Quotulatiousness

May 28, 2012

UN joke of the day: Mugabe named “international tourism ambassador”

Filed under: Africa, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:18

I guess it’s maybe a hint that the UN is no longer serious?

For cognitive dissonance, see under: The United Nations. It’s no longer just a platform for countries with less-than-negligible human rights records to bash Israel and other democratic nations, or the dispatcher of envoys like Kofi Annan to Syria (under whose watch some 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered) or the patronizing professional busy-body Olivier De Schutter, a Belgian “UN special rapporteur on the right to food,” to lecture Canada. The UN is now an expert on tourism to Africa and deciding who is best suited to promote it.

The UN just announced that its favourite African megalomaniac, Robert Mugabe, and his Zambian sidekick, Michael Sata, have been appointed United Nations international tourism ambassadors in recognition of the promotion and development of tourism. The UN through the United Nations World Tourism Organisation will officially confer the status to the two presidents at a function to be held in Victoria Falls this week and officiated by the UNWTO secretary general Mr Talib Rifai. The honour comes even though the European Union and U.S. have imposed travel bans on Mugabe and many of his senior government officials due to widespread human rights abuses.

May 17, 2012

Official response to UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food

Filed under: Cancon, Food, Government, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

As you’ll know if you’ve been visiting the blog for a while, I’m not a cheerleader for the federal government and I often disagree with their policies and statements. However, I can’t find much to disagree with in this:

May 16, 2012 (OTTAWA, ON) — The Honourable Leona Aglukkaq, Minister of Health, and Minister of the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency, today issued the following statement:

Today I met with Olivier De Schutter, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food.

As an aboriginal person from the North, I was insulted that Mr. Schutter chose to “study” us, but chose not to “visit” us.

In fact, Mr. De Schutter confirmed to me that he did not visit a single Arctic community in Canada during nearly two weeks of travel within Canada.

I asked him what stance he would take in his report on uninformed, international attacks on the seal and polar bear hunt that make it harder for aboriginal hunters to earn a livelihood. I told him that I would be reviewing his final report closely, to see if he makes any recommendations to activist groups to stop interfering in the hunting and gathering of traditional foods.

I was concerned that he had not been fully informed of the problems with the discontinued Food Mail program that subsidized the shipping of tires and skidoo parts, as opposed to Nutrition North, which improves access to nutritious and perishable foods.

He made several suggestions that would require the federal government to interfere in the jurisdiction of other levels of government. It was clear that he had little understanding of Canada’s division of powers between the federal, provincial and municipal levels of government despite his extensive briefings with technical officials from the Government of Canada.

Our government is surprised that this organization is focused on what appears to be a political agenda rather than on addressing food shortages in the developing world. By the United Nations’ own measure, Canada ranks sixth best of all the world’s countries on their human development index. Canadians donate significant funding to address poverty and hunger around the world, and we find it unacceptable that these resources are not being used to address food shortages in the countries that need the most help.

-30-

May 6, 2012

The UN keeps its priorities clear

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Food, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

As if we needed any reminder that the UN is a political entity, this story by Hillel Neuer should provide a useful refresher:

According to the World Food Program, half a million people don’t have enough to eat in Syria. Fears are growing that the regime is using hunger as a weapon.

This is the kind of emergency which should attract the attention of the UN Human Rights Council’s hunger monitor, who has the ability to spotlight situations and place them on the world agenda. Yet Olivier de Schutter of Belgium, the “Special Rapporteur on the right to food,” is not going to Syria.

Instead, the UN’s food monitor is coming to investigate Canada.

That’s right. Despite dire food emergencies around the globe, De Schutter will be devoting the scarce time and resources of the international community on an 11-day tour of Canada — a country that ranks at the bottom of global hunger concerns.

A key co-ordinator and promoter of De Schutter’s mission is Food Secure Canada, a lobby group whose website accuses the Harper government of “failing Canadians…and [failing to] fulfill the right to food for all.” The group calls instead for a “People’s Food Policy.”

[. . .]

Before Canadians can take De Schutter seriously, they ought to ask him some serious questions about whether his mission is about human rights or a political agenda.

