In this rant, Andrew Cusack argues that architects hate us and he provides evidence to back up his claim. Myself, I am not sure if they hate us or if they are so evil they just can’t tell the difference between good and bad.
It is taken for granted by most people that the rule of law requires a state. Spencer Heath MacCallum challenges that assumption in an essay entitled “The Rule of Law without the State.”
Mr. MacCallum’s proof case is none other then Somalia. This might be a little hard for some people to swallow, but the fact is that Somalia has done better by all relevant statistics since its central government was abolished. It has even improved relative to other African countries.
Now correlation does not prove causation, so Macallum’s statistics don’t prove anything. But reading this essay reminded me of Samuel’s lecture to Israelites when they asked for a king. Especially since customary law the world over tends to have a lot of similarities with the Old Testament law.
Sometimes the world is just so sick that even I can’t laugh at it. Though perhaps I am overly sensitive due to the fact that food is near and dear to my heart.
What ever the reason, I can find no humor in the fact that this country subsidizes the burning of food for fuel while at the same time slapping such heavy environmental regulations on fuel that farmers are facing shortages. This from Fox News…
NEW YORK — Fuel shortages in the U.S. Midwest are raising concerns corn farmers may have trouble harvesting their bumper crop this autumn.
Farmers planted the largest corn crop since 1944 last spring after prices hit a 10-year high of $4.37 a bushel in early 2007. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has estimated a record crop of more than 13 billion bushels.
But farmers said supplies of the ultra low sulfur diesel needed for harvesting equipment are running low, particularly in the corn-growing regions of Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa.
In Iowa, fuel shortages are anticipated as retailers report having only about 80 percent of their normal supply, said John Scott, a corn and soy farmer in west central Iowa.
“Worse case scenario is our crop stands in the field until we have fuel to harvest it,” said Scott, who has stored about one week’s supply of fuel in anticipation of shortages, but not enough to tide him over for the six-week harvest season.
Curt Watson, the President of the Minnesota Corn Growers Association, said the fuel terminal that usually supplies his area is dry. His supplier has to drive to another area, where long lines with a wait of four hours are not uncommon.
So according to this article, the checks that America Home Mortgage Investment Corp sends out to pay the property taxes are bouncing. That means that the people in those houses need to pay their bill themselves if they don’t want to lose their houses. So what has that to do with shooting government officials? Well read this….
Baltimore City received bad checks for 53 properties – a total of about $63,500. Baltimore County said American Home Mortgage checks bounced for 21 properties, totaling $41,000. Taxes are due at the end of the month.
Finance officials in the rest of the region – Anne Arundel, Carroll, Harford and Howard counties – reported no similar problems.
“This is just another chapter in what is a very difficult time for the mortgage industry,” said Donald I. Mohler III, a spokesman for Baltimore County, which no longer accepts checks from American Home Mortgage.
“It’s an unfortunate situation and we certainly hope these individuals will be able to work out some kind of agreement with their mortgage company,” Mohler said.
Anthony McCarthy, a spokesman for Mayor Sheila Dixon, said the city does not plan to notify the affected homeowners. They will get a notice in November along with all other delinquent taxpayers if the problem isn’t resolved by then.
Baltimore County said it has sent bills directly to the property owners to alert them.
Now Baltimore County is doing things right. I don’t feel any particular need to see them shot. But what excuse is there for the city of Baltimore? If the City alerted people like the county did, then people could avoid penalties.
In spite of man’s bungling nature, what can go right occasionally does so. The problem is that man typically draws the wrong lesson from when things go right. Long before 9/11, a group of highjackers almost succeeded in using a plane as a bomb. But because they were stopped, no one took the threat very seriously.
But if you read up on Air France Flight 8969, you realize how close it came to crashing into the Eiffel Tower. Or maybe how close the highjackers came to blowing up a plane over Paris. The information that is available to the public is not very clear on that point.
