Todd Burri, excuse me, Mr. Pterodactyl

has a round up of articles on the UN's Oil for Food scandal. Including allegations of a connection between Saddam and Osama bin Laden.

Read it. Read the links.

BTW, GJ stands for Grandpa John. (It took me a while too, but I'm not a relative.)

Hey, look! John Nash is praising Switzerland's economy!

Mostly for the right reasons. Swissinfo has a Q&A:

swissinfo: What do you think the Swiss do right?

John Nash: Quite simply, I think they don't do "wrong" things that others do' which are supposed to enhance the strength of an economy, but fail to be beneficial in the longer term.

I think Switzerland has benefited enormously from having a currency of comparatively superior quality. This in turn has favoured the local climate for enterprises such as those in the insurance or investment banking sectors. It is no coincidence that the financial services sector is so important in the Swiss economy – it is not just cheese and chocolate that you export.

swissinfo: What are the "wrong" things that the Swiss avoid?

J.N.: Some people might suggest that economic policy should aim to decrease the value of the Swiss franc, to help stimulate exports. Of course, there is some truth in this, but it ignores a very important factor, which is the reputation of a currency.

For instance, the dollar is becoming gradually less respectable than it used to be, but it is still at about the same competitive level as the euro, the pound sterling or the yen. Below the dollar are currencies like those of Argentina and Brazil, where devaluation doesn't seem to have helped very much.

Arguably, the Swiss franc is at the best level of all, and that is very important. In Switzerland, people are probably not thinking all the time that they would do better by putting their money in dollars in a foreign account.

swissinfo: What do you think is at the root of the Swiss franc's reputation?

J.N.: Someone once got a Nobel Prize for developing the concept of rational expectations. This says that, while governments say they are doing this or that, this may be just propaganda. The private sector, however, may look at the situation in a more rational way - they may know what to really expect. So you could say the reputation is based more on what they think.

They might become my new favorite paper. Poke around there. Lot's of cool stuff. Like this special report on William Tell.

Listen to this killjoy:

[Fabrizio] Sabelli, who teaches [anthropology] at the University of Neuchatel, said the Swiss had a purely emotional attachment to the legendary character. [Ed. note: Italian is one of the national languages of Switzerland, so he's probably a native. I'd don't think the Swiss would take this from a non-native.]

swissinfo: How would you define William Tell?

F.S: It is a wonderful Swiss creation. And it works because everyone is agreed on what qualities the character of Tell embodied.

But William Tell is not a myth. He's nothing more than a product, and he doesn't really mean anything to the Swiss today.

swissinfo: What about freedom and courage? Can't the Swiss identify with these values?

F.S.: I don't think so. The Swiss were never great patriots. They have rarely fought wars against their enemies. And freedom is a vague term. It came into vogue during the French revolution. William Tell didn't invent it.

Patriotism requires attacking your enemies? From Switzerland's point of view, who would they attack? Just make one up and kill them to show your patriotism?

And the guy should check out this page for a history of freedom. Admittedly, the concept in the Tell story is vague, though it looks like individual independence and integrity to me. .Walter Williams has examples of Kessler's asking us all to bow to their hats. A little bolt in the bow would do 'em some good.

swissinfo: Don't the Swiss need a national hero?

F.S.: Of course they do. We tried to make a hero of the [wartime military commander] General Henri Guisan. It was only a partial success - and a fleeting one.

I don't see a Swiss hero on the horizon today, and I don't think history provides one.

The Swiss don't go for heroes so much. In other countries, a Roger Federer would be a star. Not here.

swissinfo: How do you explain that?

F.S.: There needs to be a collective feeling that someone deserves to be a national hero. But in Switzerland, there is no collective spirit; we're divided along the lines of language, cantons and communes.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Communes? I didn't know they had a kibbutz system there.

TOC on Rutan:

Report from the Front
September 29, 2004

Private Space Triumph
By Edward Hudgins
Washington Director
www.ObjectivistCenter.org
ehudgins@objectivistrcenter.org
Editor, "Space: The Free-Market Frontier" (Cato Institute book)

Private entrepreneurs again have triumphed! On September 29 SpaceShipOne, built
by Burt Rutan's company Scaled Composites and financed by Microsoft co-founder
Paul Allen, completed it's first flight in pursuit of the $10 million Ansari X
Prize. This money was secured by private individuals to be paid to the first
private party to put into space twice in a two-week period a craft capable of
carrying three individuals. Rutan's rocket had its first test flight over the
100-kilometer limit on June 21 and with the success of the latest launch the
clock is now running to see if his ship can do it again in a fortnight.

