Terri Schiavo has died.
The Anchoress has a nice post. La Shawn Barber has a round-up of obits and tributes.

Paul Johnson: "The UN is for Talk, Not Action"
at Forbes

What has emerged so far confirms my view that the UN is constitutionally incapable of conducting any operation efficiently or honestly. Ideally the UN, foreshadowing a future world government, ought to be run by a global meritocracy-rule by the best. In practice, it is the opposite. Any state that can be legally defined as one can join the UN-it is a club having no rules of probity or morals. To be a member, a state does not have to be a democracy, nor must it accept the rule of law. It can be a hopelessly corrupt tyranny.
. . .
But will any punishment be meted out? Will any serious reforms be pushed through? Of course not. As for blame, some of it attaches to the major powers, such as the U.S., Britain and France, who have put pressure on UN officials to award contracts to big firms from their respective countries. The diplomats involved argue that such pressure is routine and inevitable. Any system of punishment would have to involve people from the big powers, and there's no chance of that happening. As for reforms, the UN is beyond reform until membership is restricted to civilized powers that practice democracy and the rule of law and hold their rulers responsible for their actions.

Johnson compares the UN to the EU:

Other big international organizations show similar endemic weaknesses. The EU has a corrupt, inefficient and hugely expensive bureaucracy that gobbles up billions of euros that are never properly accounted for. It has successfully resisted any kind of real investigation into its misdeeds. It survives and flourishes in its wickedness because major component states, such as France, Italy and Germany, are themselves corrupt and have no desire to see Brussels become pure and honest. The only way to reduce corruption in Brussels is to give it less to do. The same principle applies to the UN.

EU Referendum compares what the UN and the EU have done for the victims of the most recent earthquake in Indonesia:

The UN, that wonderfully efficient and transparent organization, has set up a hub in the Sumatra port city of Sibolga and is wondering what to do next as the weather is very bad on the affected islands. It might send in Chinook helicopters (probably Australian ones). Then again, it might not.
. . .
And the EU? Well, the EU has reacted in its own inimitable fashion:

“The EU’s executive commission has sent an assessment team to the affected area and said it would offer financial aid if needed.”

As Johnson said, "The UN is for Talk, Not Action", and the same goes for the EU.

Richard Gere on the WSJ
asks Don't Abandon Tibet: Why Europe must not lift the arms embargo on China:

All the more so since China enacted an anti-secession law providing it with the legal authority to attack Taiwan should it proceed further toward self-rule. The timing of this legislation contains a lesson for the EU. It was unthinkable until now because China lacked the capability to launch an invasion across the 100 miles of the Taiwan Strait. However, Beijing has invested billions of dollars in Russian-made submarines, destroyers and other weapons. Therefore, lifting the embargo could accelerate Beijing's buying spree and enable even greater Chinese aggression.

Gere is right.

Paul Johnson has argued that the larger European economies, France and Germany, are unable to generate revenues because of their socialist agendas, and must rely on deals with states like Iran and China for revenues. Let's hope their leaders realize what's at stake, before it's too late. So far, that hasn't happened. In fact, the Guardian this morning writes, Writing is on the wall for wary Taiwan

More on the MS-13
From an on-line English version of a Mexican newspaper, a nicely inflammatory headline, Vigilantes set to 'confront' migrants

nationalist vigilantes are set to begin patrolling the border with Mexico in an effort to stem what they see as a tide of undocumented immigrants, and some reports say violent Central American gang members are preparing to confront the selfstyled sentinels.

Balanced news, you ask?

Nazism in the News
Maria sent me this news item, from HonestReporting.com, on how The Nazi salute has been adopted by Palestinians

On Monday (Mar. 21), the Palestinian Authority's largest party, Fatah, held a rally for student leaders at Hebron University. At the rally, up-and-coming Fatah leaders collectively struck the 'Heil Hitler' salute that's universally associated with Nazi Germany.

This salute also seems to have been recently adopted by the PA police force, as indicated by this February 10 AFP photo (below):
With momentum gaining to resume peace talks, the PA's identification with Nazi German practice ― even in a symbolic manner ― is cause for concern.

You can read about The Nazi Roots of Modern Radical Islam

Stevens Institute story at the Star Ledger
that I posted about on Monday is now on line, at the Star Ledger, but also (via DynamoBuzz) at the Jersey Journal with a different title, Prez's salary soars; publicly it's in black, insiders see red.

Mr. Snitch! was wondering if the Hoboken papers (Jersey Journal and Hoboken Reporter) would write on the story. Now Jersey Journal has. Let's hope Stevens Institute gets an independent audit, and full disclosure.

Breakfast’s ready!
If I could tolerate sugary cereals, and was paying $40,000 for tuition, room, and board, I’d want my brand-name Cocoa Puffs. Harvard students will agree.

No need to get the reduced sugar versions, though.

Those craving 415 mg of cholesterol can order three eggs, sausages, and bacon – or they can go to Burger King

Bioethics?
In the article “Human Non-Person”: Terri Schiavo, bioethics, and our future Wesley Smith explains

If you want to know how it became acceptable to remove tube-supplied food and water from people with profound cognitive disabilities, this exchange brings you to the nub of the Schiavo case — the “first principle,” if you will. Bluntly stated, most bioethicists do not believe that membership in the human species accords any of us intrinsic moral worth. Rather, what matters is whether “a being” or “an organism,” or even a machine, is a “person,” a status achieved by having sufficient cognitive capacities. Those who don’t measure up are denigrated as “non-persons.”

Allen’s perspective is in fact relatively conservative within the mainstream bioethics movement. He is apparently willing to accept that “minimal awareness would support some criterion of personhood” — although he doesn’t say that awareness is determinative. Most of his colleagues are not so reticent. To them, it isn’t sentience per se that matters but rather demonstrable rationality. Thus Peter Singer of Princeton argues that unless an organism is self-aware over time, the entity in question is a non-person. The British academic John Harris, the Sir David Alliance professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester, England, has defined a person as “a creature capable of valuing its own existence.” Other bioethicists argue that the basic threshold of personhood should include the capacity to experience desire. James Hughes, who is more explicitly radical than many bioethicists (or perhaps, just more candid), has gone so far as to assert that people like Terri are “sentient property.”

What the definition of “sufficient cognitive capacities” is remains to be seen. Once people are seen as “killable and harvestable” sentient property, any number of justifications can be found to kill and harvest any number of people. And that could mean you, and me.

Why is communism bad?
Asks some clueless kid on a message board, and Bridget Johnson explains why. Many young people know why communism is bad.

Locally, Princeton University Students protest crackdown in Cuba

CAUSA co-founder Chris Gueits, also a Princeton sophomore, said the group's decision to end its march outside the front doors of Firestone was symbolic of the absence of a free flow of information in Cuba and restrictions against free expression.
"In countries like Cuba, this would land you in jail," Mr. Gueits said in front of the sculpture outside the library. "There's a vacuum of information over there, and these people feel alone."
. . .
The march was held within a week of the second anniversary of an alleged crackdown on dissent by Cuban President Fidel Castro on March 18, 2003. President Castro ordered the arrest of more than 75 journalists, labor union organizers, civic leaders, librarians and human rights activists, according to organizers.

The protest at Princeton University was one of several reportedly held on college campuses across the nation. There was a simultaneous march on the University of Pennsylvania campus, and memorial events were held at Harvard, Georgetown, Boston College, University of Florida, Florida State, Cornell, Columbia and elsewhere, organizers said.

I heartily applaud Mr. Gueits and his group for their efforts.

Update: Che makes it to this Dean's list (via Babalu)

The Whore of Mensa?
Back in the olden days when Woody Alan was funny, way before his incestuous marriage, the published a story called The Whore of Mensa, which premise was an escort service of high-IQ women.
Well, it looks like someone on campus’s got a business plan:

An online advertisement that offered Princeton University students male escorts — and solicited female students to apply for a position — was a joke, but the ad's author insists the business model is sound.
A business that catered to the community at large likely would be profitable, said Edward Shin, the univrsity senior who created the ad.
On March 8, Mr. Shin posted the dating service ad on a new student auction Web site called TigerTrade. TigerTrade, which opened Feb. 28, can only be accessed by students of the university and matches sellers to buyers through a bidding system similar to that used by eBay.
The ad — which was marred by several misspelled words — read, "Our gentlemen, over six feet tall and in excellent physical shape, are willing to offer you companionship. Whether the occassion is a formal, a movie, or a shopping trip, we can accomodate."