First, consider the origins of the UN’s “right to food” mandate. In voluminous background information provided by De Schutter and his local promoters, there’s no mention that their sponsor was Cuba, a country where some women resort to prostitution for food. De Schutter does not want you to know that Havana’s Communist government created his post, nor that the co-sponsors included China, North Korea, Iran and Zimbabwe.

These and other repressive regimes are seeking a political weapon to attack the West. That is why the first person they chose to fill the post, when it started in 2000, was Jean Ziegler. The former Swiss Socialist politician was a man they could trust: In 1989, he announced to the world the creation of the Muammar Gaddafi Human Rights Prize.

H/T to Nicholas Packwood (Ghost of a Flea).

April 24, 2012

The Hunger Games as a fictionalized version of the UN’s “Agenda 21”

Filed under: Books, Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:25

In a letter published in the most recent issue of Libertarian Enterprise, David Walker points out the quite notable similarities between the fictional world portrayed in The Hunger Games and the United Nations’ Agenda 21:

The Hunger Games “universe” is the inevitable result at the attempt to implement Agenda 21.

  • Herding the population into tightly controlled resource production “districts”.
    While there are no “arcologies/super cities” as forwarded by Agenda 21, I don’t think such things could possibly be created by such a system anyway. The Agenda 21 structure is simply too anti-technological and too government heavy. The “Hunger Games” police state “Districts” is a much more believable result of enforced population reduction & control.
  • In the “country” of “Panem” no one is allowed out into “the wild”. Agenda 21 demands “rewilding” of all space outside of habitation districts. In the Hunger Games, crossing the electrified fence can get you shot. Killing wild game (poaching the government’s animals) will get you shot. Pristine Earth policed with heavy weapons. Sound familiar?
  • Travel is largely by High Speed Rail, and solely by High Speed Rail between Districts. Cars/trucks are only mentioned in the Capitol. The more poor the district, the more likely you are to be forced to walk everywhere. Only the Military has anything resembling air travel and even that is curtailed (one character dreams/reminisces about winged flight vs. hovercraft).
  • The utter disdain for Carbon Based Fuels.
    The Heroine from Hunger Games comes from the Coal Producing District (District 12). As described, there simply could not be enough coal produced by that district to have coal be a viable energy source, therefore the coal must be being used for other non-energy-related tasks. Likewise, “District 12” is the pariah of the Districts. Nobody loves Coal, and nobody loves the people who produce it. “Power” is produced by a nameless “District 5” by nameless means, though Nuclear is suggested on the website.
  • There is no Religion in the Hunger Games world.
    Agenda 21 specifically declares non-pantheistic/non-“natural” religions (particularly Judaism, Islam & Christianity) as something that must be eliminated. “Nature worship” is apparently OK.
  • The Government is Hollywood/Hollywood is Government.
    Hollyweirdoes love Agenda 21. The 3 books of the series are not kind to Hollywood and the kind of government the majority of those weirdoes would create. It presents “The Capitol” as a cross between San-Francisco Body Modification, Hollywood & Rome where nonproductive decadence, self importance, absurd vanity and utter banality are the rule. Any wonder the Movie(s) (will) suppress this aspect of the books?

Other Themes, late in the series: Revolutions aren’t always led by noble causes.

April 22, 2012

Earth Day: 42 years of crying “wolf”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

Peter Foster piles on the scorn for the 42nd anniversary of Earth Day:

For more than 40 years, Earth Day has both reflected genuine environmental concern and mirrored the UN’s attempted eco power grab. Sunday’s Earth Day comes two months ahead of the vast, but significantly brief, UN Rio+20 conference. Both are pale reflections of their original radical aspirations. Earth Day is still celebrated, but 42 years of crying wolf have inevitably had an effect. The event has also been corporatized, greenwashed and taken over by such announcements as that of the “50 sexiest environmentalists.” Rio+20 will represent the graveyard of aspirations for all prospective — and inevitably less sexy — Captains of Spaceship Earth, Global Saviours, and High Priests of Gaia.

That Earth Day has gone Happy Face, and Rio+20 will be a farce, reflects the fact that their apocalyptic assumptions have turned out to be so wrong. In Canada, as in other developed countries, we can celebrate significant improvements in air quality, and success in coping with industrial impacts on water. The Great Lakes have been cleaned up, forest cover has been maintained, and the amount of “protected” land doubled. The use of toxic chemicals in industrial production has been slashed. Some credit must obviously go to activism, but the more radical end of the movement has always had a lot more than just the environment in mind.