If Rutan's company wins the prize the public's view of space will be irrevocably
altered. Instead of thinking of space as a wasteful government program, more
people will see it as a place to which individuals can travel (and -- in the
future -- work, study, vacation and live) through the efforts of private
enterprise. But already changes are taking place.

As extraordinary as the flights has been the news coverage of those flights.
From Nightline to network news to cable the coverage has been positive and
reporters have played the story straight. To begin with the profit motive has
not been portrayed as something low and base that somehow "cheapens" any
achievement. Rather, most coverage mentions the $25,000 Orteig Prize that
Charles Lindbergh won when in 1927 he became the first individual to fly
non-stopped across the Atlantic and treats cash prizes as a sound way to create
competition and innovation. Reports mention that Rutan wants to expand his
pioneering efforts into a business to carry individuals into space and that
Richard Branson, the British pioneer who runs the successful Virgin Atlantic
airlines, plans to partner with Rutan and Allen and to provide flights into
space for some 3,000 individuals in the next five years.

Further, the private entrepreneurs are treated as true innovators, with a
special focus on their novel and cost-effective vehicle designs - products of
human reason. As important, similar treatment is accorded to Peter Diamandis,
the president of the X-Prize Foundation, whose vision is sparking a private
sector revolution.

There also seems to be a special appreciation for the fact that the competitors
for the prize are risking their own money and their own lives, with no guarantee
of success, because they so passionately want to achieve something great. And
here the reporters seem to share with their audience a thirst for the sight of
human achievement, something that they can simply celebrate rather than sneer
at.

Even if Rutan were to fail to win the X Prize, one of the two-dozen competitors
likely will triumph, with pride and rationality in pursuit of profits, and in
the process help make us a true space-faring civilization!

******************************
The Objectivist Center is a national not-for-profit think tank promoting the
values of reason, individualism, freedom and achievement in American culture.
For more information, please visit www.ObjectivistCenter.org.

Update: let me add some brilliant comments from Glen Reynolds' TCS column:

It's probably no coincidence that we made rapid progress in space back when the attitude was "win at all costs," and that our progress slowed down drastically once the attitude became "no mistakes allowed."

You don't want to risk people's lives, or expensive equipment, foolishly, of course. But we often learn the most from trying projects that stretch our knowledge and capabilities, not from playing it safe. And, at any rate, the urge to play it safe usually doesn't come from concerns about protecting people or equipment, but from concerns about protecting bureaucrats from criticism.
...
I expect that SpaceShipOne will be successful, whether or not it's on schedule. And I wouldn't be surprised if several of the X-Prize competitors manage to fly successfully, even though only one can win the prize. I also expect that even those who don't win will demonstrate technologies and approaches that someone else is likely to find useful.

It's hard to structure government programs so that they produce this kind of an effect, and even harder to maintain them in the face of a political and media environment when learning from failure is seen as indistinguishable from failure alone. But in all sorts of areas -- from space and jet aviation in the 1950s and 1960s, to computers in the 1970s and 1980s, to the X-Prize today -- it seems that we make faster progress when we have lots of parallel efforts, with freedom to experiment, and to fail. Sometimes we got that sort of thing within a government program; other times it happened outside. But it seems to be an important formula for success. That's something we might want to keep in mind.

Whoo - hoo!!

SpaceShipOne Succeeds in Trailblazing First Shot at $10 Million X Prize

Updated at 11:55 a.m. ET

MOJAVE, CALIFORNIA - In a mission that could herald a new era of space tourism, a privately built, three-person rocket ship flew to space and back today. The event was the first of two flights scheduled to capture the $10 million Ansari X Prize.

The mission had tense moments as the craft appeared to make an unscripted roll near the top of its flight.

