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31
3DHS / Europe's Last True Feudal State Calls it Quits
« on: April 14, 2008, 05:48:19 PM »
Sark agrees switch to democracy

Politicians in the Channel Island of Sark have agreed to end the island's feudal system of government which has been in place for the past 450 years.



Governing body, the Chief Pleas, has approved new reform laws which will lead to the introduction of a 28-member elected chamber.

Elections under the new constitution will be held in December.

Sark, 80 miles off the south coast, had been governed by a mix of landowners and elected people's deputies.

'Great relief'

There was pressure on Sark to reform its feudal constitution to comply with the European Human Rights laws and other international obligations.

Owners of the island's 40 tenements (divisions of land) currently have an automatic seat in the Chief Pleas, and islanders chose 12 people's deputies.

The first new assembly of Chief Pleas will take place in January next year.

Deputy Paul Armorgie said: "It's a great relief.

"We have been trying to achieve this for 10 years and now a line has been drawn.

"Sark is finally moving from feudalism to democracy."


Quote
In its day, Sark had a very democratic system. The settlers ran the island
Seneshal Lt Col Reg Guille 


Sark, which is only 3 miles (4.8km) long and 1.5 miles (2.4k) wide, has a resident population of about 600.
Its government can directly trace its roots back to Queen Elizabeth I, who once granted the ruling "Seigner" a fief on the tiny Channel Island.

The unelected descendents of 40 families brought in to colonise Sark, after the French abandoned it in 1553, have governed life on the island ever since.

But its feudal system of government started coming under pressure in 2000 in the light of human rights laws.

Two proposals for reform were rejected in 2005 and 2007 until Thursday night's historic agreement.

Mr Armogie said: "Ten years ago the mood on the island was that no change was wanted.

"But Sark had to face up to its international obligations and it became clear that Sark had to move on."

"It is the passing of an era."

'Very successful'

Seneshal Lt Col Reg Guille, who acts as a presiding officer of the Chief Pleas, said the original settlers of the island would be "horrified" at the change.

He said: "The system of government has proven for our small community to be a very successful way to manage our own affairs.

"They (the original settlers) would not understand our modern democracy.

"In its day, Sark had a very democratic system. The settlers ran the island."

A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said: "Sark is seeking to reform its feudal constitution in order to make it comply with the European Convention on Human Rights and other international obligations.

"The UK is responsible for ensuring that Sark's constitution meets those requirements and the UK is vulnerable to challenge if it does not."


Also...

Sark democracy plans are approved

The UK Privy Council has approved proposed changes to the governing body of a Channel Island which still operates a feudal system of government.



Sark's ruling body, the Chief Pleas, breaches the European Convention of Human Rights because landowners have got a seat automatically for 450 years.

The Chief Pleas had already approved new reforms for an elected chamber.

A lawyer for millionaires Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay, who own nearby Brecqhou island, said they will appeal.

Advocate Gordon Dawes said the approval will be disputed in the High Court in London as the reforms do not address the role of the seigneur and seneschal.

The seigneur is the head of the Chief Pleas and retains feudal rights and the seneschal is president of the Chief Pleas and head of the judiciary.

The Barclay brothers say their roles are incompatible with the reforms.

But Sark's Seneschal, Reg Guille, said the decision to change the system of government reflected the wishes of most of the island's people.

'Huge changes'

Sark has been governed by a mix of landowners and elected people's deputies since the 1600s.

Owners of the island's 40 tenements (divisions of land) currently have an automatic seat in the Chief Pleas, with islanders choosing 12 deputies.

They will be replaced by the new 28-member chamber, which was approved following a referendum for islanders voting for democracy.

The Privy Council's approval enables Sark's judiciary and parliament to be significantly modernised.

Quote
We just like to get on with life away from the public eye
Lt Col Reginald Guille, Seneschal of Sark 


A spokeswoman for the Privy Council said: "The meeting has concluded and the Sark laws have been approved."

The move comes following pressure on Sark to change its feudal system to comply with European human rights laws and other international obligations.

The presiding officer of the Chief Pleas, Lt Col Reginald Guille, the Seneschal of Sark, said the changes would help bring the island's judiciary and government in line with the 21st Century.

He said: "These moves are intended to be a step away from a feudalist system, but at the same time still keeping some aspects of that system in place.

"It will see huge changes to our judiciary and government, making both more modern."

'Close-knit community'

The self-sufficient, car-free island is just 3 miles (4.8km) long and 1.5 miles (2.4km) wide and has a resident population of about 600.

The only forms of transport permitted are horse-drawn vehicles, bicycles, tractors and battery-powered buggies.

Lt Col Guille described life on the island as "idyllic", saying: "It's a very quiet and peaceful place.

"We are a self-sufficient, close-knit little community and we just like to get on with life away from the public eye."

The government there can directly trace its roots back to Queen Elizabeth I, who once granted the ruling "Seigner" a fief on the tiny Channel Island.

The unelected descendents of 40 families brought in to colonise Sark, after the French abandoned it in 1553, have governed life on the island ever since.

But its feudal system of government started coming under pressure in 2000 in the light of human rights laws.

Two proposals for reform were rejected in 2005 and 2007 until the island's historic referendum.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/guernsey/7339172.stm

Published: 2008/04/09 18:33:56 GMT

32
3DHS / The Free Speech Oddity of America
« on: April 07, 2008, 07:41:53 PM »
Boutique Faith

Jeremy Waldron

Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition by John Durham Peters


I have always liked hanging around courtrooms. In the Crown Court in Oxford in the late 1970s, I happened on the trial of a racist agitator, who had festooned the streets of Leamington Spa with posters depicting Britons of African ancestry as apes. He was charged under the Race Relations Act with inciting racial hatred. Leamington Spa at that time was home to Robert Relf, a leader of something called the ?British Movement?, who had made a name for himself earlier in the 1970s by advertising his house for sale ?to a white family only?. I don?t remember exactly what Relf?s involvement was in the case that I sat through. I do remember that the defendant was convicted by the jury and sentenced by a crusty old English judge to a short term of imprisonment. The judge, who one might imagine would have had little sympathy with this newfangled legislation, gave the defendant a stern lecture to the effect that we cannot run a multiracial society under modern conditions if people are free to denigrate their fellow citizens in bestial terms. There was some shouting from the gallery as the defendant was taken away. The case made a deep impression on me.

I now live in the United States and teach at a law school. My colleagues are appalled when I tell them this story of the English racist sent to prison. This, they say, would never happen in America on account of the First Amendment, and it shouldn?t happen anywhere because free speech is a fundamental right. Recently, I have heard them voice similar views about the jailing in Austria of David Irving ? the man who prided himself on having shaken more hands that shook hands with Hitler than anyone else in the world ? for Holocaust denial. It seems that racists and Nazis are never far from the centre of concerns about free speech. In the US, First Amendment scholars point proudly to the famous intervention by the American Civil Liberties Union in 1977 to defend the right of National Socialist agitators, under the leadership of a man called Frank Collin, to march ? swastikas flying ? through a Jewish neighbourhood in Skokie, Illinois (a village just north of Chicago), where many Holocaust survivors lived.

Faced with the prospect of a Nazi march, the Skokie village board had passed ordinances banning parades with military-style uniforms, banning the distribution of pamphlets promoting the hatred of any group in the community, and requiring a $350,000 indemnity bond to be posted in advance of any march. The ACLU challenged these measures on behalf of the Nazis, and the Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit declared the ordinances unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds. (In the event, the Skokie march did not take place. Collin?s Nazis marched in Marquette Park in Chicago and it was there that they handed out pamphlets saying ?Death to the Jews?. Collin abandoned National Socialism after spending time in prison in the 1980s for child molesting.)

The ACLU suffered considerable financial difficulties and the loss of many members as a result of their defence of Frank Collin?s right to march. But over the years the Skokie affair has become for them a badge of pride. ?I love free speech even more than I detest the Nazis,? one civil libertarian said. And many members repeated the saying often attributed to Voltaire: ?I detest what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.? Actually, as John Durham Peters points out in Courting the Abyss, there is no evidence that Voltaire ever said any such thing. An English writer, Beatrice Hall, writing under a male pseudonym in 1906, suggested that Voltaire?s attitude to the burning of a book written by Helv?tius might be summed up: ?How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy trifle as that! ?I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,? was his attitude now.? It was her readers ? and countless civil libertarians afterwards ? who made the mistake of attributing the saying to Voltaire himself.

Whoever said it, Peters has written an interesting and provocative book, exploring what might lie behind that smug liberal proclamation. To begin with, the language attributed to Voltaire is bewildering. ?Defend to the death your right to say it?? Whose death? How would death be involved? I guess its most attractive meaning is something like: ?I will fight and, if need be, lay down my life for a Bill of Rights that may have this implication.? A more troubling reading, however, is that Nazi speech is worth protecting even if a consequence of that protection is that someone gets hurt or killed. ?I will defend your right to say it, even if your saying it makes violence more likely against the people attacked in your pamphlets.? Is that what is meant? Defenders of free speech squirm on this point. On the one hand, they want to say that we should be willing to brave death for the sake of this important individual right. On the other hand, they assure us dogmatically that there is no clear evidence of any causal connection between, say, racist posters and incidents of racial violence, between pamphlets that say ?Hitler should have finished the job? and anti-semitic attacks, or between pornography and violence against women. Indeed, they pretend to have no idea of what such a causal mechanism could possibly be: ?We are defending only the Nazis? speech. How on earth could there be any connection between what they say and the things that some violent individuals do??

It?s a strange dichotomy because, in other contexts, American civil liberties scholars have no difficulty at all in seeing a connection between speech and the possibility of violence. They point to it all the time as a way of justifying restrictions on citizens? interventions at political gatherings. If Donald Rumsfeld comes to give a speech and someone in the audience shouts out that he is a war criminal, the heckler is quickly and forcibly removed. When I came to America, I was amazed that nobody thought this was a violation of the First Amendment. (Shouting comments at public meetings was another of my favourite pastimes when I was young and irresponsible.) But I was told by my American colleagues that heckling presages disorder, and disorder threatens security. There is a time and place for heckling ? usually several blocks away in a pen set up by the police to ?accommodate? legitimate protest, which no one except the police and the protestors themselves, certainly not Donald Rumsfeld, has any prospect of hearing. And that?s all the First Amendment requires. So there is an odd combination of tolerance for the most hateful speech imaginable, on the one hand, and obsequious deference, on the other, to the choreography which our rulers judge essential for their occasional public appearances. The Nazis can disrupt the streets of Skokie, but those who disrupt Rumsfeld?s message will be carried away with the hands of secret service agents clamped over their mouths. I have given up trying to make sense of any of this.

?I detest what you say, but I will defend your right to say it.? The aphorism need not convey that free speech doesn?t have any costs; instead, the idea may be that if there are costs, we are the better for bearing them. As we watch the Nazis march by, we are nauseated, we shake inside with rage and our sleep is troubled for days. But it?s like physical exercise: no pain, no gain. We can?t build the sort of fearless characters that modern democracy requires, unless we have been through and survived this sort of trauma. This is the theme that Peters has made central to his book. Courting the Abyss is about free speech generally, but it focuses on this suggestion that we all become better people through tolerating the most hateful and diabolical speech, by staring at and listening to the Nazis and the racists in our midst.

