Month: May 2004

A friend of mine is a liberal lawyer and author. He sent me a draft of an article he is writing. Like all his stuff, it is well-written. One thing he discusses is how during the heyday of a unionized workforce in America people had contract rights in their jobs. If they were fired, they could arbitrate. Now, we have moved to a tort system where people sue for discrimination, which is way, way more expensive. He also mentions that he speaks to audiences in Europe they simply cannot grasp that most jobs in America are terminable at will. No matter how many times he explains it, they can’t grasp it. He also claims that during the era of a unionized workforce, workers got more vacations, and had retirement plans which paid fixed amounts of benefits, and workers had longer vacations, and worked shorter hours, etc. and generally people had greater faith in the country and thought they were getting a better deal in life. I am not doing justice to a draft of what promises to be a very, very interesting article. So, don’t spend too much energy arguing why these points are wrong. When it is published I’ll link to it and he can speak for himself. Anyway, as I was reading it, I was seeing more and more that the problem is not so much his analysis as the divergence between his and my basic understanding of the world, and how it works, and what is possible.

I started to draft a response, but it turned increasingly into a rant which was not really on point. So, I plunk it on here instead.

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Fascinating. That’s what I thought as I read Niall Ferguson’s Empire. It traces the course of the British Empire from Hernry VIII’s declaring himself King of Ireland in 1541 though the destruction of the British economy in WWII and their eventual loss of the ‘Jewel’ of the Empire, India. A well written book. It’s also beautifully illustrated in the hardbound edition. Ferguson tackles history by subject, so the book is only roughly chronological from chapter to chapter.

What truly amazed me, though, was the British historical perspective on the American Revolution. Here’re a few interesting excerpts.

The war is at the very heart of American’s conception of themselves: the idea of a struggle for liberty against an evil empire is the country’s creation myth. But it is the great paradox of the American Revolution… that the ones who revolted against British rule were the best-off of all Britain’s colonial subjects. There is good reason to think, by the 1770’s, New Englanders were about the wealthiest people in the world. Per capita income was at least equal to that in the United Kingdom and was more evenly distributed. The New Englanders had bigger farms, bigger families and better educations than the Old Englanders back home. And, crucially, they paid far less tax. In 1763 the average Briton paid 26 shillings a year in taxes. The equivalent figure for a Massachusetts taxpayer was just one shilling.

How’s that for a revelation? “No taxation without representation!” What taxation? Then there’s this:

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An amazing Macromedia Flash Player presentation of the work of Cesar Pelli & Associates. Start with the Projects menu, then navigate through the various building images by way of the little squares. The little square marked ‘A’ turns information on and off.

Check out, especially, the following:

Hotel > Biwako
Hotel > Seahawk

Performing Arts > Arnoff Center
Performing Arts > Dewan Filharmonik at Petronas

Back in the late 1970’s I started to hear about some amazing research that was being done with primates. Researchers were teaching them to talk using American Sign Language.

This was particularly interesting to me because I was very interested in the outdoors. The 1970’s was the Time of the Great Extinction, or so it seemed. There were all of these doom and gloom stories in the press about acid rain, the reduction of biodiversity and looming ecological calamity that was just around the corner. If it could be proven that some primates could communicate, that they actually had an intellect that was similar to a human’s in some respects, then the arguement to protect primate species would be strengthened.

But nothing happened. A chimp never got up to address Congress or testify in front of the Supreme Court. In fact, there was a rather thunderous lack of content from the researchers that were tasked with teaching the apes ASL. So I started to pay attention to what they were doing.

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For decades, spies from North Korea would secretly travel by boat to Japan. Once there they would roam the beaches, looking for isolated couples or individuals they could grab and take back to N. Korea.

After they arrived the kidnap victims would be forced to work in spy training camps, teaching Communist commandos and spies how best to pass unnoticed in Japanese society. Every so often they’d be joined by the odd duck who had actually defected to N. Korea.

Sounds like something out of a bad spy novel, doesn’t it? But it really happened. N. Korea’s been doing it for decades. Rumors and defectors have confirmed the practice, and N. Korea finally admitted to the practice a few years ago. They would even allow a few select victims, people who had children and loved ones that could be held hostage back in N. Korea, visit Japan for a short period of time.

Now it would appear that they’re going to allow the kidnap victims to finally come home. Japan brokered a deal where they’d pass on food and oil to Korea in exchange.

This is probably a mistake even though I don’t blame Japan for making the deal.

North Korea is in dire straights, with a famine that’s reached catastrophic proportions by most accounts, and the only way they’ve been able to keep going as long as they have is by threatening the free world with nuclear bombs unless they received the food and energy needed to keep the Communists in power.

The problem is that the Communists are an enormous threat. They’ve been threatening the countries around them, particularly South Korea, for over 50 years. Any direct confrontation would result in inevitable defeat for the North but would also mean huge civilian and military casualties in S. Korea.

So the hope has been that there would be some sort of collapse in North Korea. Too many starving people, too little oil and energy, and the entire house of cards should come crashing down sooner or later.

This deal the Japanese made might just prolong that, or even mean that the Communists will be able to keep going long enough for the famine to end. But, on the other hand, it will also mean that the Japanese will be able to get their people out of harm’s way before the collapse.