The X Prize money goes to the first privately built vehicle that can haul a pilot and two passengers to the edge of space, then repeat the feat within two weeks, in this case by Oct. 13. SpaceShipOne's design team, Scaled Composites, based here at the Mojave Spaceport, said before the flight that they were ready to turn the vehicle around for reflight, perhaps making the second rocket run Oct. 4.

Excuse me, I'm going to go kiss my sleeping girls

after reading this.

A reminder to us to show our loved ones what they mean to us while we can.

It seems strange to speak of Shiites as moderates

but Shiite leaders in Iraq have bravely released this statement (via Hammorabi):

[Last line of Hammorabi's intro] The last statement was on the 25 Sep 2004 and below is the summary of the last statement.

By the Name of Allah the most Compassionate and the most Merciful

The kidnapping and killing of Iraqis, Arabs and Foreigners by organisations which considers all other than itself as infidels is not from Islam and its noble values and principles. One of the victims of these organisations are the Shia individuals, the university lectures and scientists, the intellectuals, the doctors, the officials, the innocent people in places of worship (Mosques, Churches, and others), the workers, the Shia drivers who were killed in Falluja, the Kurds, the Turkmans, and others.

The crimes of the above organisations also involved the foreigners who came to Iraq for work or as professionals in their speciality to help in the process of building or planning. Those victims are from Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, France, Italy, UK, USA, Nepal, Spain, Canada, Russia, Bulgaria and others.

We repeat what we have said before that these wrong and tyrannised acts do not belong to Islam by any way.

We call for the release of all those who were kidnapped immediately whatever their nationalities or believes.

The wrong organisations have nothing to do with Islam the religion of peace, love, forbearing, kindness, and good values.

We also look forward from the intellectuals to differentiate between Islam as a religion and these wrongful bands.

25 Sep 2004 Hawza, Najaf

Cheezits Crackers! They couldn't win with this?!

Javon Walker had a career day for the Packers, setting career highs with 11 catches for 198 yards and three touchdowns. Walker scored on TD passes of 36, 79, and 12 yards.

Brett Favre threw for 358 yards on the day, completing 30 of 44 passes with four touchdowns and no interceptions. Along with his TD strikes to Walker, Favre threw scoring pass of 27 yards to Donald Driver. Favre sat out the Packers' final series after taking a knee to the back of his leg earlier in the fourth quarter.

Oh! One more thing!

Stella

rain drops

This fella here doesn't reveal much about himself, but ya gotta admire his posts.

From the Ayn Rand Institute:

[They beat me to the punch on this letter on Dan Rather, so I'll get this one out now, while they still allow it.]

Dear Editor:

That Bill Clinton could get the emergency heart care his survival
required within 3 days underscores a life-and-death difference between
medicine under capitalism and under socialism.

Under the system of socialized medicine in Canada and Europe, people
die because waiting lists to see doctors are too long to permit them
to receive cardiac care in time to save their lives. In Canada,
for example, a patient typically must wait 24 days for an appointment
with a cardiologist--and 15 additional days for the type of emergency
bypass surgery that saved Bill Clinton's life. Similarly, a
Swedish government survey showed that Swedes can be forced to wait as
long as 11 months for a diagnostic heart X-ray and up to 8 months for
essential heart surgery. The upshot, according to one research
cardiologist, is that at least 1,000 Swedes die each year for lack of
heart treatment.

The moral belief in the right to health care beyond what an individual
can afford--health care at other people's expense--leads inevitably to
demand for unnecessary or superficial care that clogs doctors' offices, overfills hospitals and tasks the health care system beyond its capacities. The predictable result is the endless waiting lists of socialized medicine.

The choice facing Americans is stark: the rights-respecting free
market of capitalism, where goods and services are produced in
abundance, including health care--or the chronic disasters of
socialism, where thousands die because of continuous shortages.

Dr. Andrew Bernstein, Ayn Rand Institute

2121 Alton Parkway #250, Irvine CA, 92606
(949)222-6550 ext. 226

The Glittering Eye has a brilliant post

on the futility of bending the government to your will:

September 24, 2004
The best laid plans

Why do so many government programs fail? We've seen it time and time again. A need is identified, a program is formulated and put into place, everything starts out well enough, and then, perhaps over time, something happens. The program doesn't achieve its goals. Or the amount of resources needed for it to achieve its goals are vastly more than expected.
...
There are only two known organizing principles in modern societies^1: bureacracy and the unpredictable large scale group behaviors of complex systems known as emergent phenomena. Reliance on emergent phenomena to solve the great problems requires an enormous amount of faith and hope.