Peters is interested particularly in the expression of a Stoic sense of virtue and self-mastery in the free-speech position. The civil libertarian says: I am sufficiently in control of myself to look on the Nazis without contamination. I will not be brought down to their level. By staring at their swastikas and paying attention to their slogans, I grow and become a better person. Indeed, we all become better people and our society becomes a better society with this ability to look unflinchingly into the abyss of racial hatred. Peters?s book is a story of ?abyss-artists?, who put their evil on public display, and ?abyss-redeemers?, who believe in a moral alchemy that can make virtue out of our gaze into hell. (Abyss-avoiders, on the other hand, are those who recoil from the display and either shield their own and others? eyes or at least demand a better reason for ?defending to the death? the Nazis? right to march through Skokie.) Abyss-redemption, he says, is a major and neglected theme in the history of liberal thought.

Peters is right about that. Abyss-redemption has not been studied as closely as some of the other considerations that are wheeled in to support free speech for Nazis. The arguments that get studied are about the vaunted ability of ?the marketplace of ideas? to produce and disseminate truth if only it is left unregulated: somehow, sounder views about human dignity will emerge if the Nazis march through Skokie. Or the argument is about the insult (to the rest of us) and the stupidity of assigning to legislators the task of determining which ideas should be permitted and which ones suppressed. (As John Locke once observed, truth ?seldom has received and, I fear, never will receive much assistance from the power of great men, to whom she is but rarely known and more rarely welcome?.) Peters has plenty to say about these, too, much of it sceptical, all of it telling. He reminds us that it was Oliver Wendell Holmes who said, in a Supreme Court dissent in 1919, that ?the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,? but also that Holmes spoiled the effect somewhat by holding a decidedly pragmatic view of truth, as ?the majority vote of the nation that could lick all the others?.

The prospect of abyss-redemption is an adjunct to these other arguments: we know, for example, that John Stuart Mill thought the truth could not emerge except through ?the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners?, and that even where some doctrine is known to be true, we need combat with real opponents to maintain its vitality and keep us healthily on edge in its defence. ?Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field.? If Robert Relf, Frank Collin and David Irving did not exist, it is as though we should have to invent them to keep alive the sense that fascism is vile and genocide forbidden. The virtue of looking into the abyss is a recurring motif in all sorts of free-speech argumentation.

Peters has, I think, done us a service in pursuing this idea of abyss-redemption. I don?t mean he commends it to us: he does not. But he rightly observes that we had better come to terms with it if we want to understand what is really going on, what has been going on for centuries, in free-speech debates. More than that, Courting the Abyss explores a number of connections between abyss-redemption as used specifically in this context, and other areas of life and culture where it is said that we are the better for gazing unflinchingly at sin or death or evil.

Some of these connections are literary or religious (or both). Abyss-redemption, Peters says, is the argument Milton?s Satan offers to Eve to overcome her reluctance to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. ?If what is evil/Be real, why not known, since easier shunn?d?? There is something of it, too, in the argument of St Paul that we cannot know the law without knowing and even tasting the sins that its naming brings to the centre of our consciousness: ?I should not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ?You shall not covet.? But sin, finding opportunity in the commandment, wrought in me all kinds of covetousness? (Romans 7.7-8). (I remember as a boy in Sunday school being very excited to find out that there was something called ?adultery? in the Ten Commandments, excited in part by the tight-lipped discretion with which Sunday school teachers responded to my impertinent questions on the matter.) This is an odd sort of tutelage that the law is supposed to provide: it sacrifices our innocence by calling sin to our attention, but it makes us more sophisticated in a grown-up form of virtue.

Some parts of Peters?s discussion are more interesting than others. There is a long disquisition on Adam Smith?s idea that a gentleman learns sympathy only as an impartial spectator of the suffering of others, and there is an attempt to connect abyss-redemption with the unflinching tough-mindedness of modern science. One gets the sense that Peters needed to squeeze in some of his favourite quotes ? from Freud (?Even the museum of human excrement could be given an interpretation to rejoice my heart?) and from Emerson (?It behooves the wise man to . . . familiarise himself with disgusting forms of disease, with sounds of execration, and the vision of violent death?). Certainly, anyone looking for an analytically rigorous consideration of abyss-redemption will be disappointed. Peters?s book is impressionistic, free-ranging, jumpy, sly, tremendously informative, funny and in places overwrought, but it is not analytic.

That?s a pity, because his argument would profit from a more orderly examination of the various kinds of benefit that are supposed to flow from the confrontations envisaged by abyss-redeemers. We tolerate, listen to and gaze at things we ought to recoil from or condemn: is this supposed to be information, inoculation or exercise? Is it like the obligation to watch bad things on the news, replacing forms of wishful thinking with a sober awareness of what is really going on? On this account, if there are people thinking Nazi thoughts, we had better know about it and that?s why we let them march through Skokie. But if this is the argument, then it cuts in both directions: to imprison David Irving is a way of keeping our awareness of the Holocaust undiminished; it is like the citizens of Weimar being forced by American soldiers to walk through Buchenwald in 1945 and see the horrors of the camp, whether this is how they wanted to exercise their right of free thought or not.

Or is abyss-redemption supposed to make us better people in some other way: thicker-skinned, desensitised, hardened against evil, more easily able to shrug it off? Might it therefore make us more accommodating, less dogmatic in our views, more ready to share the world with others ? with Nazis and racists? ? in a live-and-let-live sort of way? If so, then that?s exactly the opposite of what someone like Mill was looking for. Mill thought we needed the spectre of horror and hatred more to keep our own convictions urgently alive for combat than to bury them in Stoic resignation. And it is arguably the opposite, too, of the sort of vigorous competition that the First Amendment is supposed to foster in the free marketplace of ideas.

Certainly abyss-redemption is not what is involved in the willingness of Gandhi or Martin Luther King to stare evil down, in a real confrontation. Non-violent confrontation does not hope to learn anything from evil; it is a mode of combating it and it summons its strength from its own resources. What is changed in the confrontation is the evil itself, by being witnessed in the light of day and shown for what it is, and that is quite different from our being changed ? whether strengthened, inoculated or desensitised ? by our confrontation with it. I emphasise this because, by the end of the book, Peters seems to think that this is the only form of abyss-redemption worth taking seriously, whereas I think a more careful analysis would show that it is not a form of abyss-redemption at all.

The more telling conclusion of Peters?s book is that, for all the excitement (his own and others) at this prospect of abyss-redemption, there is really precious little in it so far as the toleration of hate-ridden speech is concerned. At best, it is the boutique faith of a few liberals who take the resilience of their own voyeurism as a sign that speech is really harmless. If it signifies anything, what it signifies is that the costs of hate speech, such as they are, are not spread evenly across the community that is supposed to tolerate them. The Robert Relfs of the world may not harm the people who call for their toleration, but then few of them are depicted as animals in posters plastered around Leamington Spa. We should speak to those who are depicted in this way, or those whose suffering or whose parents? suffering is mocked by Frank Collin and his Nazi colleagues, before we conclude that tolerating this sort of speech builds character.


http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n14/print/wald01_.html

33
3DHS / Israel threatens Holocaust
« on: February 29, 2008, 12:21:53 PM »
Israeli minister warns of Palestinian 'holocaust'
Staff and agencies guardian.co.uk
Friday February 29 2008


A Sderot chicken factory damaged by a Hamas rocket. Photograph: AP/Almog Sugavker

An Israeli minister today warned of increasingly bitter conflict in the Gaza Strip, saying the Palestinians could bring on themselves what he called a "holocaust".

"The more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves," Matan Vilnai, Israel's deputy defence minister, told army radio.

Shoah is the Hebrew word normally reserved to refer to the Jewish Holocaust. It is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi extermination of Jews during the second world war, and many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other events.

The minister's statement came after two days of tit-for-tat missile raids between Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli army. At least 32 Palestinians and one Israeli have been killed since the surge in violence on Wednesday.

Today Israel activated a rocket warning system to protect Ashkelon, a city of 120,000 people, from Palestinian attacks.

Ashkelon was hit by several Grad rockets fired from Gaza yesterday. One hit an apartment building, slicing through the roof and three floors below, and another landed near a school, wounding a 17-year-old girl.

Located 11 miles from Gaza, Ashkelon has been sporadically targeted before but not suffered direct hits or significant damage.

"It will be sad, and difficult, but we have no other choice," Vilnai said, referring to the large-scale military operation he said Israel was preparing to bring a halt to the rocket fire.

"We're getting close to using our full strength. Until now, we've used a small percentage of the army's power because of the nature of the territory."

Israel would not launch a ground offensive in the next week or two, partly because the military would prefer to wait for better weather, defence sources said. But the army had completed its preparations and was awaiting the government's order to move, officials said.

Until now, the Palestinian rocket squads have largely targeted Sderot, a small town near Gaza. Ashkelon, a big population centre only 25 miles from Tel Aviv, was caught unprepared, its mayor said on Friday.

"It's a city of 120,000 people, with large facilities ? a huge soccer stadium, a basketball stadium and a beach. No one is ready for this," Roni Mehatzri told Israel Radio.

Dozens of soldiers in orange berets from the Israeli military's home front command arrived in Ashkelon and hung posters around the city telling residents what to do in case of rocket attack.

The barrage of Iranian-made Grads directed at Ashkelon yesterday came after an escalation of violence in Gaza. Israel killed five Hamas militants on Wednesday morning, apparently including two planners of the rocket attacks, in an air strike on a minivan.

Later in the day, a Palestinian rocket killed an Israeli civilian, a 47-year-old father of four, in Sderot.

Hamas, an Islamist group with close ties to Iran, has ruled Gaza since its violent takeover there in June 2006.

Since Wednesday, 32 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli missile strikes, including 14 civilians, among them eight children, according to Palestinian officials. The youngest was a six-month-old boy, Mohammed al-Borai, whose funeral was held yesterday.

There were further indications that Israel was preparing for an offensive by sending confidential messages to world leaders, including the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, who plans to visit the region next week.

"Israel is not keen on, and rushing for, an offensive, but Hamas is leaving us no choice," the Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, told the senior figures, according to Israel's mass circulation daily, Yedioth Ahronoth.

Security sources were quoted by both Israel Radio and army radio as saying a big operation was being prepared but was not imminent.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/29/israelandthepalestinians1

34
3DHS / The Not So "Infinite" Pie
« on: February 14, 2008, 02:58:16 PM »
February 13, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Totally Spent
By ROBERT B. REICH
Berkeley, Calif.

WE?RE sliding into recession, or worse, and Washington is turning to the normal remedies for economic downturns. But the normal remedies are not likely to work this time, because this isn?t a normal downturn.

The problem lies deeper. It is the culmination of three decades during which American consumers have spent beyond their means. That era is now coming to an end. Consumers have run out of ways to keep the spending binge going.

The only lasting remedy, other than for Americans to accept a lower standard of living and for businesses to adjust to a smaller economy, is to give middle- and lower-income Americans more buying power ? and not just temporarily.