Apparently only tall guys were available. What happened to the short guys?

As a side comment, may I mention that the Mayflower Madam has relatives in town?

Why "Non"?
Because the French want to be on top, and they don't want the "wrong sort of Europe", that's why "non".

The latest survey shows that 55% of French voters will likely vote no on the 500-page-EU Constitution referendum. The Economist explains,

From a tender age, French voters are taught the virtues of Europe. For political leaders, on left and right alike, Europe has been the means of preserving and projecting French power in a world that was otherwise eroding it. In short, Europe offered comfort: protection from decline; reaffirmation of their social model; the foundation of peace.

This sense of comfort is now falling away. In its place, Europe is increasingly seen as a menace: a destroyer of privileges and a source of new threats. Take the two issues that vex the French most just now, neither related to the constitution, but both overshadowing it: the European Commission's directive to liberalise services, which Mr Chirac ripped apart, just as he had earlier torn up the euro area's stability and growth pact, at this week's EU summit (see article); and Turkey's possible EU membership. The first, introduced by Frits Bolkestein, a Dutch liberal, has become an emblem of French fears about an “ultra-liberal” Europe. There may be genuine concerns about lower wages or safety. But nobody has even tried to explain the merits of the measure, although it was approved by the two French commissioners at the time (one of them, Michel Barnier, is now foreign minister). It has rather become, as one socialist puts it, a symbol of “Europe's drift towards liberalisation”.

The French don't want the idea of the “wrong sort of Europe”. EU Referendum looks at A sunset in Europe:

More likely, appears that Chirac feared that even 10 minutes of Barroso's "liberal" views on French television might cost votes in the referendum, although the French president is known to harbour a "low regard" for the commission chief and his "Anglo-Saxon" views.

However, there are fears that Chrac, by portraying the commission as an ultra-liberal Anglo-Saxon institution, may be fuelling the "no" campaign rather than his pro-constitution effort.

The Telegraph, which EU Referendum quotes, sees these as Hopeful signs from France, but with a propaganda machine in the works,

A "No" vote on May 29 would solve so many problems for Britain that it seems almost too much to hope for. Surely the French can be relied upon to let us down. One thing is for sure: the full weight of the Gallic establishment will be deployed in the attempt to bludgeon voters into submission. The BBC's pro-Brussels sympathies are as nothing compared with those of French television and most newspapers; the state will spend vast sums in the attempt to twist its citizens' arms. Anything that can be done will be done.

It's already started. Last evening's (government-sponsored) France2 newscast inaugurated a series of pro-EU Constitution questions-and-answers aimed to make the viewer vote "oui". Expect a lot more to come.

Japan, however, managed to say "Non" to Jacques,

In fact, Koizumi, leader of a nation renowned for its diplomatic protocols, was uncharacteristically blunt, telling l'escroc that Japan strongly opposed the lifting of a EU embargo on arms sales to China.

On another issue of contention, the siting of the proposed International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project, Koizumi also refused to yield to the French bully, telling him equally bluntly that Japan would not give up its bid to host the site.

Thank you, Mr. Koizumi.

Blogger trouble at the moment
will post on the UN Constitution later today. In the meantime, read about why it's time to disband the UN.

Time to disband the UN
My family and I live in an area of New Jersey where land has become more valuable than the structural value of a house, so it's more cost-effective to tear down an old house and build a new one than it is to buy an old, outdated, existing house. The UN has reached that point: It's time to tear down the UN.

The UN has outlived its purpose. Not because a forum of nations is per se a bad idea, but because it has, year after year for decades, become a corrupt entity beyond redemption. It is a club of petty villains and corrupt bureaucrats. As I have stated previously, there'll never be a reform of the UN. The organism itself is too far gone.

Just a glance at this morning's NY Suneditorial gives you a whiff of the UN's malodorous nature, as exhibited in its anti-Semitism:

When exactly the dream of the United Nations began to fade is hard to pinpoint. It may have been as early as 1956, during the Sinai war, or 1974, when Yasser Arafat addressed the General Assembly. Or it may have been with the passage of the Zionism is racism resolution in 1975. But it is not hard to assert that over time, in scores of decisions large and small, the United Nations emerged, if not as exactly an enemy of Israel and the Jews, at least as a hostile forum, peopled with hostile international civil servants, some of whom - like the secretary-general's chief of staff for much of this period - would not even say hello to a diplomat of the Jewish state.

There have been other failures of the United Nations - and we do not wish to belittle any of them, from Rwanda to Sbrenica - but none is as fundamental as the U.N.'s failure in respect of the Israel. It was the war against the Jews, levied by Hitler and his collaborators between 1933 and 1945, that gave impetus to the establishment of the United Nations in the first place. There have been successes of the world body, but none so great as to erase its default on its most fundamental mission to secure the remnant population of European Jewry in the land of Israel. It has simply been off the field or hosting cabals of Israel's enemies in one resolution after another designed to achieve their humiliation and destruction.

The NY Sun editorial doesn't touch on the history of corruption at the UN, with the UNESCO scandals and the numerous incidents of UN staff involvement in crimes that range from corruption to rape and murder.

If the UN was interested in things other than the preservation of its status quo, it would move closer to the places where its work is most needed -- ah, but what is the night life like in those places? Instead, the UN is based in New York City, where the living is good, and comfortable, and affords an array of services most of the nation-members of the UN can only dream of in their lands of origin.

So, of course, the UN wants to not only stay in NYC, but expand, at great cost to the City and the Americans, who shoulder 22% of the U.N. operating budget. We're talking huge sums -- as befits the UN, place of the largest scam known to mankind, the Oil-For-Food -- a $1.2 billion low-interest loan for renovating the Secretariat Building and other U.N. headquarters facilities, plus a $650 million in bonds issued by the United Nations Development Corporation, a New York city-state entity, for a 35-story annex, to be built over a city park adjacent to the United Nations' Turtle Bay compound.

At least Congress is not chomping at the bit: Congress Turns Up Heat on U.N. Headquarters

Questioning the priorities of the world body, and the demands it places on American taxpayers, Ms. Ros-Lehtinen concluded: "When there is such a need for additional resources to provide technical assistance for political development and civil society, health, and education, should the contributions of countries be diverted to making the U.N. bureaucrats in New York more comfortable? Certainly not! The U.S. taxpayer must not continue to be bled white by an unaccountable U.N. bureaucracy."

This is not the first time legislators have threatened to withhold funds unless the UN agrees to more accountability and transparency. Last year the NY State Senate tabled a bill that would have started the building of the 35-story building, and several NY State legislators "called for cutting 10 percent of U.S. funding for the United Nations unless it cooperates with investigators probing the oil-for-food scandal." The UN ignored it all.

I wish Ms Ros-Lehtinen and her associates good luck, but, as much of an optimist as I am, the UN can not be reformed. As the NY Sun proposed,

Here the way to lead is not by inclusion of the despots and bigots and envoys of hate. The way is to appoint a lower-level working group to plan the breakup of the United Nations and the salvage of some of the useful constituent parts, and a higher-level working group to plan for a new incorporated body of democratic governments committed to common principles.

Until then, it's time to close shop. We can't afford otherwise.

Two must-reads, if you haven't already
Roger L. Simon's special report on Oil-For-Food starts.

Chrenkoff's 24th installment of Good news from Iraq, which includes everything from water processing plants, to a new international airport, to schools supplies

MS-13 on the NYT op-ed page
via HispaniCon: a man named Luis Rodríguez states that the MS-13 is Gang of Our Own Making because

While there's no proof that MS-13 has any connection to Al Qaeda, it has something in common with it: American policy played a role in the creation of both groups.

Where have I heard this before?

Rodríguez, a former member of a Chicano gang in Chicago, proposes,

we can bring gang youth to the table and work to create jobs and training, providing real options for meaningful work and healthy families. In other words, we can help sow the seeds of transformation, eliminating the reasons young people join gangs in the first place.

At the same time, Drudge today has this item, Gang will target Minuteman vigil on Mexico border

Members of a violent Central America-based gang have been sent to Arizona to target Minuteman Project volunteers, who will begin a monthlong border vigil this weekend to find and report foreigner sneaking into the United States, project officials say.

which had also been a subject of my prior post. Does this sound to you like a group that's ready to come "to the table and work to create jobs and training"?

On a related subject, ¡Gringo Unleashed! has been translating on the Minutemen.

Update La Shawn wants to know Who Will Protect the Minuteman Volunteers?

