candidates for this year's trophy, and is the chief reason some believe the...
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