Much of the current debate is irrelevant. Even with more tax breaks for business like accelerated depreciation, companies won?t invest in more factories or equipment when demand is dropping for products and services across the board, as it is now. And temporary fixes like a stimulus package that would give households a one-time cash infusion won?t get consumers back to the malls, because consumers know the assistance is temporary. The problems most consumers face are permanent, so they are likely to pocket the extra money instead of spending it.

Another Fed rate cut might unfreeze credit markets and give consumers access to somewhat cheaper loans, but there?s no going back to the easy money of a few years ago. Lenders and borrowers have been badly burned, and the values of houses and other assets are dropping faster than interest rates can be lowered.

The underlying problem has been building for decades. America?s median hourly wage is barely higher than it was 35 years ago, adjusted for inflation. The income of a man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago. Most of what?s been earned in America since then has gone to the richest 5 percent.

Yet the rich devote a smaller percentage of their earnings to buying things than the rest of us because, after all, they?re rich. They already have most of what they want. Instead of buying, and thus stimulating the American economy, the rich are more likely to invest their earnings wherever around the world they can get the highest return.

The problem has been masked for years as middle- and lower-income Americans found ways to live beyond their paychecks. But now they have run out of ways.

The first way was to send more women into paid work. Most women streamed into the work force in the 1970s less because new professional opportunities opened up to them than because they had to prop up family incomes. The percentage of American working mothers with school-age children has almost doubled since 1970 ? to more than 70 percent. But there?s a limit to how many mothers can maintain paying jobs.

So Americans turned to a second way of spending beyond their hourly wages. They worked more hours. The typical American now works more each year than he or she did three decades ago. Americans became veritable workaholics, putting in 350 more hours a year than the average European, more even than the notoriously industrious Japanese.

But there?s also a limit to how many hours Americans can put into work, so Americans turned to a third way of spending beyond their wages. They began to borrow. With housing prices rising briskly through the 1990s and even faster from 2002 to 2006, they turned their homes into piggy banks by refinancing home mortgages and taking out home-equity loans. But this third strategy also had a built-in limit. With the bursting of the housing bubble, the piggy banks are closing.

The binge seems to be over. We?re finally reaping the whirlwind of widening inequality and ever more concentrated wealth.

The only way to keep the economy going over the long run is to increase the wages of the bottom two-thirds of Americans. The answer is not to protect jobs through trade protection. That would only drive up the prices of everything purchased from abroad. Most routine jobs are being automated anyway.

A larger earned-income tax credit, financed by a higher marginal income tax on top earners, is required. The tax credit functions like a reverse income tax. Enlarging it would mean giving workers at the bottom a bigger wage supplement, as well as phasing it out at a higher wage. The current supplement for a worker with two children who earns up to $16,000 a year is about $5,000. That amount declines as earnings increase and is eliminated at about $38,000. It should be increased to, say, $8,000 at the low end and phased out at an income of $46,000.

We also need stronger unions, especially in the local service sector that?s sheltered from global competition. Employees should be able to form a union without the current protracted certification process that gives employers too much opportunity to intimidate or coerce them. Workers should be able to decide whether to form a union with a simple majority vote.

And employers who fire workers for trying to organize should have to pay substantial fines. Right now, the typical penalty is back pay for the worker, plus interest ? a slap on the wrist.

Over the longer term, inequality can be reversed only through better schools for children in lower- and moderate-income communities. This will require, at the least, good preschools, fewer students per classroom and better pay for teachers in such schools, in order to attract the teaching talent these students need.

These measures are necessary to give Americans enough buying power to keep the American economy going. They are also needed to overcome widening inequality, and thereby keep America in one piece.


Robert B. Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author, most recently, of ?Supercapitalism.?

NY Times Editorial

35
3DHS / Moving Forward Towards a New Destiny
« on: February 06, 2008, 12:52:28 PM »
I'd like to take the time to make a proposal. Please hear me out before responding.

We need to rid ourselves of this expensive and time consuming election process. It is completely unfair to assume one man (or woman) = one vote. Why? Does anyone run a business that way? I didn't think so. Elections are an unethical waste of time and money. Strike them, they're gone.

We also need to be rid of the office of the President and those ridiculous cabinet posts. Secretary of Education? Health and Human Services? Defense? What is that garbage?

And what is this ancient document that we are bound by? We can put "founded in 1776" in our ads. We need new vision statements, new mission goals. We cannot be bound by text written by people who used the word 'Congrefs.'

Therefore, I propose the following:

1. The United States of America is a worn-out and somewhat disliked (from a global marketing view) brand name. I propose America Corp. I thought about USA Ltd., but that sounds like we're trying too hard for the younger demographic. America Corp projects strength, determination, and the will of a tough group of people.

2. America Corp will offer stocks (formerly known as Treasury Bonds) to the public, with a discounted rate to those who are most affected by America Corp policies. In other words, those with the highest income brackets will have the first options on the discounted America Corp stocks. Hedge Funds and Mutual Funds will be prohibited from purchasing these stocks.

3. Once the stocks are sold an election will be held. Now votes can be apportioned in a just way. Votes will be counted based on one's stock ownership in America Corp. The more stock one owns, the more votes one is allowed to allocate in any way the individual sees fit.

4. The election will result in a CEO of America Corp being chosen with a plurality of votes. The CEO may choose as many Vice Presidents as he (or she) deems necessary for the operation of America Corp. He will only legally be bound to select the following:

    Chief Financial Officer
    Chief Operations Officer
    Vice President of Marketing
    Vice President of Asset Protection
    Vice President of Acquisitions
    Chief Visionary Officer
    Chief Information Officer
    Chief Data Officer
    Chief Information Security Officer

These individuals will be charged with the duties of running a profitable organization and developing America Corp to its fullest capacity as the premier National Government Company (NGC) in the World!

They, and they alone, will take the powers that were once inefficiently held by the Federal Executive, Federal Judicial, Federal Legislative branches as well as the redundant branches represented in 50 states. All of this inefficiency will be removed and replaced with one private sector company that will dedicate itself to creating a superior market environment for all businesses.

5. Lawsuits against Microsoft and any other such daft policies will be certain to be relics of a past era.

6. If a policy, program, or publicly held interest is not profitable it will be terminated (with exceptions for venture capitalism of course).

7. Washington will no longer be the nation's capital. We will take competetive bids and sign contracts for varying durations on where the capital is located.

8. All public services will be fully privatized.

9. Local governments will no longer be necessary, but instead run by branch offices of America Corp.

10. Please contact your local America Corp representative if you have any questions. We're here to help you!


36
3DHS / The Boss is no longer the Expert
« on: January 25, 2008, 07:01:54 PM »
This sounds like the call to begin reorganizing into a co-operative organizational model. (highlights are mine)

From The Times

January 25, 2008

?4.9 billion? They wouldn't notice

The SocGen fraud reflects today's workplace, where workers often know as much as bosses
Chris Dillow

"French bank loses money? is a headline that inspires Schadenfreude in many Englishmen. But the ?4.9 billion (?3.7 billion) loss to fraud by a single trader give us more than a good laugh. There are some lessons to learn from it.

One is that trading in financial assets is not rocket science. Emotions matter. SocGen's rogue trader, Jer?me Kerviel, was not a criminal mastermind. What probably happened is that he first lost a small sum. Then, rather than own up and face a few embarrassing meetings and loss of a bonus, he tried the simple strategy known to every member of Gamblers Anonymous: double or quits. And when he lost on that, he hid his losses while trying to recoup them. But the losses just grew.

This is just an extreme manifestation of some errors that investors and traders commonly make. One is to fail to learn from experience. Often, if a share falls after we've bought it we infer not that we were wrong, but that we were merely unlucky. So we hold on to it in the expectation that we'll be proved right. We fail to heed W.C. Fields's advice: ?If at first you don't succeed, give up. There's no point being a damn fool about it.?

Also, our ego intrudes. We hate facing up to losses not just because they make us poorer but because they force us to acknowledge that we weren't as clever as we thought. SocGen's troubles show how far men will go to avoid facing this truth.

These errors contribute to what Meir Statman, of Santa Clara University, California, called the ?disposition effect?: investors are disposed to hold on to falling stocks in the hope they'll turn around and get even.

These biases can affect share prices. Because some investors fail to sell falling stocks, prices of them don't immediately fall as far as they should. And, for similar reasons, prices of rising shares don't immediately rise as far as they should. The result is that momentum investing - buying past winners and selling past losers - can produce good profits.

A second lesson of SocGen's fraud is that it's amazing what doesn't trouble stock markets. On the day SocGen announced its loss, and an intention to raise ?5.5 billion from the stock market, France's CAC-40 index leapt almost 4 per cent while SocGen's price fell less than 5 per cent - buttons in these markets.

Why is the market so relaxed? One reason is that there is lots of money sloshing around the global economy, much of it in the hands of Chinese and Arab sovereign wealth funds. These were quick to plug the holes in the balance sheets of Merrill Lynch and Citigroup. Markets are hoping they will do the same for SocGen.

But perhaps stock markets shouldn't be relaxed. The third lesson of SocGen is that top bosses cannot know everything that goes on in their organisations. The division in which SocGen suffered its fraud - equity futures hedging - is, by the standards of modern banking, a simple business. But it still had enough dark holes for a trader to hide huge losses. When you consider the countless other businesses that banks have - many of which make equity futures look like the Teletubbies - how many other ways are there for individuals to hide losses?

This is one of the threats still hanging over stock markets. It's quite possible that even now banks haven't yet announced the full extent of the losses they have made from holding US mortgage-backed assets. This isn't because rogue traders may be fraudulently hiding losses. It's because honest traders have lots of ways of pricing complicated illiquid assets and can fudge on the optimistic side. Unless a boss is more expert than his traders on multivariate copulas - the mathematical methods used to price such assets - he'll not see through their fudges.

And the boss won't be more expert. Why buy a dog and bark yourself? The division of labour that makes companies efficient - in so far as they are - is also a division of knowledge. It's just impossible for a bank boss to continually know more than every employee does. Ignorance, therefore, isn't a failing of a particular individual but an ineliminable fact about any organisation.
 
This highlights a curious paradox about modern organisations. Their hierarchical structure is much the same as that of the first factories of the industrial revolution. But one of the conditions that made hierarchy work back then is no longer present. That condition is that bosses know more than workers. In the first factories, bosses knew everything about production processes - men such as Arkwright and Watt had invented them - while workers knew little; they were illiterates and children. It was therefore sensible for information to flow up the hierarchy and orders to flow down.

But in today's firms, knowledge is spread throughout the business. Bosses aren't, and can't be, the know-alls that early factory owners were. Yet organisations are structured as if they are.

Perhaps we exaggerate the extent of management expertise. What looks like bosses' competence is in fact the skill and goodwill of their employees. Without this, they are like one-legged ducks. They might look calm and assured on the surface, but underneath they are paddling frantically without much idea where they are heading.


Luckily, financial markets give us a simple solution. Thanks to the easy availability of funds that track the stock market, ordinary investors don't need to worry about particular companies. We can back the field, rather than particular horses.

But voters don't have such an easy answer. SocGen shows us that big organisations can't always be run effectively, even when managed by highly intelligent and diligent people. So why should politicians pretend the opposite can be true of the State?