Stevens Institute story at the Star Ledger
yesterday, titled Growing pains at Stevens: Faulty urges audit amid financial woes at president's rising paycheck (but not on line today), talks about the issues first raised in an article published on the Chornicle of Higher Education. The Star Ledger article, written by Kelly Heyboer, states

A review of Stevens' IRS findings, public documents, audits and other financial records provided to the Star Ledger reveals,

• Stevens posted an $8.5 million operating loss in 2003. Several years of similar deficits, coupled with mounting debt, prompted the Moody's and Standard and Poor's credit rating agencies to downgrade school bond ratings last year.
• Despite operating in the red six of the last eight fiscal years, Stevens sent annual reports to alumni and donors showing the school solidly in the black. School officials said those documents used a set of simplified, though accurate, figures that showed "operating activity
• Raveché's pay has more than doubled in the past decade . . . In 2002, Stevens underreported his salary to the IRS by more than $100,000 due to an accounting error.
• Raveché owes Stevens more than $1.1 million on nearly $1.5 million in low-interest personal loans from school coffers.
• Stevens current yearly audit by the accounting firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers is nearly three months late

Allow me to point out that Stevens made a loan of $1.5 million to Raveché -- while the operating deficit was $8.5 million -- nearly 18% of the operating deficit total, and at the same time, as Heyboer writes, "the glossy annual report released to the public showed a $464,123 surplus."

And now for the punch line:

All of this comes as Raveché is preparing for a possible run for governor when his Stevens' contract expires in 2009.

"When I leave I'm going to think about running for governor. I am", said Raveché, who describes himself as pro-choice, anti-gun Republican.

Or, with a name like his, maybe he could run for mayor of Paris.

Jersey Style, Joe Territo, Mister Snitch! and Sluggo have been looking at this story.

Sluggo adds with his post Getting SLAPPed Around by Stevens information on a defamation suit brought by Stevens Institute against a pair of local community activists.

The dispute concerned the development of the abandoned Hoboken waterfront. Stevens wanted a portion of Castle Rock for the Lawrence T. Babbio Center for Technology Management and a parking garage. FBW contended that blasting for the project was releasing dangerous amounts of asbestos and at any rate proper clearances for the blasting hadn't been obtained. Stevens contended that the publicity cost it more than $1 million. SLAPP suit.

The suit was dismissed.

What shouldn't be dismissed is the need for an audit, and full disclosure of Stevens's books.

Schiavo and Quinlan
From the Star Ledger, A name to revive ache in N.J.: Karen Quinlan:

To the surprise of many, Karen Ann was able to breathe on her own and lived in a coma for nine more years in a nursing home.

During that time, she was given nutrition, hydration and vitamins but was not treated with medicines, including antibiotics.

Ironically, the Star Ledger yesterday had a story titled, Where there's hope, there's life.

One question for those who state that Terry Schiavo's brain dead: If she's brain dead, why is she being given morphine?

Update Previously I had posted that the Elian Gonzalez case had established a precedent used on the Schiavo case, in that "requirements for a moving party seeking federal injunctive relief - first among them that the moving party must have a substantial likelihood of succeeding on the merits", as Paxety Pages explained. Today the WSJ, in Selective Restraint: Liberals cheered when Janet Reno defied the courts to seize Elian Gonzalez

In both cases, those who were unhappy with the courts' decisions strained to assert the federal government's power to produce a different outcome. The difference is that in Mrs. Schiavo's case, Congress backed off after passing a bill that merely asked a federal court to hear the case from scratch, something that U.S. District Judge James Whittemore declined to do. By contrast, those who wanted the federal government to intervene in Elian Gonzalez's case went all the way, supporting a predawn armed federal raid on the morning before Easter to seize the 6-year-old boy despite a federal appeals court's refusal to order his surrender.

On the international news: My coverage of Ali-Baba continues
this morning with an article that says, 'Corruption is still rife at top level of French government'.

Eric Halphen, whose investigations into kickbacks from public works programmes led to a number of President Jacques Chirac's closest allies going on trial last week, said that the prosecutions "in no way" signalled an end to the corruption that has blighted French politics for decades.

Paris is vying for the 2012 Olympics, and one of the defendants is a member of Paris's Olympic bid committee.

Jaques's been keeping himself busy, with a trip to Japan (his 45th -- you can't go too far for fresh sushi, and after all, why not indulge in his two passions, food and travel?) to the International Exposition. While in flight he maybe was listening in on Sarko, but Sarko has remained cool.

According to the French satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné, President Jacques Chirac is listening in on his archrival Nicolas Sarkozy's phone calls.
.
The newspaper reported Wednesday that Sarkozy, who quit as finance minister under Chirac last year to lead Chirac's own party, the Union for a Popular Movement, is aware of the surveillance and has told friends that he believes the people responsible are Chirac and Chirac's protégé, Dominique de Villepin, who took over Sarkozy's earlier post as interior minister

If Jacques starts talking about Machiavelli, this will really start to look like New Jersey.

Happy Easter!
And here's a Text for you,

A prayer of praise and thanksgiving.
51:1. A prayer of Jesus the son of Sirach. I will give glory to thee, O Lord, O King, and I will praise thee, O God my Saviour.

51:2. I will give glory to thy name: for thou hast been a helper and protector to me.

51:3. And hast preserved my body from destruction, from the snare of an unjust tongue, and from the lips of them that forge lies, and in the sight of them that stood by, thou hast been my helper.

51:4. And thou hast delivered me, according to the multitude of the mercy of thy name, from them that did roar, prepared to devour.

51:5. Out of the hands of them that sought my life, and from the gates of afflictions, which compassed me about:

51:6. From the oppression of the flame which surrounded me, and in the midst of the fire I was not burnt.

51:7. From the depth of the belly of hell, and from an unclean tongue, and from lying words, from an unjust king, and from a slanderous tongue:

51:8. My soul shall praise the Lord even to death.

51:9. And my life was drawing near to hell beneath.

51:10. They compassed me on every side, and there was no one that would help me. I looked for the succour of men, and there was none.

51:11. I remembered thy mercy, O Lord, and thy works, which are from the beginning of the world.

51:12. How thou deliverest them that wait for thee, O Lord, and savest them out of the hands of the nations.

51:13. Thou hast exalted my dwelling place upon the earth and I have prayed for death to pass away.

51:14. I called upon the Lord, the father of my Lord, that he would not leave me in the day of my trouble, and in the time of the proud without help.

51:15. I will praise thy name continually, and will praise it with thanksgiving, and my prayer was heard.

51:16. And thou hast saved me from destruction, and hast delivered me from the evil time.

51:17. Therefore I will give thanks, and praise thee, and bless the name of the Lord.

From Ecclesiasticus Chapter 51

Ali Baba and the forty-seven thieves
With a title like this, you know it has to do with this guy:


Of course.

In case you haven't read it yet, Chirac allies go on trial over 'bribes scandal'. Why The Telegraph's using scare quotes is beyond me since bribes there were and scandal it is, but to be fair, it wasn't Chirac alone (emphasis mine),

A total of 47 people, including politicians from across the political spectrum, are accused of rigging public works contracts in Paris in exchange for bribes running to tens of millions of pounds. At the heart of the inquiry is a former senior aide to Mr Chirac.
. . .
France has become accustomed to a steady flow of investigations over illicit party funding, but this is the first time that all the main political groups have been brought to book on what prosecutors describe as collective state racketeering.

This case doesn't touch on the questions raised by Chirac's excessive travel expenses and food bills while mayor of Paris.

The trial centres on a system alleged to have been initiated by the RPR - the party founded by Mr Chirac - in which firms were promised generous contracts in a vast project to revamp school canteens, but only in exchange for hefty kickbacks.

Over a 10-year period from 1988 to 1997, an estimated £50 million was allegedly pilfered from contracts worth £2.5 billion and redistributed to the RPR, its ally the Republican Party, and the Socialists, prosecutors will argue.

Since he's inmune from prosecution for as long as he stays in office, Jacques is probably counting on running for re-elections until the cows come home.

Or until the chickens come home to roost.

Also posted at Blogger News Network.