[. . .]

That misunderstandings and misrepresentations were at the root of radical environmental thinking was exemplifed by an “equation-of-doom” hatched in the 1970s by two prominent radicals, Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren (President Obama’s current senior science and technology advisor). The equation was I=P x A x T: Human Impact (I) equals Population (P) times Affluence (A) times Technology (T). The formula was vague, but it clearly suggested that population, wealth and technology were all “bad” for Mother Earth.

Such thinking was based on a primitive, static, zero-sum view of economic development and a demonization of business. Since resources were “finite,” all development was claimed by definition to be “unsustainable.” Advancing technology merely chewed up resources faster and accelerated us down the road to exhaustion. All this came with biblical overtones. On the first Earth Day, Prof. Ehrlich thundered that “In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.”

February 11, 2012

Argentina accuses Britain of deploying nuclear weapons in Falkland Islands

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

Raising the rhetorical stake yet again, Argentina has taken their complaint to the United Nations:

Argentina has accused Britain of deploying nuclear weapons near the Falkland Islands and “militarising” the south Atlantic.

The Argentinian foreign minister, Héctor Timerman, lodged a formal protest at the United Nations on Friday and showed slides of British military bases in the region, saying they represented a threat to all south America.

He said Buenos Aires had intelligence that a Vanguard submarine was operating in the area. “Thus far the UK refuses to say whether it is true or not,” he told a press conference in New York. “Are there nuclear weapons or are there not? The information Argentina has is that there are these nuclear weapons.” Quoting John Lennon, he added: “Give peace a chance.”

Britain’s ambassador to the UN, Mark Lyall Grant, said London did not comment on the disposition of nuclear weapons or submarines but that it was “manifestly absurd” to say it was militarising the region. Britain’s defence posture remained unchanged, he said.

There was a report in the press that the Royal Navy had sent a nuclear powered submarine to the south Atlantic, but that it was conventionally armed. No nuclear power is in the habit of detailing where their nuclear weapons are deployed, so don’t expect Britain to break ranks with the others.

Also in the Guardian, Marina Hyde characterizes the decision to send a member of the royal family to the Falklands is the wrong kind of gesture:

The technical military term for the decision to deploy the second in line to the throne to the Falkland Islands is William-waving. If dispatching a fancy new warship to the archipelago on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the conflict with Argentina sends a message, then dispatching Prince William makes a hand gesture.

Of course, the Duke of Cambridge is not in the South Atlantic in his capacity as the male lead from the latest, successful instalment of the hit-and-miss Windsor Wedding franchise. His other day job is as an RAF search and rescue pilot, which is genuinely commendable — but need he really have been sent to the Falklands this week in a posting described by William Hague as “entirely routine”? If the foreign secretary truly wishes to claim that the deployment of Prince William is a business as perfunctory as deciding whether to serve tea or coffee at a meeting, then that is a matter for him. But many of us will find our disbelief simply impossible to suspend in this case, and will nurse a deep suspicion that such things are discussed at prime ministerial level.

December 16, 2011

Lorne Gunter on the Kyoto cult: “Ottawa is right to get out of it while it could.”

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

Much has been made — at least in the British press — about Canada announcing it will withdraw from the Kyoto agreement. Lorne Gunter agrees with the government that it was high time to leave:

It has been written in several places that should Canada fail to bring its emissions down drastically in the coming year, it could be subject to up to $19-billion in fines imposed by Ms. Figueres and the UNFCCC. How? The fines would be in the form of “carbon credits” — we would pay developing countries that aren’t current producing many emissions for their unused carbon. In other words, we could buy the equivalent of medieval indulgences to cover off our carbon sins. No emissions would be reduced, but the UN would be placated by this accounting device.

But what if we refuse to buy credits? In logic that would only ever make sense to UN bureaucrats, the UNFCCC then has the authority to penalize us by making us buy 30% more credits. That’s right, if we refuse to pay $19-billion in environmental baksheesh to cover off our extra emissions, the UN somehow thinks it will be able to convince us to pay $25-billion as a punishment.

Seriously, these people believe this stuff makes sense.