Chris Dillow is a columnist for

Investors Chronicle

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37
3DHS / Rape and Abuse in Iraq
« on: January 18, 2008, 11:04:45 AM »
Victim: Gang-Rape Cover-Up by U.S., Halliburton/KBR
KBR Told Victim She Could Lose Her Job If She Sought Help After Being Raped, She Says
By BRIAN ROSS, MADDY SAUER & JUSTIN ROOD
Dec. 10, 2007?


Jamie Leigh Jones

A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.

"Don't plan on working back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and there won't be a position in Houston," Jones says she was told.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave. Jones described the container as sparely furnished with a bed, table and lamp.

"It felt like prison," says Jones, who told her story to ABC News as part of an upcoming "20/20" investigation. "I was upset; I was curled up in a ball on the bed; I just could not believe what had happened."

Finally, Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a cell phone so she could call her father in Texas.

"I said, 'Dad, I've been raped. I don't know what to do. I'm in this container, and I'm not able to leave,'" she said. Her father called their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas.

"We contacted the State Department first," Poe told ABCNews.com, "and told them of the urgency of rescuing an American citizen" -- from her American employer.

Poe says his office contacted the State Department, which quickly dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to Jones' camp, where they rescued her from the container.

According to her lawsuit, Jones was raped by "several attackers who first drugged her, then repeatedly raped and injured her, both physically and emotionally."

Jones told ABCNews.com that an examination by Army doctors showed she had been raped "both vaginally and anally," but that the rape kit disappeared after it was handed over to KBR security officers.

A spokesperson for the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security told ABCNews.com he could not comment on the matter.

Over two years later, the Justice Department has brought no criminal charges in the matter. In fact, ABC News could not confirm any federal agency was investigating the case.

Legal experts say Jones' alleged assailants will likely never face a judge and jury, due to an enormous loophole that has effectively left contractors in Iraq beyond the reach of United States law.

"It's very troubling," said Dean John Hutson of the Franklin Pierce Law Center. "The way the law presently stands, I would say that they don't have, at least in the criminal system, the opportunity for justice."

Congressman Poe says neither the departments of State nor Justice will give him answers on the status of the Jones investigation.

Asked what reasons the departments gave for the apparent slowness of the probes, Poe sounded frustrated.

"There are several, I think, their excuses, why the perpetrators haven't been prosecuted," Poe told ABC News. "But I think it is the responsibility of our government, the Justice Department and the State Department, when crimes occur against American citizens overseas in Iraq, contractors that are paid by the American public, that we pursue the criminal cases as best as we possibly can and that people are prosecuted."

Since no criminal charges have been filed, the only other option, according to Hutson, is the civil system, which is the approach that Jones is trying now. But Jones' former employer doesn't want this case to see the inside of a civil courtroom.

KBR has moved for Jones' claim to be heard in private arbitration, instead of a public courtroom. It says her employment contract requires it.

In arbitration, there is no public record nor transcript of the proceedings, meaning that Jones' claims would not be heard before a judge and jury. Rather, a private arbitrator would decide Jones' case. In recent testimony before Congress, employment lawyer Cathy Ventrell-Monsees said that Halliburton won more than 80 percent of arbitration proceedings brought against it.

In his interview with ABC News, Rep. Poe said he sided with Jones.

"Air things out in a public forum of a courtroom," said Rep. Poe. "That's why we have courts in the United States."

In her lawsuit, Jones' lawyer, Todd Kelly, says KBR and Halliburton created a "boys will be boys" atmosphere at the company barracks which put her and other female employees at great risk.

"I think that men who are there believe that they live without laws," said Kelly. "The last thing she should have expected was for her own people to turn on her."

Halliburton, which has since divested itself of KBR, says it "is improperly named" in the suit.

In a statement, KBR said it was "instructed to cease" its own investigation by U.S. government authorities "because they were assuming sole responsibility for the criminal investigations."

"The safety and security of all employees remains KBR's top priority," it said in a statement. "Our commitment in this regard is unwavering."

Since the attacks, Jones has started a nonprofit foundation called the Jamie Leigh Foundation, which is dedicated to helping victims who were raped or sexually assaulted overseas while working for government contractors or other corporations.

"I want other women to know that it's not their fault," said Jones. "They can go against corporations that have treated them this way." Jones said that any proceeds from the civil suit will go to her foundation.

"There needs to be a voice out there that really pushed for change," she said. "I'd like to be that voice."


Copyright ? 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Story?id=3977702&page=2

38
3DHS / Your 19th Century Travel Guide
« on: January 16, 2008, 12:27:49 PM »
Independent.ie

The rudest travel book ever written

In the mid-19th century, one Mrs Favell Mortimer set forth to write a definitive travel guide to the world. There was just one problem: she had never set foot outside her native Shropshire. This was the result..

England

What is the character of the English? What sort of people are they? They are not very pleasant in company, because they do not like strangers, nor taking much trouble. They like best being at home, and this is right. They are very much afraid of being cheated; therefore they are careful and prudent, and slow to trust people till they know them. They are cold in their manners, yet they will often do kind actions. They are too fond of money, as well as of good eating and drinking. They are often in low spirits, and are apt to grumble, and to wish they were richer than they are, and to speak against the rulers of the land. Yet they might be the happiest people in the world, for there is no country in which there are so many Bibles.

Is London a pleasant city? No; because there is so much fog and so much smoke. This makes it dark and black. Yet the streets where rich people live are kept clean, and the maid in each house washes the steps of her master's house every morning.

Is London a pretty city? No; because it is not built by the sea-side or on high hills. Yet it has two beautiful churches - called St Paul's and Westminster Abbey - and it has some beautiful parks where ladies and gentlemen drive and walk, and where even poor children play under the shady trees.

Wales

Though the Welsh are not very clean, they make their cottages look clean by white-washing them every year, and sometimes they white-wash the pig-sties too.

Scotland

Is Scotland like England?

No - it is more beautiful. It has not as many trees as England has, but then it has very high hills, higher than any hills in England, and larger lakes, and more streams and water-falls.

One day a traveller said to a Scotchman, "Does it always rain, as it does now?" "No," replied the man, "it snaws sometimes." He said "snaws" instead of "snows", for the poor Scotch speak their words very broad.

One of the chief faults of the Scotch is the love of whisky. Another fault is the love of money. They often ask more than they ought, and are very slow to give. They are industrious, but disobliging. They will not take much trouble to please strangers. They are not as clean as English people, and they let their books be covered with dust, and even black with soot.

They are very grave, and not fond of jokes; however, they like music, and can sing some very pretty songs; but you would not like the sound of their bag-pipes. The noise is almost as ugly as the creaking of a door, or the squalling of cats.

The chief town of Scotland is Edinburgh. This is the most beautiful city in the world. What makes it so beautiful? Its green hill with the castle at the top. As you walk in the fine broad streets of Edinburgh, whenever you look up, you see this hill and its castle, and you admire them, and say, "How grand, how beautiful!"

Ireland

There are not many rich people in Ireland. Those who are rich like best going over to England and living there, and this is one reason why the poor people are so very poor. But there are some ladies and gentlemen who try to make poor people happy, and who have schools for the children.

The Irish say they are Christians, yet most of them will not read the Bible. Is not that strange? Why do they not read it, if they are Christians? Because their ministers tell them not to read it. Why? Because these ministers or priests tell them a great many wrong things, which are not written in the Bible, and they do not want the people to find out the truth. The religion they teach is called the Roman Catholic religion. It is a kind of Christian religion, but it is a very bad kind.

If you were to go to a Roman Catholic church, you would see a basin of water near the door. What is it for? It is called "holy water", because the priest has blessed it. Everybody dips his hand in this water, and sprinkles himself with it, and thinks that doing this will keep him from Satan. O how foolish!

France

The parents like to make their children little men and women. They take them where they go, keep them up late, and let them eat unwholesome food, and even allow them to talk away before grown-up people, and show how clever they are. Children of five or six years old often dine with company, when they ought to be alone with their papa and mamma, or else in the nursery.

Is there a King of France? The last King left his palace in great haste. There were crowds under his windows, and he was afraid they would burst in. So he left his dinner unfinished on the table; he did not stop to pack up his clothes, but, with his queen on his arm, he hurried through the streets, and got into a carriage and drove off. Where did he go? To England. That is a safe place for French kings.

Spain

The Spaniards are rather short and thin. Their hair and eyes are black, their skin is dark, and their cheeks pale, and their countenance is grave and sad. They walk very slowly, and hold up their heads. The women are very graceful.

They are not like the French, lively and talkative: they are grave and silent. They are not active like the Scotch, but cold and distant; nor fond of home like the English, but fond of company. Yet they are cruel, and sullen, and revengeful. They are very proud. The poor are as proud as the rich. They think no nation, and no language is like their own. It is true their language is the best in Europe, but there are very few wise books written in it.

Portugal

What? Though the Portuguese are indolent, like the Spaniards, they are not so grave, and sad, and silent. They are proud like the Spaniards, but they are more deceitful. They have black eyes, and hair, and dark complexions like the Spaniards, but they have whiter teeth, for they never smoke, and it is smoking paper cigars which spoils the teeth in Spain.

But though the Portuguese do not smoke, they have another bad habit, they take snuff continually, - the poor as well as the rich - the young as well as the old.

The Portuguese language is not as beautiful as the Spanish, it has more hissing sounds, and is spoken in harsh and squeaking tones.

No people in Europe are as clumsy and awkward with their hands as the Portuguese. It is curious to see how badly the carpenters make boxes, and the smiths make keys. The carts are very ill-made; they are drawn by two oxen, and as they move slowly along, the wheels make a loud creaking noise, which almost stuns people of other countries; but the Portuguese do not mind the sound, and say it is of use, for then there will be no danger of two carts meeting in the narrow roads.

Portugal, like Spain, is filled with robbers; the laws are not obeyed, and the wicked men often escape without being punished.

Russia

The rich people are very fond of company; nothing pleases them more than to see some sledges gallopping up to their house. Then they make fine feasts, talk and laugh, sing and dance, from morning till night. The children are allowed to play so much, that they grow up very ignorant. The boys are not t aught Latin or Greek, for they are so foolish as to think it too much trouble to learn languages which nobody speaks now. The Russians are very fond of music and dancing, and the children are very quick in learning to dance and sing; but dancing and singing will not make them wise.

The poor Russians are not black, but fair, with light hair. Why are they called "black?" Because they are very dirty. The Russians are very uneasy if they cannot bathe.

The rich people are unjust, and often do not pay their debts; they are fond of feasts and company, but they care little for their servants and poor neighbours. The poor people are civil, but sly, and dishonest, idle, and fond of drinking.

Italy

Rome is the capital of Italy, and once it was the capital of the world. It was a wicked city then, full of idols and cruelty - and it is a wicked city now. Here the Pope lives. He is the chief of all the priests of the Roman Catholic religion. Naples is much more beautiful than Rome. It is built by the sea-side, where the land is in the shape of a half-moon. This is called a bay. Naples is a gay city. The people are always moving and talking fast. The streets are full of carts and carriages laden with people - some before, and some behind, and some underneath; for even poor people like to have a ride. In Rome the people are grave and silent, but in Naples they are merry and noisy. Which city should you like best?

Germany

The Germans are very kind, and pleasant in their families. They are affectionate. They are careful, and cautious. It would be well if they were more neat and clean, especially the poor people.