Trade Is Only Part of the Solution
From HispaniCon, a link to an article in the WaPo by Marcela Sanchez, who realizes that Free-Trade Agreements Only Go Half Way: Trade Is a Tool, Not a Strategy:

The truth of the matter is no country has yet tapped into an IDB program dedicated exclusively to "meet the challenges of the trade adjustment process.'' Not enough attention and work has gone to what Robert Devlin of the IDB called "the real big chapter in the CAFTA story'' -- helping sectors adjust and compete. Devlin, deputy manager for integration, trade and regional programs, said the "natural tendency'' in many regional governments has been to judiciously allocate most of their resources to training their officials to become better negotiators.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa, on page 133 of his book Liberty for Latin America : How to Undo Five Hundred Years of State Oppression explains what happened when political reforms were not matched by economic reform:

. . . the export boom injected life into the traditional government-individual relations. Instead of bringing about prosperity for large sectors of the population (with the exception of Argentina, where liberal capitalism made greater inroads and bred a high degree of development), the export era consolidated the predatory institutions and the divide between the oligarchy and the masses. The expansion of certain crops and industries might have brought new faces into the oligarchy with commercial interests enlarging a priviledge caste previously monopolized by landowners, but the touchstone of the system remained: economic success and failure were more than ever tied to the political network.

Ms Sanchez states, "Politically it couldn't be more urgent for governments to do the hard work of preparing the countries for the transition". The rule of law and the establishement of property rights would be a good place to start.

The subject is the New Jersey budget
and the bloggers are posting about it.

Roberto notices that it's Politics As Usual With the "Historic" Ban on Pay to Play. As for the NJ Saver rebates (property tax rebates)

So now it's nearly unanimous. Except for Richard Codey and perhaps those tax happy people over at NJPP, the plan to eliminate the property tax rebates is being shown to be exactly what it is, balancing the budget on the backs of middle class homeowners struggling to pay property taxes in this state.

Enlighten-NJ looks at Corzine's ratings.

Enlighten does justice to his name when he points out that,

The government is incapable of growing an economy or creating private sector jobs - good paying or otherwise. The state can create good paying government jobs, but these jobs do not create wealth, they subtract from the capital available for wealth creation. Every communist government has tried this approach, as have the socialist countries in Europe with disastrous results. So there’s no need to repeat those mistakes in New Jersey.

The government can create a climate that ranges from hostile to favorable towards business and economic growth.

SmadaNek checks out Schundler's Tax Calculator and his responsiveness.

The NJ budget is like a very fat woman whose friends are always saying "but she has such a pretty face". That the politicians friends don't want to come out and say is that she needs to loose a lot of weight. It won't make them popular, but it's the truth.

Note Please, if you are severely overweight, don't take it out on me.

Chávez has been networking
as I was saying last Tuesday. Thursday El Herald published a list of Círculos Bolivarianos (CB) in the USA, covering both coasts, Florida, and additionally, Montreal and Toronto in Canada.

Just so you know, when you start seeing Chávez t-shirts.

Jeff has a modern-day fable
titled LITTLE TOTALITARIAN, about a certain "former hostage" named Giuliana.

Yes, by now I even doubt that she was really kidnapped.

And speaking of frauds, don't miss Victor Davis Hanson's The Seven Faces of “Dr.” Churchill. Academia’s everyman

Ben Stein says

But with the Congress and the President of the United States pleading for the life of a woman who is not brain dead, who responds to words and to touch, who is not on life support, whose parents beg for her to be kept alive, whose nurses give affidavits that she can be rehabilitated, with a specific law commanding the courts to review the case to keep this poor soul alive, the courts instead find no rights for her.

Read it here.

The poor are not the problem but the solution
is the title of an interview (via HispaniCon) by Dirk Verhofstadt of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto. De Soto has concluded that

much of the marginality of the poor in developing and former communist nations comes from their inability to benefit from the positive effects that formal property provides. Without legal titles and the necessary property-related institutions, these poor cannot fully exploit their assets. The challenge these countries face is not whether they should produce or receive more money but whether they can identify which legal institutions are required and summon the political will necessary to build a property system that is easy for the poor to access.

In the interview, de Soto explains,

Almost 5 billion people out of the 6 billion in the world live in either developing or formerly communist countries, where much of the economy is extralegal. Capitalism doesn’t thrive in these countries because of their inability to produce capital. However, capital is the force that raises the productivity of labour and creates the wealth of nations. It seems that poor countries cannot produce capital for themselves no matter how eagerly their people engage in all the activities that characterize a capitalist economy. In fact, the poor inhabitants of less developed countries do have things, but they lack the process to represent their property in such a way that it can create and transfer capital. They have houses but no titles; crops but no deeds; businesses but no statutes of incorporation. In other words: their property is not registered, not formally legalised. This last fact is crucial, for only through property rights is it possible to obtain credit. Property converted into capital provides the potential to create, to produce, and to grow. Landownership can only be exchanged for a loan if it is registered.

The numbers are staggering,

In fact, the total value of the assets held but not legally owned by the poor in the Third World and former communist nations is at least $ 9.300 billion.

Anyone interested in terrorism, social justice, possible solutions to poverty, property rights, or economics must read not only this interview, but also de Soto's books, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else and The Other Path: The Economic Answer to Terrorism.

Property rights are a cornerstone issue in any society, and a democracy can not exist without solid property rights and a rule of law. This applies not only to developing countries, but also to our country, which is currently debating the issue of eminent domain and the seizure of property by the government. If a solid legal base of individual property rights is eroded, we all stand to lose.

How to cut $150,000,000,000
From Kudlow, who rightly says,

. To maintain economic growth, and preserve lower tax rates, there's no time like the present to pull out a budget knife and start carving down overspending.

Listen to Larry, guys.

Wonders never cease:
A UN report managed to say something good about Israel (via Roger L. Simon)

Update: A trifecta of wonders, via Babalu: The Guardian publishes an article that states that a French legal expert, slammed Cuban authorities from banning her from the country, making it ``almost impossible'' to prepare a balanced report.

Maybe I'll go play the lotto.

The Anchoress points out an irony:
FL rancher charged with starving cattle. She also has a link to an article where Ralph Nader points out,

The courts not only are refusing her tube feeding, but have ordered that no attempts be made to provide her water or food by mouth. Terri swallows her own saliva. Spoon feeding is not medical treatment.

To me, that's where the outrage lies.

The WSJ:

If Terri Schiavo's ordeal, and that of her husband and parents, can help our society reach a better understanding of how to deal with these difficult issues, that will be a worthwhile legacy.

Back to the Future, the UN way
Yesterday I quoted Claudia Rosett's WSJ article, In Deep Trouble: Kofi Annan's idea of "reform" is more of the same--and lots more, where she said (emphasis mine),

The grand failure of the U.N. is that its system, its officials and most visibly its current secretary-general are still stuck in the central-planning mindset that was the hallmark of dictators and failed utopian dreams of the previous century. Mr. Annan's plan takes little practical account of a modern world in which competition, private enterprise and individual freedom are the principles of progress. He has his own agenda, which he would like the rest of us to follow and fund. The words sound lofty: "development, security, and human rights for all." The devil is in the details, and because this is a blueprint for the future of the entire earth, that means a lot of room for big trouble. This report is not a benign document.

Rosett's words resonated in my mind last night, as I was reading Alvaro Vargas Llosa's (AVLl)excellent new book, Liberty for Latin America : How to Undo Five Hundred Years of State Oppression, specifically when I read page 69:

In any case, suplly and productivity of capital, and the levels of capital formation, depend on the institutions and the capacity of individual enterprise within those institutions , not on an investment of funds received from abroad via the World Bank, the IMF [and others].

Alvaro Vargas Llosa's the son of eminent writer and thinker Mario Vargas Llosa, about whom I've written before.

Kofi (and Jacques Chirac, too) would like a tax on rich nations, collected by the UN, and reveues to be distributed to the poor nations, with the UN in charge, of course. Just the fact that Jacques is for it makes me suspicious. After all, Jaques is one step ahead of the law only for as long as he remains in office, but I digress. Here's how I believe it'll all turn out, if this tax on the rich ever happens:
First, there'll never be a reform of the UN. The organism itself is too far gone.
To use the words of AVLl's book, what little resources Kofi et al manage to channel will strengthen statism, postpone adequate solutions, and displace political responsibility. I'm using bold print to emphasize AVLl's own words:

• Strengthening statism comes from programs that encourage reliance in other people's means rather than one's efforts in order to sustain economic activity. Call it the welfare-queen effect, or, as AVLl puts it, gentle parasitism. Inefficiency and corruption ensue, and are perpetuated.
• The postponement of adequate solutions stem from the fact that the UN would channel most of its funds towards pushing for big government, whether locally or at the UN, rather than reforming the countries.
• The displacement of responsibility comes when all of the funding fails to address systemic problems in the countries, and the countries then resort to blaming international bodies for evils whose major causes lie at home

(I hope Mr. Vargas Llosa forgives my excessive relyiance on his words).