One of the reasons UN bureaucrats have begun using language such as “legal obligation” is that they are hoping to convince national supreme courts to enforce international treaties for them. At the Durban climate summit recently concluded in South Africa, delegates agreed to form an International Climate Court of Justice, partly in hopes that rulings from such a body would be enforced by domestic courts, even against countries, such as Canada, that withdraw from climate treaties.

The UN environmental cult becomes more dangerous to national sovereignty and personal freedom every day. Ottawa is right to get out of it while it could.

October 31, 2011

Shipwrecks: salvage or preserve?

Filed under: Environment, History, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:26

An article at the BBC website looks at some of the issues involving shipwrecks in international waters:

When a ship sinks and lives are lost, it is a tragedy for the families involved.

For the relatives of the dead, the ship becomes an underwater grave but as the years pass the wreck can become a site of archaeological interest.

In recent years technological innovations have allowed commercial archaeologists, decried by some as “treasure hunters”, to reach wrecks far below the surface.

[. . .]

In November 2001, the Unesco Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage was finally adopted.

But 10 years on, it still has not been ratified by the UK, France, Russia, China or the US, and commercial archaeologists continue to locate wrecks, remove their cargoes and sell them off.

“The convention has not been ratified yet because of the issues it throws up about the cost of implementing and policing it,” a spokesman for the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, says. “Discussions continue within government, but ratification is not currently seen as a priority.”

It’s telling that the convention has not been ratified by five of the nations most likely to have both the technology and the interest to take on major underwater archaeological or salvage projects.

Robert Yorke, chairman of the Joint Nautical Archaeology Policy Committee, argues the real reason the government, and the Ministry of Defence in particular, are not ratifying the convention was becayse of a misplaced fear about the implications for British warships around the world.

The internationally recognised concept of “sovereign immunity” means nations should not interfere with foreign warships.

Under the Military Remains Act 1986, a number of British warships around the world are protected, including several ships sunk during the Falklands conflict. Also covered are several German U-boats in UK waters.

October 29, 2011

More on Malthus

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:57

Tim Harford poses and answers some common questions about the much-talked-about 7-billionth birth:

There will be 7bn of us come Halloween? You’re kidding.

Someone at the UNPFA has a sense of humour, it seems. This is a terrifying prospect to some and cheery for others, while most of us find it irrelevant. Halloween seems appropriate.

This is a statistical projection, and statistical projections don’t have a sense of humour.

But they do have margins of error. The UNPFA doesn’t even know whether the seven billionth person will be born in 2011. Even the UK is currently relying on 10-year old census data. There are places in the world where the data are decades old and we’re just guessing at the population. Still, such celebrations — if they are celebrations — do pass the time.

[. . .]

So Malthus was wrong?

Even Robert Malthus realised that there was such a thing as birth control. His more excitable successors, such as Paul Ehrlich, author in 1968 of The Population Bomb, have been fairly thoroughly rebutted by subsequent events. Dan Gardner, author of the fascinating Future Babble, summarises Ehrlich’s three scenarios for the 1980s as “everybody dies” (starvation-triggered nuclear war), “every third human dies” (starvation-triggered virus) and in the optimistic scenario “a billion people still die of starvation”.

October 8, 2011

WIPO head: the Web would be better if it was patented and users had to pay license fees

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:42

Cory Doctorow reports on remarks by the head of the UN World Intellectual Property Organization:

Last June, the Swiss Press Club held a launch for the Global Innovation Index at which various speakers were invited to talk about innovation. After the head of CERN and the CEO of the Internet Society spoke about how important it was that the Web’s underlying technology hadn’t been patented, Francis Gurry, the Director General of the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), took the mic to object.

In Gurry’s view, the Web would have been better off if it had been locked away in patents, and if every user of the Web had needed to pay a license fee to use it (and though Gurry doesn’t say so, this would also have meant that the patent holder would have been able to choose which new Web sites and technologies were allowed, and would have been able to block anything he didn’t like, or that he feared would cost him money).

This is a remarkable triumph of ideology over evidence. The argument that there wasn’t enough investment in the Web is belied by the fact that a) the Web attracted more investment than any of the network service technologies that preceded it (by orders of magnitude), and; b) that the total investment in the Web is almost incalculably large. The only possible basis for believing that the Web really would have benefited from patents is a blind adherence to the ideology that holds that patents are always good, no matter what.