Hungary

The Hungarians are a much wilder people than the Germans; they are not industrious; they do not know how to make things; most of them cannot read or write.

Prussia

Prussia is not a pretty country. It is full of sandy plains, and ugly bogs, and low fir-trees. Neither is it a healthy country. The east wind blows very sharp, and the ground is very damp. Yet in one respect it is a good country, for the religion is Protestant. There are also many good laws, and the poor people are taught to read. It is a pity there are so many soldiers.

Poland

All children who have read the Bible, know that the Jews were once called Israelites, and that they once lived in the land of Canaan. Where do they live now? In all lands; but more Jews live in Poland than in any other country. They have eyes like the hawk and noses like its beak. They are fine-looking men - such as you might imagine David and Solomon were.

The rich Jewesses wear bright turbans, adorned with diamonds and rubies. But all the Jews are not rich. Some are miserably poor.

The Jews are very troublesome in Poland. They follow travellers about, offering to help them, and will not go away when they are told. The Poles speak very rudely to the Jews, and think themselves much better; but the Jews bear rudeness with great patience, because they are accustomed to be ill-treated. The Poles love talking, and they speak so loud they almost scream; and they are proud of this, and say that the Germans are dumb.

Holland

There is no people in Europe as clean as the Dutch. If they did not rub and scrub a good deal, the damp would cover all their brass pans with rust. The poor children at school are much cleaner than English children.

The Dutch are very industrious. The king will not allow big boys to stand idle in the streets. The policemen take up idle ragged boys, and send them into the country to drain the marshy grounds; so there are very few thieves, and hardly any beggars. The Dutch children do not make as much noise at school as our children do. You hear no noise outside the school-house, and when playtime comes the scholars go out quietly. They cannot help making some noise with their feet, as they wear wooden shoes - and wooden shoes, I think, they must need to keep them out of the wet.

Denmark

This is the capital. There is not so regular and handsome a town in all Europe; but as the ground is at, it cannot be as beautiful as Edinburgh.

If you like a quiet city, you would like Copenhagen. It is so still and so silent, that you might almost think there was nobody in it.

Norway

The men are tall and strong; the women are handsome. They are a simple people - kind and good-natured, and particularly honest. In summer nights, which are quite light and very hot, the people leave their doors open, and no thief comes in, not even in the towns. Bars and bolts are of no use in Norway.

The greatest fault of the Norwegians is drunkenness. They are too fond of a spirit called finkel - something like gin, only it is made from potatoes. On every little farm there is a machine, called a still, for making it. O who can say how much mischief is done by that still!

The poor are ignorant, and not fond of reading, though they can read. They are not like the Icelanders, who drink little and read much.

Turkey

The king of Turkey is called the Sultan, or the Grand Seignor. He has a palace by the water-side where his wives live. They are all slaves brought from distant parts, and chosen for their beauty.

The Grand Seignor does what he pleases. He orders any one who offends him to be killed.

It is one of the wicked customs of this dark land to murder the boy-babies of the king's brothers. The reason is lest they are grown up any of them should try to make himself Grand Seignor.

Greece

The Greeks do not know how to bring up their children. I will relate an anecdote of one spoiled child. An English lady was in a ship not far from Athens. When it grew dark she went down into the cabin. There she saw a Greek lady lying on the floor, twisting her hands in her long hair, weeping and lamenting aloud, and crying out, "If the ship do not return to Athens immediately, I do not know what I shall do!" "What is the matter?" asked the English lady. "Oh," said she, "I have a little daughter of seven years old, and she wishes to go home; and when we told her she could not, she began to scream violently, and is still screaming so loud that I fear she will go into fits."

The English lady tried to quiet the naughty child by giving her cakes and sugar-plums. This plan succeeded. If the child had not been spoiled ever since she was a baby, she would not have been so wilful and passionate at seven years old.

Arabia

The three Evils of Arabia.

The first evil is want of water. There is no river in Arabia: and the small streams are often dried up by the heat.

The second evil is many locusts, which come in countless swarms and devour every green thing.

The third evil is the burning wind. When a traveller feels it coming, he throws himself on the ground, covering his face with his cloak lest the hot sand should be blown up his nostrils. Sometimes the men and horses are choked by the sand.

These are the three evils: but there is a still greater - the religion of Mahomed: for this injures the soul; the other evils only hurt the body.

Kurdistan

The fiercest of all the people in Asia are the Kurds. They are the terror of all who live near them. Their dwellings are in the mountains; there some live in villages, and some in black tents, and some in strong castles. At night they rush down from the mountains upon the people in the valleys, uttering a wild yell, and brandishing their swords. They enter the houses, and begin to pack up the things they find, and to place them on the backs of their mules and asses, while they drive away the cattle of the poor people; and if any one attempts to resist them, they kill him.

The reason why the Armenians live in holes in the ground is because they hope the Kurds may not find out where they are. The Kurds have thin, dark faces, hooked noses, and black eyes, with a fierce and malicious look.

Persia

Very often you may see a large company of pilgrims, some on foot and some mounted on camels, horses, and asses. They are returning from Mecca, the birth-place of Mahomed. What good have they got by their pilgrimage? None at all. They think they are grown very holy, but they make such an uproar at the inns by quarrelling and fighting when they are travelling home, that no one can bear to be near them.

China

If you were to sit by a clock, and if all the Chinese were to pass before you one at a time, and if you were to count one at each tick of the clock, and if you were never to leave off counting day or night - how long do you think it would be before you had counted all the Chinese?

Twelve years. O what a vast number of people there must be in China! In all, there are about three hundred and sixty millions!

If all the people in the world were collected together, out of every three - one would be Chinese. How sad it is to think that this immense nation (except a few) knows not God, nor His glorious Son!

All the religions of China are bad, but of the three, the religion of Confucius is the least foolish.

The religion of Taou teaches men to act like madmen.

The religion of Buddha teaches them to act like idiots.

The religion of Confucius teaches them to act like wise men, but without souls.

We must allow that the Chinese are very clever. They found out how to print, and they found out how to make gunpowder, and they found out the use of the loadstone. What is that? A piece of steel rubbed against the loadstone will always point to the north. The Chinese found out these three things, printing, gunpowder, and the use of the loadstone, before we in Europe found them out. But they did not teach them to us; we found them out ourselves.

It is a common thing to stumble over the bodies of dead babies in the streets. In England it is counted murder to kill a babe, but it is thought no harm at all in China.

Hindostan

There is no nation that has so many gods as the Hindoos. What do you think of three hundred and thirty millions? There are not so many people in Hindostan as that. No one person can know the names of all these gods; and who would wish to know them? Some of them are snakes, and some are monkeys!

Siberia

If their taste in dress is laughable, their taste in food is horrible, as you will see. A traveller went with a Samoyede family for a little while.

One day the traveller saw a Samoyede feast. A rein-deer was brought and killed before the tent door; and its bleeding body was taken into the tent, and devoured, all raw as it was, with the heartiest appetite. It was dreadful to see the Samoyedes gnawing the flesh off the bones; their faces all stained with blood, and even the child had his share of the raw meat. Truly they looked more like wolves than men.

Japan

They are a very polite people, - much politer than the Chinese - but very proud. They are a learned nation, for they can read and write, and they understand geography, arithmetic, and astronomy.

But Japan is exposed to many dangers, from wind, from water, and from fire - three terrible enemies! The waves dash with violence upon the rocky shores; the wind often blows in fearful hurricanes; while earthquakes and hot streams from the burning mountains, fill the people with terror.

But more terrible than any of these is wickedness; and very wicked customs are observed in Japan. It is very wicked for a man to kill himself, yet in Japan it is the custom for all courtiers who have offended the emperor, to cut open their own bodies with a sword. The little boys of five years old, begin to learn the dreadful art. They do not really cut themselves, but they are shown how to do it, that when they are men, they may be able to kill themselves in an elegant manner. How dreadful!

Australia

This is the largest island in the world. It is as large as Europe (which is not an island, but a continent). But how different is Australia from Europe! Instead of containing, as Europe does, a number of grand kingdoms, it has not one single king. Instead of being dilled with people, the greater part of Australia is a desert, or a forest, where a few half-naked savages are wandering.

Australia is not so fine a land as Europe, because it has not so many fine rivers; and it is fine rivers that make a fine land. Most of the rivers in Australia do not deserve the name of rivers; they are more like a number of watering holes, and are often dried up in the summer, but there is one very fine, broad, long, deep river, called the Murray. It flows for twelve hundred miles. Were there several such rivers as the Murray, then Australia would be a fine land indeed.

The women are the most ill-treated creatures in the world. The men beat them on their heads whenever they please, and cover them with bruises.

The miserable "gins" (for that is the name for a wife or woman) are not beaten only; they are half starved; for their husbands will give them no food, and they - poor things - cannot fish, or hunt, or shoot; they have nothing but the roots they dig up, and the grubs, and lizards, and snakes they find on the ground.

I have already told you that the natives have no God; yet they have a devil, whom they call Yakoo, or debbil-debbil. Of him they are always afraid, for they fancy he goes about devouring children.

These savages show themselves to be children of debbil-debbil by their actions. They kill many of their babes, that they may not have the trouble of nursing them. Old people also they kill, and laugh at the idea of making them "tumble down". One of the most horrible things they do is making the skulls of their friends into drinking-cups, and they think that, by doing so, they show their affection!! They allow the nearest relation to have the skull of the dead person. They will even eat a little piece of the dead body, just as a mark of love. But, generally speaking, it is only their enemies they eat, and they do eat them whenever they can kill them.

Egypt

The Pyramids are great piles of stones. There is one much larger than the rest. It is possible to climb to the top, for the stones of the sides are uneven, like steps; yet the steps are so high that Englishmen find it very hard to clamber up such stairs; but some Egyptians can jump from stone to stone like goats, and they help travellers to get up and to get down.

But do you not inquire what is the use of these Pyramids? For a long while people were perplexed about it. At length an opening was found in the side of one of the pyramids. Then narrow, slanting passages were discovered.

To what do the passages lead? To dark chambers. In the largest a stone chest was found; it had no lid, and it contained nothing but rubbish. What a disappointment to those who expected to find treasures, or at least, the bones of ancient kings!

Abysinnia

Perhaps there is no Christian country in the world as ignorant as Abyssinia. How should the people know anything, when even the priests know nothing! Their chief employment is dancing and singing.

In general the Abyssinians avoid everything that the Mahomedans approve, for they hate and despise them, and wish to be as unlike them as possible. On this account they never smoke, nor drink coffee, nor wash frequently.

The United States

New York is the chief city. It contains about a quarter as many people as London. It is much more beautiful, for it has neither smoke nor fog, but enjoys a clear and brilliant sunshine. In warmth it is like Spain or Italy.

There is in New York a very broad street, called Broadway, planted with trees; it is two miles long. It is thronged with splendid carriages, and people elegantly dressed.

This is the gayest city in America, and also the most ungodly. There are very few churches, but there are amusements of all kinds. It may be called a city of strangers, for people come from all parts of America to pass the winter here.

There is no place in the whole world where so many ships are all collected in one spot as in the harbour of New Orleans. But the river is the bane of the city. The banks are so low that the damps from the water render the city unwholesome. Yellow fever frequently comes and carries away thousands. New Orleans is a dangerous place to live in, both for the body and the soul.