We've seen it happen before, and will see it happen again. And, as Claudia Rosett said, that means a lot of room for big trouble.

Kyrgyzstan, too
Kyrgyzstan Protesters Storm Government Compound

The protests began even before the first round of parliamentary elections on Feb. 27 and swelled after March 13 runoffs that the opposition and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said were seriously flawed.

Profoundly ignorant of the geography of vowel-deprived countries, I had to look up Kyrgyzstan, so I went to The Economist, which calls it A tulip revolution. This momentarily confused me, since it brought to mind the time I went to the Spring Flower Show in Holland, and came by chance upon an immense field where acres and acres of hundreds of varieties of tulips were in full bloom, gently waving in the breeze, one of the most extraordinary experiences I've had.

But back to Kyrgyzstan. The Economist shows a map, and Kyrgystan is north and west of China, two countries up from Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Economist calls it a tulip revolution because there the mountain tulips bloom in spring, and the reports ends on an optimistic note:

And should the Kirgiz protesters succeed in driving Mr Akaev from office, or even in forcing a re-run of the parliamentary polls, the “tulip revolution” could bring a bit of hope to this undemocratic corner of the world.

Let's hope for that.

Red-State Moscow?
I'm old enough to remember the Cold War phrase "better dead than red", meaning better dead than a communist. Of course, the meaning of the shade of political thought invoked by the color red has chenged, and now it's supposed to convey a Bible-Belt republicanism that likes to meddle into censorship.

Well, people are seeing red in Moscow, over an opera written by an alleged pornographer. From the Beeb:
Fury over Bolshoi composer clones

Children of Rosenthal, composed by Leonid Desyatnikov and staged by Lithuanian director Eimuntas Nekrosius, has already caused much controversy and triggered a political debate.

Some deputies of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, want it banned.

Members of the youth movement Walking Together, who support President Vladimir Putin, have been staging daily pickets in front of the Bolshoi and burning books by the opera libretto's author.

They brand conceptualist writer Vladimir Sorokin a "pornographer".

At this rate Putin won't be getting a guest appearance in The Simpsons, unlike Tony Blair, who did.

Precedent
The outcome of legal cases establishes precedent. Today, Dr. Krauthammer looks at the Schiavo case,

Given our lack of certainty, given that there are loved ones prepared to keep her alive and care for her, how can you allow the husband to end her life on his say-so? Because following the sensible rules of Florida custody laws, conducted with due diligence and great care over many years in this case, this is where the law led.

He proposes a solution,

There is no good outcome to this case. Except perhaps if Florida and the other states were to amend their laws and resolve conflicts among loved ones differently -- by granting authority not necessarily to the spouse but to whatever first-degree relative (even if in the minority) chooses life and is committed to support it. Call it Terri's law. It would help prevent our having to choose in the future between travesty and tragedy.

While on the subject of travesty and tragedy, I came across this post (via Babalu) from Paxety Pages, on how the Elian Gonzalez case established precedent for the Schiavo case.

Fake but accurate, again?
Via Captain's Quarters, PowerLine's asking where did the anonymous memo that ABC and the Washington Post claim constitutes "GOP talking points" on the Schiavo case come from, and requests, Show us the source
Jim Geraghty:

As they point out, certain creepy phrases and inappropriate mixing of "talking points" with political strategy points suggest this memo was written by either A) the dumbest GOP Capitol Hill operative of all time or B) a Democratic dirty trickster.

We'll be hearing more on this, for sure.

Syrian opposition
is starting to make itself heard. From this morning's NY Sun,Syrian Dissidents Find Their Voice As Lebanon Provides a MegaphoneA Syrian writer, writing from Damascus, in an article published in a Beirut newspaper,

In biting metaphor and with blunt fury, he describes how, under 42 years of Baathist rule, Syria's media has performed as a tin pot press. Reporters and editors have been required to stage Orwellian stunts in which the cruelties and depravities of the Baath Party are described as glorious deeds, in which "their corruption is turned into achievements, and their profligacy into profits." Mr. al-Baba reminds his audience of the days before Baathist tyranny, when Syria had hundreds of lively magazines and newspapers instead of a few orchestrated, official ones. He calls for a press in Syria that would be free to "learn and make mistakes, get it right, fail and succeed" and write the truth instead of trumpeting on cue the party line.

Meanwhile, the excellent Jane Novak reports that in Yemen, Yemeni prisioner Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani is to be released.

Update First, a clarification: The Sun article is by Claudia Rosett, who's in Lebanon.
Jane says, It's official!. Jane deserves a standing ovation.

UNScam today: Show me the money! (if you can find it)
Last night John Batchelor had Larry Kudlow on his show and both discussed the latest from the Financial Times with Claudio Gatt, the article's author: Cotecna link to Kojo Annan under scrutiny (emphasis mine on all quotes)

In December 1998, by which time Kojo had moved from a staff position to become a consultant, Cotecna won a contract to verify shipments to Iraq under the oil-for-food programme. In the course of six years, the contract was worth approximately $10m (€7.6m, £5.3m) a year, roughly equivalent to 11 per cent of Cotecna's revenues.
. . .
Cotecna says from January 1999 to February 2004 it had a “non-compete” contract with Kojo that paid $2,500 a month in fees, plus health insurance. The total payment over the years reached about $175,000.

“It was important Kojo would not work for the competition,” said Cotecna, and “$2,500 a month was not an expensive price to pay, considering the very important contracts at stake”.

But when monies transferred between different entities or accounts connected to Cotecna or Kojo Annan are added together, the total comes to more than $300,000.
. . .
Until August 2000, Kojo's expenses were reimbursed including his American Express bill in 1999 which was well into five figures, the FT/Il Sole have learnt.
. . .
In addition, it emerged from records Cotecna and Kojo provided to congressional and UN investigators that the methods of payment changed several times. The first three transfers were sent from the Cotecna UBS account to Kojo's Lloyds TSB account in London.

In early 1999, soon after the Sunday Telegraph article, Kojo started receiving payments from another entity owned by the Masseys called Meteor.
. . .
The following month, instead of going to Kojo, the money started to be paid by Cotecna to Westexim, a company registered in London whose ownership is obscure.

In the company's records was found an entry, in French, for a transfer of $4,000 on April 19 2000 to a Ms Ama Annan. The older sister of Kojo Annan is called Ama.

Kofi's proposing reforms at the UN. Claudia Rosett notices that

The grand failure of the U.N. is that its system, its officials and most visibly its current secretary-general are still stuck in the central-planning mindset that was the hallmark of dictators and failed utopian dreams of the previous century. Mr. Annan's plan takes little practical account of a modern world in which competition, private enterprise and individual freedom are the principles of progress. He has his own agenda, which he would like the rest of us to follow and fund. The words sound lofty: "development, security, and human rights for all." The devil is in the details, and because this is a blueprint for the future of the entire earth, that means a lot of room for big trouble. This report is not a benign document.

Wretchard finds

In my own opinion Kofi Annan's proposals are a recipe for disaster for two reasons. His entire security model is philosophically founded on a kind of blackmail which recognizes that the only thing dysfunctional states have to export is trouble. He then sets up the United Nations as a gendarmarie with 'a human face' delivering payoffs to quell disturbances. This is the "bargain whereby rich countries help the poor to develop, by promoting the Millennium Development Goals, while poor countries help alleviate rich countries' security concerns." Second, his model flies in the face of the recent experience in Afghanistan, Iraq and the entire democratizing upheaval in the Middle East. It is by making countries functional that terrorism is quelled and not by any regime of international aid, inspections, nonproliferation treaties, declarations, protocols, conferences; nor by appointing special rapptorteurs, plenipotentiary envoys; nor constituting councils, consultative bodies or anything else in Annan's threadbare cupboard.

Roger L. Simon says,

Before the UN can ask us taxpayers for more money, it must show us absolutely that the cash is not going to end up in the pockets of despots.