All that is known for sure is that Air France Flight 8969 was high jacked in Algeria in December of 1994 and the highjackers wanted to fly it to Paris. At a pit stop in Marseille the highjackers demanded 3 times as much fuel as was needed for the flight to Paris. And something convinced the French that they needed to storm the plane as soon as possible.
Why the French felt that they needed to storm the plane is not very clear. Some sources say that the French knew that the Highjackers intended to fly the plane into the Eiffel Tower. Others only say that the French suspected that this was the Highjackers aim.
Regardless, this plan might have succeeded had the French government’s original plan been carried out.
In the beginning the French government did not seem to realize that this was a suicide mission. So they made a deal with the highjackers; in return for releasing the woman and children, the plane would be allowed to fly to Paris. But at first, Algerian government would not allow the plan to take off. It seems that this delay enabled French intelligence to overhear the highjackers talking about the best way to blow the plane up over Paris.
At that point everything got fouled up in bureaucratic infighting. The Algerian government and the French government both wanted to storm the plane. In fact, the Algerians had been against letting the plane takeoff from the very beginning.
But the French government did not want the Algerian commandos to storm the plane. Instead, they wanted their own Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (most commonly referred to by the acronym GIGN) to handle to problem. Naturally, Algerian government wanted its own commandos to do the storming since the plane was on Algerian soil.
After much French arm twisting, a compromise was reached. The Algerians let the plane take off, and the French tricked the highjackers into landing at Marseille on the excuse that the plane was low on fuel. There, the GIGN intended to storm the plane. But once again things started going wrong.
The Highjackers must have realized that something was up because they suddenly took the plane close to control tower and opened fire on it. This forced GIGN to charge the plane instead of sneaking up on it as they were intending to. If it had not been for their heavy body armor, the GIGN agents would have been massacred. As it was, they were initially driven back, and many of them were seriously injured. But they managed to keep the highjackers occupied while the passengers were evacuated.
After that, they just kept on shooting until all the highjackers were dead. They must have been shooting blind because the pilots who where cowering in the cockpit had to tell them to stop shooting when all the highjackers dead.
Watching the video below of GIGN storming the plane makes you realize how badly everything could have turned out. They were very fortunate.
(One annoying thing about the Video is that the narrator does not understand anything. For one thing, he keeps saying that GIGN was throwing explosives and he makes it sound like it was an explosive that ended the fight. In reality, only the highjackers threw a grenade which injured many people. GIGN was only throwing flash bangs as there were still pilots in the cockpit. The “explosive” that GIGN throws into the cockpit at the end of the video was flash bang. The GIGN guys were running because of the well aimed hostile fire. Once flash bang went off, they started advancing again. You can see a higher quality version of this same video here. Also this clip is longer but there is no sound.)
I thought that government guaranteed deposits were supposed to stop bank runs. But apparently it does not work all that well. This from the Telegraph…..
About £1 billion was withdrawn by panicking Northern Rock customers on Friday, as fears for the bank’s future sent shock waves through the City and caused its shares to crash.
The company’s phone lines were jammed for most of the day, its website crashed and the 72 branches were besieged by thousands of worried customers after it admitted having to ask the Bank of England for emergency funding.
I have yet to read a good explanation for what Northern Rock’s problem is. But it is not going to be an independent company for long at any rate.
There is so much going on; I almost need to take a day off just to keep up with the news. But here is quick round up.
Remember how I said that every adult should read this week’s essay of the week? This is why…..
Thousands of homeowners face an “imminent risk” of losing their homes because of clashes between American Home Mortgage Investment Corp. and its former financial backers, according to Freddie Mac, a government-chartered housing financier.
In documents filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., Freddie Mac said it seized $7 million that homeowners sent to American Home to cover principal and interest payments, property taxes and insurance just before the company’s Aug. 6 collapse. American Home quit making payments to tax authorities and insurance companies Aug. 24.