But if we rely on the grand solutions we'd better be prepared for a lot of failure and to spend more than we can really afford.

More brilliance at the linked post:

An emergent phenomenon in a complex system is a large scale, group behavior that cannot be predicted by an understanding of workings of the individual components of the system. There's a word used to describe the condition under which such phenomena emerge--synergy--and a description: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Quite a few of the things that are absolutely the most important to us are emergent phenomena: life, consciousness, history, the Market (Adam Smith's Invisible Hand), and the workings of a free and democratic society are all emergent phenomena and, as such, are highly distasteful to those who look for a simple, tidy, elegant, and orderly universe. And that group, in turn, includes a truly remarkable group of unlikely allies including both Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, Marxists, and bureaucrats of every religion, philosophy, and political party.

He's making a fair bid to replace the Clueless.

I had an attack of silliness last night.

I made up a song, to the tune of the Ford Truck 'jingle' - I do a good imitation of that guy. My daughter was begging me to stop by the third line. It starts out autobiographical and becomes fanciful:

I'm a snot-nosed man
That's what I am
I can't find no Kleenex
I won't compromise
I'll let it run to the ground
'Fore I'd wipe me nose on my sleeve
Honey!
The only thing worse 's when it's happ'nin' an' ya gotta sneeze.

I don't think it warrants further stanzas.

This may well be

the damnedest thing.

Google works in mysterious ways. (The second page.)

I'm afraid!

A thing that causes obsessive anxiety is checking out of the Blogosphere. This is deeply disturbing.

Not only that, but he has to rub it in our faces by titling his last post Do! Do! Do The Selfish Monkey!

Recognize the tune?

I mean, first it's Selfish Monkey (I never knew ye!), then den Beste, then... Oh, sorry! I went over to the Probligo's to get the link to this guy, thinking that would be easier than finding it at my homepage, when I got lost in a reverie here.

Anyway, back to my list: The Sciolist... Wait a minute! What does this mean? Stay Tuned - Watch This Space ... Re-Opening Soon Under New Management.... That sounds like a trumpet! The Cavalry's just over the ridge!

What's that pain in my side? A gunshot?!! Oh, God!!

Will I wake up in the hospital to be greeted by the grinning mugs of... A selfish monkey? A bugbear? A garbage collector? And the stern visage of the master of the USS Clueless?

God help me!!

God HE-ELP MEE-eee!!!

A guy named Chrenkoff

has a thoughtful piece on the question, "Can there be a liberal democracy in the middle-east?"

The Post-Totalitarian Stress Disorder

Completely giving away the store, here is his description of the disorder:

Distrust of the state and the authorities - the state is the enemy and the oppressor; you collaborate to the extent it is necessary to survive, no more. You don't owe it any loyalty and are quite happy to try to sabotage it in every little way you can - by breaking minor laws, petty embezzlement, cheating, dishonesty, lies, passivity or indifference.

A prison mentality - you might hate the state, but you still have an expectation that the hand you cannot bite will provide for you; feed you, clothe you, give you shelter and a job. Since the state has crowded out most, if not all, of the private sphere, logically only the state is able to provide for one's needs - you're quite literally at the mercy of a monopoly.

Lack of initiative and abdication of personal responsibility - as the state is seemingly omnipresent and omnipotent and the area of your personal sovereignty heavily circumscribed, this state of affairs breeds resignation, fatalism and passivity. Why would you bother to try to do anything if you can't achieve much? How can you really take responsibility for your condition if you're just a powerless puppet at the mercy of the Leviathan? And so you wait for things happen to you, as they always do, instead of trying to make your own fate. The system simply doesn't provide any incentives to think and act otherwise - initiative is not rewarded and can even land you in trouble, working hard brings in no more benefits than working little; effort and imagination more often than not hit the wall of limited practical possibilities.

Distrust of others - it's not just the state; you don't trust your fellow citizens too - at worst they might be spying on you for the authorities, at best they are competing with you for scarce resources. Either way, they're out to screw you over. So you only look after your own.