Washington is one of the most desolate cities in the world: not because she is in ruins, but for the opposite reason - because she is unfinished. There are places marked out where houses ought to be, but where none seem ever likely to be.

The children are brought up in a very unwholesome manner. At the dinner table of the boarding-house they see all kinds of dainties, and they are allowed to eat hot cakes and rich preserves at breakfast, and ices and oysters at supper, when they ought to be satised with their basin of porridge, or their milk and water and bread and butter. The consequence is that many children die, and others are pale and sickly.

There are so many slaves in the south, that the white people indulge in the habits of idleness and luxury. The children, from their earliest age, have black people ready to do everything for them; so they learn to do nothing for themselves. As they grow up, they leave all the work to the slaves, while they themselves lounge upon sofas, reading novels - or divert themselves with company.

The people in the northern states are very industrious. As there are not many servants to be had, they wait upon themselves. The children are useful to their parents. They can be trusted to go on messages, and to make purchases, and even to go to the dentist's by themselves.

The Americans are benevolent. They love to do good, and among other things they have asylums for the blind, and hospitals for the sick, and refuges for the destitute; and they make even their prisoners comfortable - perhaps too comfortable.

Mexico

Mexico is indeed the land of robbers. They abound most in the country, because they succeed best there. It would be delightful to live in the country in Mexico, if it were not for the robbers. In Mexico it is not thought a disgrace to be a robber. Even gentlemen, if they lose much money by gambling, will go and turn robbers for a little while, and not be ashamed. Sometimes, however, a robber is caught and hanged, and his dead body suspended in chains by the road-side. But then he is much pitied.

The most honest set of people in Mexico are the letter-carriers. These men are employed in carrying packages as well as letters, and none but trusty men could obtain employment. What dangers must these carriers encounter from the robbers! Robbers do not often break into the churches, but in times of tumult and rebellion they have even robbed churches.

New Zealand

This country is remarkable for lying just opposite Great Britain. Could a tunnel be dug quite straight through the earth from our land, that tunnel would end in New Zealand. Such a tunnel, however, never can be dug. It would be eight thousand miles deep. Though we can never reach New Zealand by a tunnel, we know that it lies just opposite to us, so that the feet of the people there are opposite to our feet.

All the seasons there are contrary to ours here; when it is summer there, it is winter here: and when it is winter there, it is summer here. The seasons there are like ours here, though they occur at different times; and the days there are of the same length as the days here, though they also occur at different times.

This is an edited extract from The Clumsiest People in Europe or Mrs Mortimer's Bad-Tempered Guide to the World, edited by Todd Pruzan, published by Random House

SCOTTISH

'They are not as clean as the English'

FRENCH

'Spoil their children'

IRISH

'Practice bad Christianity'

ENGLISH

'Low in spirits and apt to grumble'

RUSSIAN

'Sly, dishonest and idle'

KURDISH

'Fierce and malicious'

NORWEGIAN

'Too fond of finkel'

DANISH

'Their capital is not so beautiful as Edinburgh'

CHINESE

'Baby murderers'

POLISH

'Noses like beaks'

JAPANESE

'Polite, but very proud'

AMERICAN

'Idle and ungodly'

MEXICAN

'Delightful, if if were not for the robbers'

The Independent

http://www.independent.ie/travel/travel-advice/the-rudest-travel-book-ever-written-1091634.html

 

39
3DHS / Some Economic News
« on: January 11, 2008, 01:25:10 PM »
Goldman Sachs sees US recession

The investment bank Goldman Sachs has predicted that the US economy will go into recession in 2008.

Its forecast follows comments from Merrill Lynch, which said that the US economy is already in recession.

Goldman Sachs said that the slowdown would force the US Federal Reserve to reduce interest rates to 2.5% from the current level of 4.25%.

But a survey of 62 economists by the Bloomberg news agency suggested the slowdown might not lead to a recession.

Taking the mid-point of the economists' predictions for US growth in the first six months of 2008 gave an average figure of 1.5%.

Prepare yourselves

"It's soft economic activity that feels like a recession, but we probably won't have one," Bloomberg quoted Mickey Levy at Bank of America as saying.

In a note to client entitled "Prepare for recession", Goldman Sachs cut its forecast for US growth this year to 0.8% from 1.8% and said that gross domestic product would decline in the second and third quarters of the year.

It predicts that US unemployment will rise from the current 5% to 6.5%.

Last Friday's labour market figures, which showed the jobless rate rising to 5%, set stock markets falling around the world and were described by Merrill Lynch as the final proof that the recession had started.

It recommended that investors should reduce holdings in the financial sector and information technology and opt instead for healthcare stocks.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/7179298.stm

Published: 2008/01/09 14:50:44 GMT

? BBC MMVIII


 
US trade deficit widens sharply


Petroleum imports hit a record

The US trade deficit expanded to its highest level in 14 months in November as imports, especially of oil, overshadowed a rise in exports.

The Commerce Department said that the trade deficit expanded by 9.3% to $63.1bn (?32bn) driven by a 16.3% jump in America's foreign oil bill.

US exports rose by 0.4% to a new record of $142.3bn, getting a boost from the weaker dollar.

Analysts said the growing deficit could weigh on US economic growth.

But they added that the trade deficit, the gap between imports and exports, should narrow in the longer term as the weaker dollar makes US exports more competitive on world markets.

The trade gap widened by more than expected, with economist forecasting a deficit of $59bn compared with $57.8bn in October.

The US trade deficit with China shrank slightly to $24bn, down from a record high in October when shops were receiving shipments of toys in time for Christmas.

However, the figures brought the year-to-date deficit with China to $237.5bn at the end of November, already eclipsing the annual record of $232.6bn set in 2006.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/7183403.stm

Published: 2008/01/11 15:15:42 GMT

? BBC MMVIII


US prices jump most in two years
US inflation rose at its fastest pace in two years during November, spurred on by higher energy prices, according to figures from the Labor Department.
Consumer prices rose 0.8% in November from October, above market forecasts.


The figures come as US and UK central banks have been cutting interest rates to bolster weakening economic growth.

The higher than expected inflation figure saw the dollar post its biggest one-day rise against the euro in more than three years.

This is because traders now expect the Federal Reserve to delay any further rate cuts.

By late Friday afternoon trading in New York, the euro was down 1.5% to $1.4412 against the dollar.

This is the strongest the dollar has been against the single European currency since October.

"The fear is that inflation will become the bigger concern," said John Forelli of Independence Investment in Boston. "It would be a lot easier to carry out their plans if inflation was not a concern."

US shares fell on concerns that the Federal Reserve would now not cut interest rates. That expectation helped strengthen the US dollar as investors looked for assets in currencies that offered higher returns.

'Dilemma'

Earlier on Friday, a report showed that inflation in the eurozone, which covers the 13 nations that use the single European currency, also surged.

According to figures from Eurostat, consumer prices rose 3.1% in November compared with the same month in 2006, the biggest rise in more than six years and up from October's 2.6%.

Central banks are battling to keep inflation in check as a slump in the price of the US dollar, and higher energy costs have pushed up prices.

However, at the same time they are also trying to limit the impact of a global credit crunch caused by problems in the US mortgage market.

There are fears that the high energy costs and problems in the financial markets will act as a brake on consumer spending, and hamper economic growth.

Analysts said that central banks including the US Federal Reserve will have a number of factors to consider when setting borrowing costs in coming months.

"The data highlights the huge dilemma the Fed is under between trying to quell the financial dislocations in the market, easing policy, all the while inflation rates are starting to climb higher," said Kim Rupert at Action Economics.

"It's going to be a difficult road."

Background figures

The last time US inflation rose by such a large amount on a monthly basis came after an energy shortage in the wake of hurricane Katrina in September 2005.

As well as energy, the cost of clothing, airline tickets and medication also rose in November in the US.

Consumer prices increased 4.3% on a yearly basis - the most dramatic rise since June 2006.

While the US central bank has cut interest rates three times in recent months to boost the economy, analysts suggest that these figures will make another interest rate cut less likely.

For the year to date, inflation is at 4.2% - compared with 2.6% in the same month in 2006.

Separate figures from the Fed on Friday showed further evidence that the economy may not be slowing as quickly as first thought, analysts said.

Industrial production rose 0.3% in November, reversing October's 0.7% drop, the Fed said. This reversal stemmed from higher output at auto factories, contributing to the overall 0.4% rise in manufacturing output.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/7144519.stm

Published: 2007/12/14 20:32:17 GMT

? BBC MMVIII



Tacoma, WA - Friday, January 11, 2008 

Profits climb for insurers

Report says surpluses rising faster than costs

M. ALEXANDER OTTO; alex.otto@thenewstribune.com
Last updated: January 11th, 2008 01:21 AM (PST)


State Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler said two consumer groups got it right Thursday in a report claiming the state?s leading health insurance providers are making record profits while covering fewer people and spending a smaller portion of their revenues on care.
 
The Washington Community Action Network and the Northwest Federation of Community Organizations analyzed annual financial data from Kreidler?s office for Premera Blue Cross, Regence BlueShield and Group Health Cooperative, which together cover some 2 million Washingtonians, about half of the state?s health insurance market.

Among other things, the groups found the companies together made on average about $18.23 profit per member per month in 2006, up from less than $1 per member per month in 2002.

Meanwhile, net income for the companies climbed 23 percent during those years, while medical expenses increased just 16 percent, according to the report.

The report also found that the companies? surpluses rose from $833 million in 2002 to $2.2 billion in 2006.

The report ?is accurate. I stand behind it,? Kreidler said Thursday. The companies ?surpluses are rising faster than the cost of health care.?

Company spokesmen said Thursday that the report doesn?t capture the full picture.

?Insurance companies have to project what (their) medical costs are going to be and set rates accordingly,? said Group Health spokesman Mike Foley.

?It turns out health care costs didn?t go up as much as we projected, so we had an increase in our surpluses and revenues,? he said.

Kreidler said the companies did need to increase their surpluses ?which act as hedges against unexpected costs ? after hard financial times in the 1990s, but he believes now they are ?continuing to build surpluses that go beyond what they have a legitimate need for.?

So far, the extra money has not been used to lower premiums for policyholders, he said, adding at this point, ?it?s hard to justify the surpluses? while premiums have gone up ?across the board.?

The problem is worst, Kreidler said for people who buy insurance directly, instead of obtaining coverage through their employers.

Those people have seen ?significant increases in costs, and significant reductions in benefits,? he said.

The report also found that net income for the three companies rose form $244 million in 2003 to $431 million in 2006 and that subscribers dropped from 2.37 million in 2002 to 1.97 million in 2006.

Kreidler said he supports the groups? proposed legislative fixes, which include a publicly funded alternative to private health insurance and expanded oversight of health insurance companies by state government.

Kreidler said in particular he should have the ability to review and approve premiums for people who buy individual policies.

The advocacy groups? political aims prompted Premera spokesman Scott Forslund to call the report ?a misleading effort to support (an) agenda.?

?If you only look at numbers they selected and not the whole story,? the report ?may (lead) you to misleading conclusions,? he said. ?Our profit on the dollar in 2006 was 4 cents, for example.?