Just imagine: instead of our current anarchic, idiosyncratic-but-still-amazingly-useful Web, we’d have a bureaucratically regulated superset of the old walled garden models like Compuserve, where innovation was stifled long before it got into the users’ hands.

September 20, 2011

About that “ethnic cleansing” in Basildon

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

All the great and the good are girding for battle over the Dale Farm evictions:

A terrible episode of ‘ethnic cleansing’ is looming. It promises to be so bad that a spokesman for the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has been helicoptered in to ‘oversee negotiations’. Amnesty International has set up a special ‘priority action’ page on its website, pleading with people to write letters of outrage to politicians. Head-tilting celebrities have turned up to raise awareness about what one journalist refers to as the ‘racist hysteria’ of the coming cleansing, including that grande dame of right-on causes, Vanessa Redgrave. Things are so dire that the BBC has sent in Fergal Keane, its softly spoken, Irish ponderer of all things evil, who doesn’t only wear his heart but also his lungs, liver and spleen on his sleeve, who cut his teeth reporting on the war in Bosnia and the calamity in Rwanda. ‘It’s a very apprehensive situation’, he intoned on last night’s news.

Oh god, what has happened? A new war in Africa? A rekindling of the old wars in Bosnia? No. Basildon Council in Essex in south-east England is planning to evict some Travellers from their plot of land in Dale Farm. That’s all. Yet watching the media coverage, perusing the millions of tweets of tear-stained concern, you could be forgiven for thinking that the so-called Battle of Dale Farm was a rerun of Bosnia 1992. That is because moral opportunists, cause-hunters, those desperate for some political momentum in their lives, have cynically transformed a small-scale spat between a council and some Gypsies into an epochal stand-off between the forces of racist hysteria and the massed ranks of decent UN cheerleaders. It speaks to the desperation of today’s wannabe moral crusaders that they are willing to infuse even the Dale Farm fallout with the kind of simple-minded moralistic lingo they usually reserve for foreign wars.

Of course, the threatened Dale Farm eviction, which was supposed to take place yesterday until the High Court in London imposed a temporary injunction against it, will be bad and distressing for the Traveller families involved. Eighty-six families could be forcibly removed, simply for building homes on land which they own yet which Basildon Council says is protected Green Belt territory. But is that any justification for using phrases such as ‘racist hysteria’ to describe Basildon Council’s actions and even conjuring up the Holocaust to describe the plight of the Travellers, with Vanessa Redgrave talking about ‘what happened during Hitler’s rule’ and demanding that ‘minorities shouldn’t be destroyed’? If there’s any hysteria here, it is among those who fantasise that we’re witnessing a rerun of Nazi evil and that it is down to conscience-exercising celebs and Amnesty letter-writers — the heroes of the hour — to stop it in its tracks.

September 18, 2011

“One would have to go back to 1973 to find a more perilous time for the Jewish state”

Filed under: Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:58

David Harsanyi on the increasing UN pressure on Israel:

Sure, the United Nations has historically vacillated between deep irrelevance and monumental ineffectiveness. But with all its prevaricating and impotence on genuine threats to human rights across the world, next week it will be actively precipitating violence and endorsing ethnic cleansing.

It is understood that one of the preconditions for the existence of a Palestinian state is the judenrein West Bank. It will be purified of Jews, regardless of their political inclinations, Zionist or not, because effectively speaking no Jew will be able to live in the West Bank or East Jerusalem safely. Palestine Liberation Organization’s ambassador to the United States, Maen Rashid Areikat, has admitted as much.

[. . .]

Another onetime ally the increasingly Islamic Turkey has similarly turned on Israel, kicking out the Israeli ambassador, and ending military ties and trade pacts. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to send warships as escorts to “aid ships” in the next activist-filled flotilla trying to reach the Palestinians. A United Nations failure will only provoke more hostility and put the two nations in a potentially catastrophic position.

Supporters of Israel often speak in perfunctory tones about the existential threat Israel faces. But one would have to go back to 1973 to find a more perilous time for the Jewish state. With this vote, the United Nations is simply giving in to its seemingly pathological need to undermine Israel — no matter the circumstance, no matter the consequence.

