Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
The teaser to the news article reads “NORTH KOREANS FACE WINTER WITHOUT ADEQUATE FOOD”.
Can someone please tell me how this is different from the last 20 years?
There are times when the only reasonable response to a tragic situation is by laughing. It is for that reason I would like to share with you the following news item.
A while back Richard North posted this at EU Referendum :
Is there anything the EU has ever done that can be considered, unambiguously, an unalloyed success?
Well, if you are to believe the hype, one such is the Asia-Europe Meeting, or ASEM to its friends, a “cooperation forum” for Asian and European countries. It was initiated in 1996 “to strengthen dialogue and interaction between the two regions” and to promote “concrete cooperation that aims at sustainable economic and social development”.
Yet, via chron.com [the link doesn’t work anymore, the article can be found here, though] Associated Press writer Robert Weilaard puts a different spin on it. Normally, AP is the most Europhile of all the press agencies, but Weillaard is definitely not of the Kathy Gannon mould.
Heading his piece, “Unhappy Birthday for EU-Asia Relations”, he tells us that at a summit in Bangkok in 1996, European and Asian leaders pledged to boost economic, trade and political relations to offset America’s disproportionate weight in global affairs. Today, he adds, both sides agree that has failed miserably.
As so often, I disagree with Richard as to the merits or lack of same of the European Union, but I’ll leave that for another post.
Either way, attempts to manage trade politically always fail. I replied in the comment thread to the post in the EU Referendum forum, just arguing on general priciples, without going into the details too much:
It failed because the whole idea is wrong-headed, both in concept and in the idea “America’s disproportionate weight in global affairs” is a bad thing (I’m adding that last bit just for completeness’ sake, for it goes without saying).
We talk about “global trade” all the time, but the importance of trading partners increases more or less exponentially the closer they are to your own country. Since Asia is so far away from Europe, other trading partners take precedence, meaning that European countries necessarily trade mostly with each other as well as the United States (oil imports from Arab countries aside).
I have a great love of war-time propaganda films, particularly British ones. I have now seen a goodly number of them either at the National Film Theatre or, back in the days I still had one of them, on the goggle box. What I have always found slightly surprising is how many of them (as well as the number of thrillers published at the time) deal with fifth columnists. Some films give the impression that the country was absolutely honeycombed with groups and individuals at all social levels who sympathized with the Nazis and worked actively towards a German victory.
Naturally, I have thought, during a war, people must be alert; there will always be traitors, particularly if the war is to a very great extent an ideological one, and all others must be careful and vigilant. But was it really sensible to propagate the idea that a large proportion of the British population was not really involved in the war effort. Quite the contrary. Surely, that was completely untrue.
“Countdown to Genocide” by J. Peter Pham & Michael I. Krauss describes a situation that strains our sympathies:
Sudan seems intent on accelerating the massacre in Darfur: the government has actually proposed that the African Union troops depart when their mandate expires, to be replaced by 10,000 troops from the same Sudanese army that created the Janjaweed in the first place. Thus is set in place the most massive calculated campaign of slaughter, rape, and displacement since the Rwandan genocide (a slaughter that itself could have been mitigated had the then-head of UN peacekeeping, one Kofi Annan, not hamstrung General Roméo Dallaire, commander of the blue helmets in the benighted Central African country). By best estimates, at least 250,000 men, women, and children have already been killed in Darfur. At least another 2.5 million people whose homes have been destroyed have taken shelter in miserable camps partially under the watch of the African Union military that will be withdrawing.
A new biography The Man Who Fed the World is reviewed by: Ronald Bailey in WSJ. The now-92-year-old
remains a consultant to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico and president of a private Japanese foundation working to spread the Green Revolution to sub-Saharan Africa. He believes that biotechnology will be crucial to boosting world food supplies in the coming decades and decries the underfunding of the world’s network of nonprofit agricultural research centers.
He also laments the unnecessary suspicion with which biotech is treated these days. “Activists have resisted research,” he notes, “and governments have overregulated it.” They both miss the point. “Responsible biotechnology is not the enemy: starvation is.”
Okay – is it ever possible to beat Insta? I started this, taught a class & when I got back he had both up. Does anyone else sometimes suspect that he’s cloned himself?
Apparently, the long-time dictator of Cuba was struck from behind:
Zidane Vs. Fidel Castro – video powered by Metacafe