You'll have to RTWT to see how he can speak with authority on this and how it affects "our" nation building in Iraq. Actually, I'd like to see him go deeper into that last.

WOD: Obscurantism

Meaning of OBSCURANTISM
Pronunciation: ub'skyûrun`tizum

WordNet Dictionary

Definition: [n] a deliberate act intended to make something obscure
[n] a policy of opposition to enlightenment or the spread of knowledge


See Also: deceit, deception, dissembling, dissimulation, policy

Webster's 1913 Dictionary

Definition: \Ob*scur"ant*ism\, n.
The system or the principles of the obscurants. --C.
Kingsley.

Oh, you mean like this supposed explanation of this. Actually, I think I'll now be better able to handle post-modernist jargon than I was before I read it. It's not complete gibberish.

This isn't news to me, but others seem unaware of it

From An Open Letter To Advocates of International Free Trade, by Richard C. B. Johnsson, Ph.D.

One of the most characteristic features of today's society is the division of labor and specialization. But although the merits of division of labor are widely acknowledged, with it follows a perceived implication of great importance; if the person who is best at extracting teeth becomes a dentist and the best woodworker a carpenter, the conclusion is that those who aren't best at anything will end up outside society. And it is, after all, a fact that the lives of many people in today's society have ended in poverty and misery, while others live well, and that many have lost out in the competition. We do live in a Darwinist society of the survival of the fittest, with advanced division of labor. From this, two common standpoints would seem to follow; either you end up believing that the division of labor is a moral outrage, despite its efficiency, or you end up believing that because the division of labor is so efficient, and because so many benefit so much from it, the idea of some people being pushed outside society is somehow acceptable - some kind of welfare system and taxation will supposedly take care of those problems. Despite the apparent popularity of these two views, there is nevertheless no need to hold either of them. Instead, it seems possible to defend the merits of division of labor while discarding the idea of a society where only the fittest survive. In fact, this is one of the main points the message tries to communicate to you. Please bear with me a little longer.

According to the famous Ricardian principle, the international division of labor is made according to comparative advantages. But this also holds for the division of labor at all other levels of society. In fact, all trade, international as well as domestic, stems from the same source - the comparative advantage of the individual. Almost all of us specialize in the area that we are best in relative to others. There will almost always be someone who could potentially perform a task better than you. Even if you are the very best in an absolute sense, you will have had to rely on your comparative advantage to get there. The dentist thus finds it worthwhile to cooperate with the carpenter even though he might potentially be a better carpenter, and so on. The comparative advantage of the individual then lends itself to groups of people, companies, regions and countries. The comparative advantages could thus be seen as the glue of society. It is these that make it worthwhile for people to cooperate on any larger scale at all. They guarantee that there will be room for everybody. The division of labor according to the principle of comparative advantages could hence be considered the ultimate form of cooperation among humans.

Diversity must be respected as a fact of nature. The moral imperitive is to develop one's gifts as fully as possible and trade them.

UN Screws the Pooch in Kosovo

From the Christian Science Monitor: Even in eager Kosovo, nation-building stalls

Five years after 'liberation,' UN officials this week are again working on a plan for the political status of the province.

Yet the greatest blame may lie with the UN itself, according to an internal UN report. Annan dispatched Norwegian UN Ambassador Kai Eide to Kosovo this summer to investigate what's gone wrong and recommend a way out. The report, delivered to Annan in July, was unusually scathing.

"The international community in Kosovo is today seen by Kosovo Albanians as having gone from opening the way to now standing in the way," Eide wrote. "It is seen by Kosovo Serbs as having gone from securing the return of so many to being unable to ensure the return of so few."

Annan has yet to act on the report. "It's still being absorbed," says a UN official.

Back in 1999, reluctance to discuss Kosovo's future was not surprising. After the wars in Bosnia and Croatia claimed more than 200,000 lives, Kosovo earned Milosevic a third strike. So the international community, spooked by a decade of Balkan warfare and potential for further splintering along ethnic lines, intervened on behalf of the Kosovars.