Forslund said the real problem is rising health costs, and the need to control them by healthier lifestyles and services aimed at preventing heart disease and other chronic conditions.

Company spokesmen said they are making changes that will reduce costs.

Some of the report?s numbers are also off, Forslund said, at least as far as Premera is concerned. He noted that the company has actually added 250,000 members since 2002, not reduced membership.

But report co-author Julie Chinitz stood by her work Thursday evening.

?We showed these calculations to an outside (health policy) expert? at the University of Washington, ?who said they were correct,? she said.

In sum, ?It appears there is a mismatch between what?s good for the health insurance companies and what?s good for the public right now,? Chinitz said.


 

40
3DHS / True intentions of Christ's teachings (Sirs)
« on: January 09, 2008, 06:14:24 PM »
Sirs stated that my Christian beliefs are too intertwined with Socialist ideology and that I contort Biblical teachings to fit my own personal ideology.

He thus stated that he knows the true teachings of Christ, therefore as a Christian I believe it is incumbent upon him to teach us. I believe Paul would agree.

I'm asking sincerely, will you teach us the true teachings of Christ not bound to any political or economic ideologies, Sirs?

41
3DHS / Thought of the Day
« on: January 08, 2008, 05:44:47 PM »
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought to himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself belongs to nobody.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau from Dissertation On the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind

42
3DHS / Time for Honest Recruitment?
« on: January 07, 2008, 02:11:09 PM »
Ex-soldier calls for "honest" recruitment
By Alexis Akwagyiram
BBC News 


The government has denied claims by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust that the British armed forces glamorise war to boost recruitment.

BBC News spoke to a former soldier to consider his views.

Barry Donnan was in the Army for six years, during which he served in the first Gulf War, Belize and Northern Ireland.

He was medically discharged in 1993 after developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Mr Donnan, from Irvine, Ayrshire, believes more should be done to highlight the life-threatening dangers that new recruits could face, arguing that military recruitment does not focus enough on the gritty realities of modern combat.

The 36-year-old agreed with the view, expressed in the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust report, that "vulnerable" teenagers were being encouraged to serve without realising the full implications of their decision.

The report from the Quaker organisation, which holds pacifism as a cornerstone of its religious beliefs, says recruits are unable to make informed choices about enlisting and that children are being targeted.


Ultimately, you're there to kill or be killed

Sharing his own experience of joining the armed forces at 16, Mr Donnan said he "naively believed it would be an adventurous lifestyle" and had been told that he could learn a trade after two or three years, only to find there were few such opportunities.

"At 16 you can't join the police, can't drink alcohol, can't vote, yet you can join up [to the armed forces]," said Mr Donnan.

"At that age you aren't switched on to the world. Parents of those under 18 should be involved in interviews, workshops and film shows to make it a mutual decision rather than one being made solely by a 15 or 16-year-old."

The trust suggests many young recruits leave when they discover the reality of life in the military and says a 2007 survey found 48% of soldiers had found army life to be worse than they had expected.

Quote
We are truthful for two main reasons - one is that we have a moral obligation to be so but the other one is that it's not in our interests to paint a distorted picture
- Bob Ainsworth Armed forces minister 


Mr Donnan agrees, citing recruitment adverts as a contributory factor.

He says the adverts are "appalling" and attract "half-hearted" people who are not aware of the realities of warfare, adding that it makes more sense to provide a "more balanced and honest" depiction of military life.

"Ultimately, you're there to kill or be killed," he said.

"If people want to take the step to join, we need to be honest and show them the reality - people would appreciate that," the former soldier said.

"We'd also retain soldiers who are there because they want to be, not half-heated ones who want to leave because they're there on false pretences."

His comments echo those made by Armed Forces Minister Bob Ainsworth, who said recruitment needed to be based on truth to ensure that military personnel were fully motivated.

'Rounded picture'

However, Mr Ainsworth rejected the notion that the recruitment process was in some way disingenuous, stressing that efforts were made to ensure information was "factual" and a "rounded picture" provided.

The minister said: "I think we are truthful for two main reasons. One is that we have a moral obligation to be so but the other one is that it's not in our interests to paint a distorted picture.

"We do not want people joining the armed forces who are not motivated, who are not capable of undertaking the training that we want them to undertake and doing the job that we ask of them at the end of the day."

The report says many recruits enlist without fully understanding their legal obligations and that recruitment literature fails to mention how, unless they leave within six months of enlisting, minors have no legal right to leave for four years.


Quote
The men and women currently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are doing a very, very good job under very difficult and demanding circumstances
- Barry Donnan 


It recommends sweeping changes, including a radical review of recruitment literature, phasing out recruitment of minors and new rights for recruits to leave service.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) says many of the report's claims are "out of date, incorrect and ill-informed" and denies children under 16 are being targeted.

However, Mr Donnan sees the perceived problems cited by the trust as being the fault of the MoD and the government.

"It all comes back to politicians and chiefs of staff. It's just bad management," said the former serviceman, who insisted that he was not "sinking the boot" into the armed forces.

'Poor housing'

"The men and women currently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are doing a very, very good job under very difficult and demanding circumstances."

He said friends still in the armed forces had told him morale was low "due to a lack of equipment and lack of medical care", as well as "poor housing".

Mr Donnan argued that an alternative recruitment approach focusing on the realities of combat, particularly the risk of death or injury, would cut recruitment costs as it would remove the need to replace young servicemen and women who are keen to leave.

He said money could them be spent on improving the lives of serving personnel by providing better housing, equipment and pension benefits.


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/7174982.stm

Published: 2008/01/07 16:04:00 GMT

? BBC MMVIII

43
3DHS / Healthcare
« on: January 07, 2008, 01:01:37 PM »
First, I think we need to correct a myth. No candidate is proposing socialized medicine. Even the leftist of candidates, Dennis Kucinich, is proposing a cooperation between private insurance and Government. So y'all can stop with the Red Scare redux from the 1950's filmstrips. If anything, all of the candidates that are proposing UHC, are proposing some form of corporatist health care. Quite frankly, none of them have the grapes to propose an NHS style system because the Health Insurance and Pharmaceutical companies have far too much money and influence. What? You think Hillary Clinton gets all that corporate money because she's proposing socialized healthcare? Bullshit. Corporatism, just in different gradients.

Second, let's end the myth that this country provides better care than other countries. We don't. All that talk of long queues in Canada and the UK and the horrible conditions of French, German, or Swedish hospitals...here's an idea ask the people that live there! I have yet to meet a Canadian, Brit, French, or German who has supported the pack of lies we toss around in this country about their healthcare systems. And what about ALL those Canadians who come to the United States because they are so behind in treatment. Prove it! Guess what? The Canadians have a problem of Americans crossing the border and using their clinics for free (that's fraud) because our Americans cannot afford the procedures or the health insurance in the United States.

Third, let's end the myth that we have an expensive system because we don't have tort reform or that Federal red tape is the problem. The former amounts to less than a 0.1% of the total medical expenses of this country. If the latter were the problem then surely the horribly evil socialised systems would be far more expensive...but they aren't. They are, in fact, much cheaper in terms of per patient expenses.

Fourth, another myth to put an end to is the myth of "freedom to choose" in the United States. In France and Canada you may go to ANY hospital or doctor you like. Try doing that with your HMO. Hell, try doing that with a PPO or POS plan. Freedom to choose, my ass.

Fifth, guess what country your chemotherapy (or any procedure) can be stopped, even if it is working, right in the middle of the procedure if you don't have the money? Here's a hint, not the UK, Canada, France, or Sweden. If you guessed the United States, you're correct. They will literally allow you to die for being too poor to pay for the treatment. Tough shit on you.

Lastly, the question is: is healthcare a universal right? or is it a commodity to be purchased by those who have the means? If you answer "yes" to the latter then you have to accept that insurance companies provide bonuses to those who deny the most cases and thereby save the company the most money. You have to accept that people will be denied medically necessary treatments, or cut off of a life saving treatment half way through its completion. People will die for profits. If you accept that, then fine. But don't make bullshit lies and excuses that this system is somehow better or more humane than the others - it is not.

To me, it is a universal right and everyone deserves the very best treatment possible no matter if they are a penniless homeless individual or a software tycoon.

Unfortunately, the best we can hope for is corporatism...and the insurance companies are just waiting to game that system.

44
3DHS / How To Torture
« on: January 07, 2008, 11:14:40 AM »
The definitive CIA manuals on interrogation including "coercive techniques."

KUBARK Part 1, Part 2, & Part 3.

The Human Resources Exploitation Manual Part 1 & Part 2

Kubark was interesting as it came from the CIA funded research of Dr. Ewen Cameron, an eminent psychiatrist in Montreal. He performed experiments on those who had no idea they were being experimented upon. One component of these experiments included Canadian Native American children, Vacaville prison inmates, as well as Cameron's own patients who came into his care with minor problems such as anxiety and left with schizophrenia, etc.

45
3DHS / Does the Road to the Future End at Dubai?
« on: December 31, 2007, 12:34:48 PM »
Sinister Paradise
Does the Road to the Future End at Dubai?
By Mike Davis

The narration begins: As your jet starts its descent, you are glued to your window. The scene below is astonishing: a 24-square-mile archipelago of coral-colored islands in the shape of an almost finished puzzle of the world. In the shallow green waters between continents, the sunken shapes of the Pyramids of Giza and the Roman Coliseum are clearly visible.

In the distance are three other large island groups configured as palms within crescents and planted with high-rise resorts, amusement parks, and a thousand mansions built on stilts over the water. The "Palms" are connected by causeways to a Miami-like beachfront chock-a-block full of mega-hotels, apartment high-rises and yacht marinas.

As the plane slowly banks toward the desert mainland, you gasp at the even more improbable vision ahead. Out of a chrome forest of skyscrapers (nearly a dozen taller than 1000 feet) soars a new Tower of Babel. It is an impossible one-half-mile high: the equivalent of the Empire State Building stacked on top of itself.

You are still rubbing your eyes with wonderment and disbelief when the plane lands and you are welcomed into an airport emporium where hundreds of shops seduce you with Gucci bags, Cartier watches, and one-kilogram bars of solid gold. You make a mental note to pick up some duty-free gold on your way out.

The hotel driver is waiting for you in a Rolls Royce Silver Seraph. Friends have recommended the Armani Hotel in the 160-story tower or the seven-star hotel with an atrium so huge that the Statue of Liberty would fit inside, but instead you have opted to fulfill a childhood fantasy. You always have wanted to be Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Your jellyfish-shaped hotel is, in fact, exactly 66 feet below the sea surface. Each of its 220 luxury suites has clear Plexiglas walls that provide spectacular views of passing mermaids as well as the hotel's famed "underwater fireworks:" a hallucinatory exhibition of "water bubbles, swirled sand, and carefully deployed lighting." Any initial anxiety about the safety of your sea-bottom resort is dispelled by the smiling concierge. The structure has a multi-level failsafe security system, he reassures you, that includes protection against terrorist submarines as well as missiles and aircraft.