There can be no other reason for a vote that is simultaneously so dangerous and so utterly useless.

Then again, that’s the perfect way to describe the United Nations.

September 3, 2011

US troops allegedly handcuffed and executed children in 2006

Filed under: Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

Wikileaks may have been sitting on a particularly disturbing report:

A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks suggests that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.

The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks’ website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.

But Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger.

Claims of American troops committing atrocities were very common, but few of them appear to have been anything other than Al Qaeda propaganda exercises. This may well be another case of this, but the initial investigation implied otherwise:

The original incident report was signed by an Iraqi police colonel and made even more noteworthy because U.S.-trained Iraqi police, including Brig. Gen. Issa al Juboori, who led the coordination centre, were willing to speak about the investigation on the record even though it was critical of American forces.

Throughout the early investigation, U.S. military spokesmen said that an Al Qaeda in Iraq suspect had been seized from a first-floor room after a fierce fight that had left the house he was hiding in a pile of rubble.

But the diplomatic cable provides a different sequence of events and lends credence to townspeople’s claims that American forces destroyed the house after its residents had been shot.

August 27, 2011

QotD: Consistency

Filed under: Africa, Middle East, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:58

We are all glad that the Gadhafi regime is purportedly on its last legs. When I visited Libya in 2006, tragedy was what I saw—and a friendly population under the yoke of a psychopath. But I don’t think we have had much idea of what we were doing in Libya—a sort of diplomatic pastime secondary to presidential jet-setting and golfing. Moreover, I don’t see any hypocrisy in critiquing our confusion over Libya, as a supporter of the removal of Saddam Hussein. Wanting to use American power and influence to its fullest extent when going to war is preferable to not wanting to use all our power and influence when going to war. The hypocrisy is rather on the Left, which once damned the principle of intervention against an Arab Middle East oil-exporting nation that had not recently attacked us, only to support intervention against an Arab Middle East oil exporting nation that had not recently attacked us. In the Left’s defense, one could argue their consistency is that it’s OK if you have a UN vote, but irrelevant whether you have consent of the U.S. Congress.

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was the object of 23 different Congressional authorizations (one should go back and read that October 2002 long list of “whereas”es), had been in hot and cold wars with us since 1991, attacked four neighbors, and in the heart of the ancient caliphate was hosting all sorts of terrorists. In a post-911 climate it made sense to reckon with him. Indeed, I think one of the great untold stories of Iraq was the carnage of Islamic terrorists who by volition promised that Iraq would be the central theater in jihad, flocked there, were killed and wounded in droves, and lost—and vastly weakened their cause. But in contrast, the West was apparently in the middle of a weird charm offensive with Gadhafi (one advanced by bought-and-paid-for American academics, European oil companies, and multicultural elites), and the result by 2010 was that Libya was considered no longer the 1986 Libya that Reagan had bombed.

Victor Davis Hanson, “The Middle East Mess”, Works and Days, 2011-08-24

July 26, 2011

The implied relationship between traffic tickets and corruption

Filed under: Economics, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:11

Tim Harford linked to this Forbes graphic showing an interesting correlation:

This nicely illustrates what he wrote in 2006:

An alternative view, popular among the common-sense crowd, is that corruption is a problem in Indonesia because Indonesians are crooks by nature; poor countries are poor because they are full of people who are lazy or stupid or dishonest. I disagree out of faith, rather than because the evidence is compelling. But then, what evidence could there be? You would need to take people from every culture, put them somewhere where they could ignore the law with impunity, and see who cheated and who was honest.

That sounds like a tall order for any research strategy, but the economists Ray Fisman and Edward Miguel have realised that diplomats in New York city were, in fact, the perfect guinea pigs. Diplomatic immunity meant that parking tickets issued to diplomats could not be enforced, and so parking legally was essentially a matter of personal ethics.

Fisman and Miguel found support for the common-sense view. Countries with corrupt systems, as measured by Transparency International, also sent diplomats who parked illegally. From 1997-2005, the Scandinavians committed only 12 unpaid parking violations, and most of them were by a single criminal mastermind from Finland. Chad and Bangladesh, regularly at the top of corruption tables, produced more than 2,500 violations between them. Perhaps poor countries are poor because they are full of corrupt people, after all.

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