Expect more fancy plans from Kofi, and more revelations of bad money-laundering type schemes. But when it comes to expecting complete transparency from the UN, whether on financial matters, or on its inner workings, Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

Chavez, the next t-shirt icon.
The paleoliberal establishment has its heroes. fidel. Che. And now Hugo. Fresh from this morning's El Herald, Chavistas cautivan a académicos de Estados Unidos (Chavez's followers charm American academics):

Académicos, científicos sociales, estudiantes universitarios, religiosos católicos y protestantes, activistas sociales y luchadores antiglobalización, integran el más prestigioso conglomerado de apoyo con que cuenta la llamada revolución bolivariana en los Estados Unidos en la actualidad, una red que ha significado para los grupos prochavistas el acceso a tribunas prestigiosas de la intelectualidad y la izquierda tradicional estadounidense.
(my translation:) Academics, social scientists, college students, Catholic and Protestant clergy, social activists and anti-globalists, are currently members of the most prestigious group of supporters of the so-called Bolivaran revolution in the United States, a network that conveys access to podiums of the most prestigious American intellectual and traditionally leftist forums.

That Chavez has been looking for a confrontation with the USA only adds to the excitement of being "cool".

El Herald has been writing a four-part series on Venezuela, from which is the above quote. Another article of the series shows that Venezuelan Minister of Information Andrés Izarra (formerly a reporter for CBS news) has been publicly bragging that

Venezuela mantiene una red de inteligencia en territorio estadounidense que ha penetrado hasta los cuerpos de inteligencia de Estados Unidos.

''Inclusive, dentro del servicio de inteligencia de Estados Unidos tenemos gente que nos habla y que nos dice. Tenemos más amigos de lo que se cree'', afirmó Izarra durante una conferencia de prensa esta semana.
Venezuela maintains an intelligence network in the United States that has even penetrated American intelligence agencies.

"Inclusively, even with the US intelligence service, we have people that talks to us and tells us things. We have more friends than people believe", Izarra state during a press conference this week.

The article states that the Fort-Lauderdale based Venezuelan Information Office keeps track of what's mentioned against the Chavez administration in the American media and in Congress. According the the Department of Justice, the VIO keeps track of reporters writing on Venezuela for The Washington Post, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune and The Miami Herald. In addition, the VIO has contacted some thirty senators and canvassed at least four Democrat representatives, among them Raúl Grijalva (Arizona), Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), Barbara Lee (California) y Jan Schakowsky (Illinois), for support against the referendum against Chavez, plus it counts on the support of Jack Kemp and former Attorney General Ramsey Clarke.

According to the article, the VIO has reached out to other areas, including Utah, Chicago (where the Armada Libertad - Armed Freedom - group's slogan is ``Defendiendo a Venezuela desde las entrañas del monstruo'' "Defending Venezuela from within the entrails of the monster"), and Canada. This post at Venezuela News And Views talks about how much money the Chavez administration is spending on hired pens to promote its cause outside, and gives you an idea of the actual sums involved.

Chavez has adopted Castro's old motto, "Patria o muerte" (Homeland or death). That's not his only stride towards becoming Fidel's Mini-Me. As this article in The Economist explains, Chavez has

• "recently declared himself to be a Fidelista, a follower, that is, of Cuba's communist president, Fidel Castro, his closest ally. He has ordered Venezuela's armed forces to draw up a new Cuban-style strategy in which the top priority has become preparing to fight a war of resistance against a hypothetical invasion by the United States, now seen as the principal adversary."
• "At the same time, the president is shopping for arms. In recent months, he has bought from Russia 40 Mi35 helicopters and 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles. He is negotiating for up to 24 Brazilian Super-Tucano ground-attack planes and four Spanish naval corvettes."
• "Now Mr Chávez is negotiating trade and investment deals with Russia, Brazil, Iran and China. The next step, some in Washington worry, will be that Venezuela will start diverting its oil from the United States to China."
• "A third controversy is Mr Chávez's tightening grip at home. Since the referendum, the opposition has all but disappeared as a coherent force. The chavista majority in the legislature has appointed an expanded—and avowedly “revolutionary”—supreme court, which in turn has named a new electoral authority, with a 4-1 pro-government majority."

Property rights in Venezuela are becoming a thing of the past. Much of the private sector's facing extinction, and, while thousands of Venezuelan professionals are unemployed, Castro's sending hundreds of teachers, doctors and sports instructors of questionable credentials to Venezuela as part of an oil deal. Instead of Oil-for-food, is it Oil-for-crews? I ask -- after all, Fidel's Hugo's mentor, and where there's oil, there's money.

Chavez's appropriation of lands for collective farms, which practice slash-and-burn agriculture, will lead to ecological disaster. But all is forgiven. Hugo will soon be featured on a t-shirt near you, because, as The American Thinker states, Venezuela is now like a house on fire in the name of Marxist revolution. And nothing pleases a paleoliberal more than that.

This post also published in Blogger News Network.
Update Welcome, Babalu readers. Please visit often. Many thanks to Babalu commenter MIguel-O-Matic for the link to this site.

Follow-up post here

Holy cast of Nunsense, Batman
the nuns are repelling! Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.

After viewing contraband videos of Batman, Nunsense, and The Three Stoodges, an anonymous Iranian filmmaker produces a video on police training for women. The filmaker manages to show decadent moves perfected by the off-Broadway casts of the successful tap-dancing-nuns musical, the 1960s camp TV series, and the famous vaudeville trio. Criminals aren't exactly quaking in their shoes. Details at LGF

Blue Eyed Infidel comments on the news,
(via the Anchoress) with I can't wait to starve my dog to death, and Must stop watching news. Expect foul language, but great reading.

Thank you, Diane Legreide
I didn't know who Diane Legreide is until I read this article in Sunday's Star Ledger: The woman who broke the curse of the old DMV

Customers who once spent hours in lines now walk in and out within 30 minutes, stunned at how easily things went. Motor Vehicle phone lines that used to be so busy they turned away 1,600 people a day now handle almost every call.

Ms Legreide has done more for the quality of life of NJ drivers, and for the productivity of NJ drivers than anyone in NJ history.

For that, I say, Thank you, Diane Legreide.

UNScam today
After All Its Denials, U.N. Admits It Paid Oil-for-Food Program Aide's Legal Fees

After months of denials, the United Nations admitted yesterday that, in an exception to its own rules, it has paid for the legal defense of Benon Sevan. The U.N.'s own investigation panel denounced Mr. Sevan for his central role in the oil-for-food scandal that has engulfed the world body.

But here's the good news,

Questions regarding whether the U.N. would cover Mr. Sevan's legal fees were raised soon after the name of the oil-for-food program chief appeared on a list published by the Iraqi newspaper al-Mada shortly after the start of the Iraq war. The newspaper accused world diplomats, businessmen, and U.N. officials of accepting bribes from Saddam Hussein in the form of oil allocations.

I applaud al-Mada's bringing this up.

In the meantime, the UN, which has spent $300,000 on Sevan's legal costs, UN begins action decade on water. Tuesday is the UN's World Water Day, marking the start of an international decade of action, Water for Life.Took them a while, but Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

Exerting influence on public opinion
This op-ed article in the NY Post explains how the Pew Charitable Trusts, along with the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation and George Soros' Open Society Institute spent over $120,000,000 behind the scenes to create the false impression that there was a "mass movement" afoot clamoring for campaign-finance reform.

The Beeb, which is about to lay off some more people spent some good money on a survey that supposedly showed some gratifying results:

Respondents said they wanted to see a UN becoming "significantly more powerful in world affairs", and registered an average support of 64%.

The poll of 23,518 people was conducted by the international polling firm GlobeScan, together with the Program on International Policy Attitudes (Pipa) at the University of Maryland

Gratifying to the Beeb, and to the UN. The Beeb didn't pay anyone to conduct any surveys on whether the licensing fees should continue, but continue they will.

Yesterday's Star Ledger asks Embryonic research offers huge medical and economic rewards. Why isn't the Bush administration buying?. The author didn't look into the facts on funding, or the facts on stem-cell use which show that real results have been obtained by non-embryonic stem cells.

Over at Samizdata, Gabriel Syme comments about fake news: "For myself, I am not too worried about "covert propaganda" in government broadcasts provided there is an individual somewhere in the process who will simply blog about it on his blog..."

Speaking of blogs, don't miss Arthur's post on the latest Iraqi survey (not featured on the BBC news), and catch his 5th installment of good news from the Islamic world, the special pro-democracy edition.