Although you have an important business meeting at the Internet City free-trade zone with clients from Hyderabad and Taipei, you have arrived a day early to treat yourself to one of the famed adventures at the Restless Planet dinosaur theme park. Indeed, after a soothing night's sleep under the sea, you are aboard a monorail headed for a Jurassic jungle. Your expedition encounters some peacefully grazing Apatosaurs, but you are soon attacked by a nasty gang of velociraptors. The animatronic beasts are so flawlessly lifelike -- in fact, they have been designed by experts from the British Museum of Natural History -- that you shriek in fear and delight.

With your adrenaline pumped-up by this close call, you polish off the afternoon with some thrilling snowboarding on the local black diamond run. Next door is the Mall of Arabia, the world's largest mall -- the altar of the city's famed Shopping Festival that attracts 5 million frenetic consumers each January -- but you postpone the temptation.

Instead, you indulge in some expensive Thai fusion cuisine at a restaurant near Elite Towers that was recommended by your hotel driver. The gorgeous Russian blond at the bar keeps staring at you with almost vampire-like hunger, and you wonder whether the local sin scene is as extravagant as the shopping?..

The Sequel to Blade Runner?

Welcome to paradise. But where are you? Is this a new science-fiction novel from Margaret Atwood, the sequel to Blade Runner, or Donald Trump tripping on acid?

No, it is the Persian Gulf city-state of Dubai in 2010.

After Shanghai (current population: 15 million), Dubai (current population: 1.5 million) is the world's biggest building site: an emerging dreamworld of conspicuous consumption and what locals dub "supreme lifestyles."

Dozens of outlandish mega-projects -- including "The World" (an artificial archipelago), Burj Dubai (the Earth's tallest building), the Hydropolis (that underwater luxury hotel, the Restless Planet theme park, a domed ski resort perpetually maintained in 40C heat, and The Mall of Arabia, a hyper-mall -- are actually under construction or will soon leave the drawing boards.

Under the enlightened despotism of its Crown Prince and CEO, 56-year-old Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the Rhode-Island-sized Emirate of Dubai has become the new global icon of imagineered urbanism. Although often compared to Las Vegas, Orlando, Hong Kong or Singapore, the sheikhdom is more like their collective summation: a pastiche of the big, the bad, and the ugly. It is not just a hybrid but a chimera: the offspring of the lascivious coupling of the cyclopean fantasies of Barnum, Eiffel, Disney, Spielberg, Jerde, Wynn, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

Multibillionaire Sheik Mo -- as he's affectionately known to Dubai's expats -- not only collects thoroughbreds (the world's largest stable) and super-yachts (the 525-foot-long Project Platinum which has its own submarine and flight deck), but also seems to have imprinted Robert Venturi's cult Learning from Las Vegas in the same way that more pious Moslems have memorized The Quran. (One of the Sheik's proudest achievements, by the way, is to have introduced gated communities to Arabia.)

Under his leadership, the coastal desert has become a huge circuit board into which the elite of transnational engineering firms and retail developers are invited to plug in high-tech clusters, entertainment zones, artificial islands, "cities within cities" -- whatever is the latest fad in urban capitalism. The same phantasmagoric but generic Lego blocks, of course, can be found in dozens of aspiring cities these days, but Sheik Mo has a distinctive and inviolable criterion: Everything must be "world class," by which he means number one in The Guinness Book of Records. Thus Dubai is building the world's largest theme park, the biggest mall, the highest building, and the first sunken hotel among other firsts.

Sheikh Mo's architectural megalomania, although reminiscent of Albert Speer and his patron, is not irrational. Having "learned from Las Vegas," he understands that if Dubai wants to become the luxury-consumer paradise of the Middle East and South Asia (its officially defined "home market" of 1.6 billion), it must ceaselessly strive for excess.

From this standpoint, the city's monstrous caricature of futurism is simply shrewd marketing. Its owners love it when designers and urbanists anoint it as the cutting edge. Architect George Katodrytis wrote: "Dubai may be considered the emerging prototype for the 21st century: prosthetic and nomadic oases presented as isolated cities that extend out over the land and sea."

Moreover, Dubai can count on the peak-oil epoch to cover the costs of these hyperboles. Each time you spent $40 to fill your tank, you are helping to irrigate Sheik Mo's oasis.

Precisely because Dubai is rapidly pumping the last of its own modest endowment of oil, it has opted to become the postmodern "city of nets" -- as Bertolt Brecht called his fictional boomtown of Mahagonny -- where the super-profits of oil are to be reinvested in Arabia's one truly inexhaustible natural resource: sand. (Indeed mega-projects in Dubai are usually measured by volumes of sand moved: 1 billion cubic feet in the case of The World.)

Al-Qaeda and the war on terrorism deserve some of the credit for this boom. Since 9/11, many Middle Eastern investors, fearing possible lawsuits or sanctions, have pulled up stakes in the West. According Salman bin Dasmal of Dubai Holdings, the Saudis alone have repatriated one-third of their trillion-dollar overseas portfolio. The sheikhs are bringing it back home, and last year, the Saudis were believed to have ploughed at least $7 billion into Dubai's sand castles.

Another aqueduct of oil wealth flows from the neighboring Emirate of Abu Dhabi. The two statelets dominate the United Arab Emirates -- a quasi-nation thrown together by Sheik Mo's father and the ruler of Abu Dhabi in 1971 to fend off threats from Marxists in Oman and, later, Islamists in Iran.

Today, Dubai's security is guaranteed by the American nuclear super-carriers usually berthed at the port of Jebel Ali. Indeed, the city-state aggressively promotes itself as the ultimate elite "Green Zone" in an increasingly turbulent and dangerous region.

Meanwhile, as increasing numbers of experts warn that the age of cheap oil is passing, the al-Maktoum clan can count on a torrent of nervous oil revenue seeking a friendly and stable haven. When outsiders question the sustainability of the current boom, Dubai officials point out that their new Mecca is being built on equity, not debt.

Since a watershed 2003 decision to open unrestricted freehold ownership to foreigners, wealthy Europeans and Asians have rushed to become part of the Dubai bubble. A beachfront in one of the "Palms" or, better yet, a private island in "The World" now has the cachet of St. Tropez or Grand Cayman. The old colonial masters lead the pack as Brit expats and investors have become the biggest cheerleaders for Sheikh Mo's dreamworld: David Beckham owns a beach and Rod Stewart, an island (rumored, in fact, to be named Great Britain).

An Indentured, Invisible Majority

The utopian character of Dubai, it must be emphasized, is no mirage. Even more than Singapore or Texas, the city-state really is an apotheosis of neo-liberal values.

On the one hand, it provides investors with a comfortable, Western-style, property-rights regime, including freehold ownership, that is unique in the region. Included with the package is a broad tolerance of booze, recreational drugs, halter tops, and other foreign vices formally proscribed by Islamic law. (When expats extol Dubai's unique "openness," it is this freedom to carouse -- not to organize unions or publish critical opinions -- that they are usually praising.)

On the other hand, Dubai, together with its emirate neighbors, has achieved the state of the art in the disenfranchisement of labor. Trade unions, strikes, and agitators are illegal, and 99% of the private-sector workforce are easily deportable non-citizens. Indeed, the deep thinkers at the American Enterprise and Cato institutes must salivate when they contemplate the system of classes and entitlements in Dubai.

At the top of the social pyramid, of course, are the al-Maktoums and their cousins who own every lucrative grain of sand in the sheikhdom. Next, the native 15% percent of the population -- whose uniform of privilege is the traditional white dishdash -- constitutes a leisure class whose obedience to the dynasty is subsidized by income transfers, free education, and government jobs. A step below, are the pampered mercenaries: 150,000-or-so British ex-pats, along with other European, Lebanese, and Indian managers and professionals, who take full advantage of their air-conditioned affluence and two-months of overseas leave every summer.

However, South Asian contract laborers, legally bound to a single employer and subject to totalitarian social controls, make up the great mass of the population. Dubai lifestyles are attended by vast numbers of Filipina, Sri Lankan, and Indian maids, while the building boom is carried on the shoulders of an army of poorly paid Pakistanis and Indians working twelve-hour shifts, six and half days a week, in the blast-furnace desert heat.

Dubai, like its neighbors, flouts ILO labor regulations and refuses to adopt the international Migrant Workers Convention. Human Rights Watch in 2003 accused the Emirates of building prosperity on "forced labor." Indeed, as the British Independent recently emphasized in an expos? on Dubai, "The labour market closely resembles the old indentured labour system brought to Dubai by its former colonial master, the British."

"Like their impoverished forefathers," the paper continued, "today's Asian workers are forced to sign themselves into virtual slavery for years when they arrive in the United Arab Emirates. Their rights disappear at the airport where recruitment agents confiscate their passports and visas to control them"

In addition to being super-exploited, Dubai's helots are also expected to be generally invisible. The bleak work camps on the city's outskirts, where laborers are crowded six, eight, even twelve to a room, are not part of the official tourist image of a city of luxury without slums or poverty. In a recent visit, even the United Arab Emirate's Minister of Labor was reported to be profoundly shocked by the squalid, almost unbearable conditions in a remote work camp maintained by a large construction contractor. Yet when the laborers attempted to form a union to win back pay and improve living conditions, they were promptly arrested.

Paradise, however, has even darker corners than the indentured-labor camps. The Russian girls at the elegant hotel bar are but the glamorous facade of a sinister sex trade built on kidnapping, slavery, and sadistic violence. Dubai -- any of the hipper guidebooks will advise -- is the "Bangkok of the Middle East," populated with thousands of Russian, Armenian, Indian, and Iranian prostitutes controlled by various transnational gangs and mafias. (The city, conveniently, is also a world center for money laundering, with an estimated 10% of real estate changing hands in cash-only transactions.)

Sheikh Mo and his thoroughly modern regime, of course, disavow any connection to this burgeoning red-light industry, although insiders know that the whores are essential to keeping all those five-star hotels full of European and Arab businessmen. But the Sheikh himself has been personally linked to Dubai's most scandalous vice: child slavery.

Camel racing is a local passion in the Emirates, and in June 2004, Anti-Slavery International released photos of pre-school-age child jockeys in Dubai. HBO Real Sports simultaneously reported that the jockeys, "some as young as three -- are kidnapped or sold into slavery, starved, beaten and raped." Some of the tiny jockeys were shown at a Dubai camel track owned by the al-Maktoums.

The Lexington Herald-Leader -- a newspaper in Kentucky, where Sheikh Mo has two large thoroughbred farms -- confirmed parts of the HBO story in an interview with a local blacksmith who had worked for the crown prince in Dubai. He reported seeing "little bitty kids" as young as four astride racing camels. Camel trainers claim that the children's shrieks of terror spur the animals to a faster effort.

Sheikh Mo, who fancies himself a prophet of modernization, likes to impress visitors with clever proverbs and heavy aphorisms. A favorite: "Anyone who does not attempt to change the future will stay a captive of the past."

Yet the future that he is building in Dubai -- to the applause of billionaires and transnational corporations everywhere -- looks like nothing so much as a nightmare of the past: Walt Disney meets Albert Speer on the shores of Araby.

Copyright Mike Davis

Note: the author in some cases uses a shortened form of the Sheikh's name ("Mo" for Mohammed). This is generally offensive to a lot of Muslims, but I'm not going to edit Davis' words. He is a well-respected academic, especially known for his work on urbanism.

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