Archive for January, 2007
Good cause
I’m very skeptic about the influence of this, but I’m going to be there anyway for the slight hope that this demonstration will help Kareem. If you around NY today, January 31st, it will be nice if you can join:
Former Cato Institute interns and New York residents Constantino Diaz-Duran and Chris Kilmer are organizing an effort on behalf of an Egyptian student they’ve never met who faces a terrible penalty for writing his opinions on his personal blog. The event will take place Wednesday, January 31 starting at 3:30 pm at the Egyptian Consulate in New York at 1110 2nd Avenue, between E. 58th and E. 59th.
Technorati Tags: Abdel Kareem Namil - Freedom of Speech - Human Rights - Tyranny - Egypt - NYC
Escaping the calamity
Not surprisingly those people who Chavez counted on to fuel his version of socialism - those who are capable to create the wealth which he than will redistribute - aren’t planning to be enslaved and they are fleeing away:
CARACAS, Venezuela — The line forms every day after dawn at the Spanish Consulate, hundreds of people seeking papers permitting them to abandon Venezuela for new lives in Spain. They say they are filled with despair at President Hugo Chávez’s growing power, and they appear not to be alone. At other consulates in this capital, long lines form daily.
Doug, from The Liberty Papers, titled
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Don’t you see I’m on a diet?
I never smoked marijuana, but now it seems I have no choice:
LONDON (Reuters) — Britain’s GW Pharmaceuticals Plc said Tuesday it plans to start human trials of an experimental treatment for obesity derived from cannabis.
Cannabis is commonly associated with stimulating hunger. Several other companies, including Sanofi-Aventis with Acomplia, are working on new drugs that try to switch off the brain circuits that make people hungry when they smoke it.
GW Pharma, however, says it has derived a treatment from cannabis itself that could help suppress hunger.
And on a serious note, aren’t we done already protecting the tobacco industry by criminalizing marijuana?
Weight Watcher session
Technorati Tags: Marijuana - Cannabis - Diet - Legalization - Humor
Wikilobbying
Steven Colbert’s Wikilobbying is obviously humoristic, But it reflect serious concerns about lobbies and PR agencies tempering with the information in Wikipedia. I like using Wikipedia and I believe it has a potential, but it has to develop some serious defense to protect itself from such activities.
The wrong approach
In an article about the Tax Gap the WSJ notes that:
Nina Olson, the IRS’s taxpayer advocate, told Congress last year that IRS auditors have found that an estimated 94% of noncompliance is the result of honest mistakes by tax filers who simply don’t understand the 17,000-page beast of a tax code.
But if you thinks that the Congress will simplify the tax code, and by product will increase the tax collected, you should think again:
One obvious answer would be to simplify the code (more on that later). But this requires political will, so Congress naturally prefers the easier route of ratcheting up taxpayer regulation and enforcement.
Why am I not surprised?
Technorati Tags: Taxes - Tax Gap - Tax Collection - The Free Market - Tax Code
Administrative announcement
Apparently the upgrade to Wordpress 2.1 was not as smooth as I thought. Thanks to e-mail I got today I found that my RSS feed isn’t functioning properly. If you are an RSS subscriber please update your RSS reader with the following feed .
Reminder
Abdel Kareem Nabil is still in jail, and is facing sentence of up to nine years behind bars. He is such a dangerous criminal that the Egyptian authorities refuse to release him on bail. His horrible crime is:
often denounced Islamic authorities and criticized Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on his Arabic-language blog. He faces up to nine years in prison if convicted on the charges.
When wondering about the roots of desperateness, the lack of hope that is the bedding for terror, we shouldn’t only look at the obvious tyrant regimes but also on those who we claims as allies. We have no chance of influence a change in the Middle East if we are giving hand to, if only by keeping quiet, the imprisonment of a person that his crime was to have an opinion.
Technorati Tags: Abdel Kareem Namil - Freedom of Speech - Human Rights - Freedom - Tyranny
Milton Friedman Day
With my hectic schedule the last few days it completely escape from me that today, January 29th, is Milton Friedman Day. Luckily I set my DVR to record today’s broadcast of The Power of Choice The Life and Ideas of Milton Friedman.
Technorati Tags: Milton Friedman - Milton Friedman Day - Power of Choice - Capitalism - Libertarianism
Somethings never change
The NYT reports that Google improved the search algorithm to handle “search bombs” appropriately:
Google announced on Thursday on its official blog that “by improving our analysis of the link structure of the Web” such mischief would instead “typically return commentary, discussions, and articles” about the tactic itself.
Indeed, a search on Saturday of “miserable failure” on Google leads to a now-outdated BBC News article from 2003 about the “miserable failure” search, rather than the previous first result, President Bush’s portal at whitehouse.gov/president.
Such gamesmanship has been termed “Google bombing,” and is not unique to President Bush, or even politics. John F. Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, was linked to the search “waffles,” while other Google bombs have been elaborate jokes or personal vendettas.
At least one results hasn’t change since I wrote about it, few months ago. Searching for French military victories provides the same results…
Blood money
Nicholas Cristof, one of the most devoted journalist to uncover the genocide in Darfur, reports today that the likely new head of the African Union going to be:
Incredibly, that job may go to Sudan’s blood-drenched president, Omar al-Bashir, architect of the genocide in Darfur.
The outcome is still uncertain, with Sudan campaigning furiously for the job, but it’s mind-boggling that African countries would even consider selecting as their leader a man who has systematically dispatched militias that pick out babies on the basis of tribe and skin color and throw them into bonfires.
Or in simple words the person who will be in charged on the AU peacekeeping forces in Darfur will be the person who is responsible for the genocide in the first place. Incredible.
One might wonder how can such genocide continue for so long without the world stopping it. Kristof’s offer one explanation:
One reason Mr. Bashir has continued to engage in such behavior is that the world doesn’t seriously object. Almost all North African countries are backing his bid to chair the African Union. China, which supplies nearly all the AK-47s that are used to kill children in Darfur, has underwritten the genocide. Lately, it has encouraged Sudan to be more responsible, but President Hu Jintao is visiting Sudan shortly — let’s see whether he publicly expresses concern about Chinese-supported atrocities in Africa that far exceed the Rape of Nanjing.
Yet Europe is oblivious (the Davos conference here has great sessions on Africa but nothing on Darfur). President Bush has been better than most world leaders, but still pathetic: he mustered half a sentence in his State of the Union address. Perhaps this is because Mr. Bush regards the situation as tragic but hopeless, but in fact there is plenty he could do.
The WSJ provides another possible explanation to why nobody is in a rush to confront Sudan’s government:
For years, Sudan’s Darfur region has been the scene of brutal militia attacks that have left hundreds of thousands dead — violence described by the United Nations as getting support from the Sudanese government, and by the Bush administration as constituting "genocide."
At the same time, Sudan is home to investments by large international companies that are fixtures in many Americans’ mutual funds and retirement plans.
We already pointed out to the French and Chinese oil interests in Darfur, apparently many more are involve.
Many years ago I made a decision not to bank with Chase after I found that they were activity involved in selling Bonds for the Nazi regime in Germany. I’m going to update my list with companies that decided to make their profit helping the butchers from Sudan.
Technorati Tags: Darfur - China - Europe - Oil for blood - Bush - Genocide