Chinese consumerism and entrepreneurial ferment as a weapon for peace? Capitalism in Europe?
George Will (via RealClearPolitics) looks at Beijing's 43 Bentleys:

But America's hope still is that burgeoning enterprise and commerce in China—"getting and spending"—will divert the torrential energies of the Chinese nation into peaceful outlets. The hope is that a China whose muscle and will are devoted to consumerism will be too busy—too hedonistic—for militarism.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx described the power of emerging capitalism to dissolve old social structures such as feudalism—"all that is solid melts into air." If that occurs in a context Marx never imagined—capitalism emerging within a communist society—it will be tyranny that melts. This, the longstanding hope underlying U.S. policy, is the capitalists' kind of economic determinism—call it Brooks Brothers Marxism.

Consumerism and entrepreneurial ferment sprout in, and widen, fissures in China's system of state control, which is why commerce conduces to the subversion—in broad daylight—of the regime. The regime knows that economic dynamism is a prerequisite for China to be globally consequential as well as domestically tranquil. The regime may be wagering that it can hermetically seal China's political system from the contagion of the social prerequisites of economic dynamism, including private property as a basis of the individual's zone of privacy and sovereignty. The regime will lose that wager because, as Marx said, society's political superstructure is shaped by society's economic base.

Speaking of societal economic bases, the Economist finally realizes that Jacques Chirac has in office turned into one of Europe's most left-wing leaders

Consider Mr Chirac's credentials as a champion of the left. His recent proposal to create an “international solidarity levy” on international financial transactions or airline-ticket sales, so as to finance African development and the fight against AIDS, won him the acclaim of the third-world lobby. “Development is both the greatest challenge and the greatest urgency of our time,” he declared in a speech broadcast at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, calling Africa's poverty “morally unacceptable”. Mr Chirac is also a certified écolo (green), having got his cherished environmental charter enshrined in France's constitution last month. This puts the right to live in a healthy environment on the same legal footing in France as human rights, setting the country up as a pioneer in environmental protection—and Mr Chirac as potential saviour of the planet.

The French president has no rivals as global spokesman on anti-Americanism, a doctrine that usually belongs to the left in Europe but in France has a long history on the Gaullist right as well. To this, he has added his own blend of anti-globalisation, globe-trotting with the likes of Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former trade-union leader, and dispatching representatives to the World Social Forum. Moreover, with his Arabist foreign policy in the Middle East, and his defiant hostility to the war in Iraq, he seems to have a soft-left world outlook that would fit well on any university campus.

The article correctly points out that Chirac "is guided less by conviction than by a desire to keep the social peace and avoid confrontation" and that, to him, "consensus now matters more than change". The article doesn't dwell on the fact that he's free from prosecution for as long as he's in office. Chirac's economic positions aren't good for Europe. As another Economist article explains, France, Germany and Italy are the biggest obstacles to economic reform in Europe

For the biggest failings in the euro area remain microeconomic, not macroeconomic. There is a reason why Denmark and the Netherlands have higher employment and lower unemployment than Germany and France: it is that the latter two have overly regulated labour markets, tougher hire-and-fire rules and high minimum wages. The evidence that excessive interference to “protect” people in work penalises those who are out of work has seldom been as clear as in Europe over the past five years. As this week's Lisbon scorecard from the Centre for European Reform (CER), a think-tank, shows, a similar story emerges on energy and telecoms liberalisation, competition in financial services, industrial subsidies and the rest: countries that have been fastest to open their markets to competition have outperformed those that have been slowest—notably France, Germany and Italy.

Then there's the proposed EU Constitution (emphasis mine)

So why are the leaders of France, Germany and Italy so hesitant about reform? The answer lies in domestic politics. France's Jacques Chirac, behaving like a left-winger, is eagerly appeasing union protesters against change (see article). Germany's Gerhard Schröder, struggling with unpopularity, talks of more reforms, but on too timid a scale. Italy's Silvio Berlusconi is nervous about April's regional elections. Even Mr Barroso, opponent of decaffeinated reform, is reluctant to press for stronger measures, fearing that scare stories of American capitalism trumping the European social model may scupper referendums on the EU constitution. Such alarm is specious: if they look north, not west, EU leaders can see Nordic countries doing well and keeping their social model. It is not the Lisbon agenda that threatens the model: it is failure to reform.

Meanwhile, in France, two recent surveys show that 52% of those surveyed would vote against the EU Constitution.

Maybe Bentley will regain market share in Europe after all.

The Anchoress
is on a roll. She links to the Larry King transcript where Michael Shiavo says "We didn't know what Terri wanted, but this is what we want".

In another post, she explores spiritual connections, and the lives we have. After listening to a poor excuse of a Palm Sunday sermon yesterday in chuch, which featured politics and global warming (I guess sitting through that was part of doing penance during Holy Week), I wish my church would have her as a guest speaker.

Sunday blogging: Retail therapy: the jacket
A couple of years ago I treated myself to a nice Coach jacket similar to this one. It turned out to be a really good purchase, and very practical. The jacket's shell's imprevious to rain, you can wear it in cool weather and it's suprisingly warm enough to wear over a sweater when the temperature's in the 40s. It fits close to the body, so it has a slimming effect, and after a couple of years' wear still looks nice. It is, however, a Fall item. The dark brown color looks out of place once Spring has sprung.

Being an optimist, I consider that Spring has sprung even when you wouldn't know it by looking outside. Right now it's grey, with rain, with temperatures in the upper 30s that the Weather Channel box on this blog's right sidebar says "feels like 34oF". Still, the spirit of Spring is in my mind, at least.

As you can probably ascertain from looking at this blog, I'm interested in the weather. I'm also interested in clothes, but up to a certain extent. I want clothes that look updated and fit well but that can endure for years of wear, particularly if it's a coat or a jacket. The ultimate purchase of this type is my red Burberry raincoat, of which I wrote about last year. So, believing that I needed a nice practical Spring jacket to update the wardobe, I started looking. I had in mind a nice bright color.

Men reading this far (I suspect a few or more would have already scrolled down to yesterday's post as soon as they saw the "retail therapy" subject line) would be thinking that their (female) meaningful others' closets have been updated more often than the CNN newstape. The Husband, for one, would agree on that. He might be right. Still, look for a jacket I did.

Coach didn't have any quilted jackets for Spring. Burberry has a nice one, and the magenta color's good for my winter pallor. Still, a light-color jacket that sets you back $335 and needs dry-cleaning was way over the budget. For years I've aimed to purchase clothes that can be washed at home, since I know life is messy and I'm cheap. L. L. Bean has a washable jacket for $90 but how does it fit? Land's End has one that would probably fit nicely, for $59.50, but comes only in pastels.

Well, yesterday I found what I was looking for. A nice, emerald-green quilted jacket for $59, on a mannequin on the sidewalk right in front of a Palmer Square store.

Sometimes you stumble right into what you were looking for. It fit perfectly. The Manolo would approve. As soon as the weather warms up by 3o, I'll wear it.

Blogging about serious matters will resume tomorrow.

Following up on the Mara Salvatrucha story,
¡Gringo Unleashed! has translated an article from Hola Hoy, and an editorial from Manuel Gutierrez Fierro in La Voz.

Last May The Econonmist wrote on the gang's origins:

The gangs' origins lie in the wars that engulfed Central America in the 1970s and 1980s. To escape these, many Central Americans migrated to the United States, and particularly to Los Angeles. Their children imitated that city's gang culture. In 1992, as the wars were dying down, the United States decided to start deporting jailed gang members when their sentences were over.

The notorious Salvatrucha
Back in countries that were almost foreign to them, with no jobs, the deportees set up their own gangs. According to government estimates, 36,000 people are said to belong to gangs in Honduras, 14,000 in Guatemala, 10,500 in El Salvador, 1,100 in Nicaragua and 2,600 in Costa Rica. The true figure is almost certainly much higher. The most notorious of hundreds of gangs, or maras, is the Mara Salvatrucha, named for its Salvadorean founders who claimed to be as wise as a trout. Its initials appear in graffiti across the region.

A more recent article last month states that, while the number of rural counties and small cities reporting gang activity dropped considerably between 1996 and 2002 and youth gang membership numbers appear to have leveled off, the MS-13, with its wide network and alleged connections to al-Qaeda is a major player:

Violent gangs are increasingly linking up and going international, helped by the internet, immigration and America's deportation of criminals. One especially violent gang under close FBI scrutiny is Mara Salvatrucha (MS), a network of street thugs and former paramilitary guerrillas whose exact genesis is disputed, but which got its first toehold among the children of Salvadorean refugees in Los Angeles. MS now has a stronghold in northern Virginia, as well as in Central America.