It was a major investment for NATO - an estimated $45 billion - and the West worried what message an independent Kosovo might send around the world: if you want independence, insurgency pays. Kosovo's fate rested in the hands of the UN Security Council. Russia and China are two of the Council's five veto-wielding permanent members, along with the US, Britain, and France. For the Russians, who had allied themselves with their Slavic brethren in Belgrade, an independent Kosovo bolsters the case for an independent Chechnya, not to mention Dagestan, Ingushetia, and so on; for Beijing, there's the specter of statehood for Tibet, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

So the UN opted for a familiar tack - kick-the-can diplomacy, as analysts describe it - putting off hard decisions until later. In his report, Eide often cites the world body's lack of clear goals when it comes to Kosovo's future.
...
The UN has adopted a process it calls "standards before status," requiring Kosovo to meet satisfactory levels of democratic governance, rule of law, and multiethnic tolerance before beginning discussion of permanent status. Review of Kosovo's standards-before-status progress is slated for mid-2005.

But the standards process is seen as an unreasonably high threshold for a war- ravaged region with little to no tradition of democracy and a generation of Kosovars who opted out of Serbia's repressive administration for underground, Albanian-run institutions. Moreover, the process is seen by Kosovars as demeaning. They note that no such standards-before-status formula was laid out for, say, Iraq, before it regained its sovereignty this summer. Or, in a closer parallel, when East Timor won independence from Indonesia in 2002. And if Israelis and Palestinians were to ever hammer out a peace deal, the United Nations would probably recognize an independent Palestine the next day - before any guarantee of a democratic, tolerant society.

These guys have a more hopeful assessment.

Here's a good taste of Murray Rothbard for you,

castigating Karl Polanyi, courtesy of The Mises Institute:

Capitalism did not, therefore, tragically disrupt, as Polanyi would have it, the warm, loving, "social" relations of pre-capitalist era. Capitalism took the outcasts of society: the beggars, the highwaymen, the rural over-populated, the Irish immigrants, and gave them the jobs and wages which moved them from destitution to a far higher standard of living and of work. It is easy enough to wring one's hands at the child labor in the new British factories; it is, apparently, even easier to forget what the child population of rural England was doing before the Industrial Revolution-and during the Revolution, in those numerous areas of England where the I.R. and the new capitalism had not yet penetrated: these children were dying like flies, and living in infinitely more miserable conditions. This is why we read nowadays, when it seems inexplicable to us, British and American writings of the period which praise the new factories for giving work to women and children! This praise was not due to their being inhuman monsters; it was due to the fact that, before such labor was available, and in those regions where such labor was not available, the women and children were living and suffering in infinitely worse conditions. Women, children, immigrants, after all, were not driven to the factories with whips; they went voluntarily and gladly, and that is the reason.

There are even broader aspects of the population problem which Polanyi ignores. For capitalism was responsible, in a sense, for the huge increase in population in the modern world. Capitalism's upsurge in living standards has enabled capitalism to free the world from the Malthusian checks, from the grim evils of over-population, and has permitted a rapid multiplication of population at even higher living standards than before. So when Polanyi, in effect, asks us to scrap the market and return to a caste or communal or even tribal society, he is not only asking us to abandon the luxuries of civilization and return to the sub­sistence level of the primitive tribe; he is also asking for the liquidation and eradication of the vast bulk of the world's population Because if a caste or tribal system will "work," even on the least subsistence level, it will work only for a small, tiny minority of the population; the rest of us will starve en masse. The fact noted above, of the small numbers of the primitive tribe, takes on, then, a new and more terrible significance.

Excuse me, this is an update, made after the first six comments: Ah, controversy! What fun! Here is the Mises Blog post and a couple of links gleaned from their comments section on this article: a fellow Misesian attacker of Karl Polanyi and The Polanyi Institute's defense. I have to criticise TMI's lack of a permalink connecting the post with the comments. It won't be long before the post is shuffled off to the archives along with the comments attached to it.

[Update: Oh, for God's sake! Here it is!]

I'm not sure that Sandall's final letter is devastating. I'll have to find the book and read it.

Oh, this site's gonna end up on my sidebar!

Vince Lombardi.com.

Thanks, CPF!

Sample quote:

"Once you agree upon the price you and your family must pay for success, it enables you to ignore the minor hurts, the opponent's pressure, and the temporary failures."