As this week's raids have shown, the MS-13 had spread to other parts of the country, including here in NJ.

Prior posts on this subject here and here

Reagent stockpile
Normally I don't advocate more governemnt spending, but this is one area where a little more funding would go a long way: stockpiling sufficient reagents that identify bioterror organisms.

A reagent is not a new and improved James Bond -- a reagent is a chemical used in testing. In order to detect bioterror organisms, and to identify them correctly, you need reagents. According to this article in C&E News,

But, Becker asks, what if this week’s false alarm turned out to be similar to the 2001 anthrax letter attacks—with many places under attack and testing occurring at many different labs within CDC’s Laboratory Response Network? He is “concerned that there wouldn’t be enough reagents to go around” to perform the tests necessary to identify the bioterror organism. Indeed, he says, once CDC was notified by the Pentagon, it began “working on an allocation scheme to get reagents where they would be needed.”

“There’s an easy fix to this problem,” Becker says. “Congress can appropriate the funds that will permit CDC to develop a reagent stockpile.”

Sounds like a good idea to me.

On Terri Schiavo
I haven't posted on the case because there's a lot I don't understand about it. As Alice Chasen explains,

Terri Schiavo can’t speak for herself. Into the silence, we project our deepest anxieties about existence and significance. We all wrestle with the meaning of our lives, but we’re rarely called upon to quantify it or justify our existence before the court of public opinion. So Terri Schiavo becomes a surrogate for our self-evaluation on some cosmic scale. How would I weigh in if my life hung in the balance?

However, the fact that she is denied food and water even orally, by court order, has distressed me tremendously. Removing the feeding tube is painful. Lesbien C'est Moi expresses my feelings exactly,

I am not an extremist, but anyone would call me an ardent liberal, that is certain. Perhaps I am an anomaly, but I am devastated over what is about to happen here. To even be debating this is perverse. It is murder, nothing shy of that very accurate description. Murder. She will not die tomorrow, but she will be murdered tomorrow. By all estimates it will take her 7 - 10 days to actually die of starvation and dehydration. Terri is being executed by calculated, cruel and inhumane measure. We do not even execute condemned criminals with such unthinkable methods. And this woman's crime? Needing more love and care than the average human being. I am sick over this. Desperate almost. I sit writing this tonight with an utter punctured equilibrium over what will happen tomorrow and my inability to do anything about it.

George Felos, Michael Schiavo's attorney was on CNN last evening saying Ms Schiavo won't starve to death, she'd die from electrolyte imbalance. Electrolyte imbalance must be legalese for death by dehydration, a painful and awful death.

I didn't sleep well last night. This morning I found some consolation reading Dan Rhiel's post Angels, Too, Must Come in 3's.

This is the second anniversary of the fall of the Sadam Hussein regime
I celebrate by reading Arthur's twenty-first installment of Good news from Iraq, and Victor Davis Hanson's article on Postmodern War,

The key in irregular, as in conventional, war remains the will to win. That’s why it was simplistic to suggest in the 2004 campaign that John Kerry was a “flip-flopper,” as if he altered positions solely because of changes of heart. In fact, his support for, or criticism of, the war hinged entirely on the pulse of the battlefield. Winning in Iraq made him shed his Howard Dean pacifism; seeing American inability to put down insurgents turned him back into a war critic. And at times, even our war leaders seemed to overlook this simple and depressing facet of human nature: for all their care to hit only terrorists, to supply money and aid, and to work with the Iraqis, they forgot the one requisite for success—the overarching aim to win at all costs.

Clarity of purpose is what wins struggles.

On a lighter note, it's Spring!
It's also Peeps season.

Dan's ready to party, and has news on an emperor penguin senator . . .

Oh, Canada
Back in my freshman/woman days at the University of Puerto Rico I heard a lot about American imperialism, and how the USA was out to invade and take over every country in the world. The irony that Canada is right next to the USA -- and doesn't have an army to speak of, while it has existed for 200+ years -- without being annexed by the USA was totally lost on the UPR demagogues.

I mean, look at it: Latin American anti-American demagogues, such as fidel and fidel's mini-me, are constantly saying that the USA's going to wipe them out and take over their countries. This is of course a pretext to continue to oppress their peoples -- who curiously keep coming here to stay -- and overspend in weaponry and armaments. Canada, which has immense land area, natural resources, ecological diversity, and an educated workforce, has all this while reduced its military to the point that it's reached negligible status. If the USA was so hell-bent on imperialism, Canada would be the place to start.

Or so I thought.

After reading this article by by Matt Labash, I have second thoughts.

Where Canada fails is no big secret. Most of us know that its universal health care is a great thing, if you don't mind waiting, say, nine months for an MRI on your spinal cord injury. We all know Canadians are overregulated, to the point that Canadian rocker Bryan Adams was denied "Canadian content status" for cowriting an album with a British producer, limiting the play his songs could receive on the radio (a policy that's supposed to encourage Canadian talent, but that in Adams's words "encourage[s] mediocrity. People don't have to compete in the real world. . . . F--ing absurd").

We all know the Canadian military has become a shadow of itself. Things have gotten so dire that a Queen's University study (titled "Canada Without Armed Forces?") predicted the imminent extinction of the air force. This unpreparedness has become such a joke that Ferguson says their military ranks just above Tonga's, which consists of nothing more than "a tape-recorded message yelling 'I surrender!' in thirty-two languages."

What many don't consider is how much Canada has oversold itself in the areas where it purportedly does succeed. While it's true that the government has been much friendlier than ours to gay marriage, only 39 percent of Canadians decidedly support it. While Canada is supposedly more environment-friendly, it has been cited for producing more waste per person than any other country. While Canada is supposedly safer, a 1996 study showed its banks had the highest stick-up rate of any industrialized nation (one in every six was robbed). And while a great deal is made of Americans' passion for firearms, the Edmonton Sun, citing Statistics Canada, reported that Canada has a higher crime rate than we do.

Canadians are supposedly less greedy than Americans, yet they lead the world in telemarketing fraud, and most of their victims are Americans. Are they more generous? Not by a long shot. The Vancouver-based Fraser Institute publishes a Generosity Index, which shows that more Americans give to charity, and give more when they do.

Is the Canadian "mosaic" more successful than the American "melting pot," a distinction they constantly make? You be the judge. Imagine every decade or so America's Spanish-speaking southwesterners holding a referendum over whether to secede. It's happened twice since 1980 among the Francophones of Quebec, and some say it's going to happen again. While America has figurative language police on its college campuses, Quebec has literal ones--"tongue troopers," the locals call them--who ruthlessly enforce absurd language laws requiring, for example, that restaurant trash cans feature the word "push" on their lids in French instead of English.

Apart from the Anglo/Franco teeter-totter that Canada can't ever seem to get off, are Canadians less racist, as many of them claim? Well, like America, they saw both slavery and segregation. If Canadians today are less racist, someone ought to tell their aboriginal peoples, who've spent centuries getting their land annexed and being generally mistreated (as of 2000 in Nova Scotia, there was still a law on the books offering hunters a bounty for Indian scalps).

Recent polling shows 35 percent of Canada's "visible minorities" (such as blacks and Asians) have experienced discrimination in the last five years. Another poll showed 54 percent of Canadians believe anti-Semitism is a serious problem in Canadian society today. It certainly was yesterday. Around World War II, a few Jews did manage to squeak in--despite the policy summed up by Canada's director of immigration as "None is too many." Will Ferguson points out that more Nazi war criminals are thought to have found sanctuary in Canada than refugees fleeing the Holocaust.

But even when Canada succeeds, it carries the whiff of failure. For nearly a decade, the country sat atop the United Nations quality-of-life index, a fact that Canadian schoolchildren could parrot in their sleep. When Canada dropped to eighth, just behind the United States, its collective psyche took a beating. The next year, Canada shot past us again, but not back to the top. The headline in Ontario's Windsor Star tells you all you need to know about Canadian triumphalism: "Cheers to us, we're No. 4."

IN A SENSE, Canada is the perfect place for American quitters

On an almost-related story, last evening's France2 news (a rich source of material for my blogging!) reported that yesterday was the day to celebrate those furthering the French language and culture. Among them (25 minutes into the program) was a lady from Quebec, Nicole Rene of -- what else -- the Quebec Office for the French Language, who, waving clenched fists, insisted that it all came down to resisting being taken over by Americanization.

Going by the Labash article, I can safely say she has nothing to fear.