Freddie Mac said 4,547 loans valued at nearly $797 million are at stake. It said it doesn’t have the loan files necessary to pay insurance premiums and property taxes on them, however. “Therefore, there is the imminent risk that borrowers’ insurance policies may lapse for nonpayment, subjecting the borrowers to a risk of loss of their mortgaged properties,” Freddie Mac said.
Property-tax bills will go unpaid, Freddie Mac said, “resulting in increased tax liabilities and possible tax-foreclosure sales.” It added it needs a court order allowing it to seize American Home’s loan files “to avoid these serious consequences stemming from AHM’s inability to service the Freddie Mac mortgage loans.” . . .
That is just a teaser. You really should follow the link above and read the whole thing.
Also, Israel has hit targets in Syrian but both the Syrians and the Israelis are keeping the details hush hush. It may have been Nuclear materials from North Korea that they were hitting. This from the Jerusalem Post…
An official in the Bush administration told the New York Times Wednesday that in recent days the IAF has flown over Syria several times in an attempt to gain intelligence on a number of suspected nuclear facilities Israel believes have been sponsored by North Korea.
“The Israelis think North Korea is selling to Iran and Syria what little they have left,” the official told the Times, adding that the alleged strike had not necessarily provided evidence to confirm the intelligence.
Meanwhile, North Korea slammed Israel for the alleged air strike, calling it a “dangerous provocation” aimed at breaching Syria’s sovereignty and upsetting peace and security in the region.
“North Korea harshly condemns the said incursion and expresses solidarity and support of the Syrian nation in its righteous cause of safeguarding national security and peace in the region.”
See here for a collection of good links on the subject. See here for some interesting thoughts on the matter.
In separate news oil has hit $80 a barrel for the first time ever.
We live in interesting times.
The idea of a town with no road signs conjures up ideas of Italian-style traffic mayhem, with cars whizzing everywhere and nervous pedestrians diving for cover. But for some traffic experts, such chaos is to be embraced — or, as the title of a recent traffic conference in Frankfurt put it, “unsafe is safe.”
Now the town of Bohmte in the German state of Lower Saxony is putting its money where its motor mouth is — it’s getting rid of its road signs in a bid to cut accidents.
According to the rest of the article, this has been tried in the Netherlands and it has worked. But I have to wonder.
For some reason this is not getting a lot of press. But this story pretty much tells it all….
A SHADOWY leftist rebel group claimed responsibility for six explosions that damaged several Mexican gas and oil pipelines today, sending flames towering into the sky and forcing the evacuation of thousands.
Financial markets in the US and Mexico were rattled by the blasts, which officials said cost hundreds of millions of dollars in lost production. Some local factories were forced to shut after natural gas supplies were cut but there were no immediate reports of injuries directly caused by the explosions and fires.
It was the second time in three months that the so-called People’s Revolutionary Army has claimed to have targeted pipelines as part of what it has labelled its “prolonged people’s war” against “the anti-people government.”
The group, known as the EPR, is an extremely secretive, tiny rebel group that staged several armed attacks on government and police installations in southern Mexico in the 1990s. It was later weakened by internal divisions, leaving it unclear which splinter group carried out the attacks.
The six explosions, which affected several natural gas pipelines and one oil pipeline in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, triggered fires that shot flames and plumes of black smoke high into the sky and could be felt kilometres away.
The rest of the story talks about the likely political and economic effects.
China is now learning why it unwise to subsidize your exporters with an artificially weak currency. Sure it makes your exports more competitive on the global market. But it also makes your imports more expensive.
As it happens, one of China’s most important imports is food. This from Macro Man….
As is generally the case, China marches to a somewhat different drumbeat to the rest of the world. So while the West has been snoozing, it’s been all action in China with the release of a (yet another) higher-than-expected CPI report and a 4.5% decline in equities. While the latter is but a blip, the former has now reached its highest level in more than ten years, and thus merits some attention.
As has been the case throughout the year, food prices account for the bulk of the rise in CPI. Non-food-price inflation remains fairly steady at around 1%, which has encouraged many China watchers to presume that the current bout of inflation need not be met with aggressive policy tightening. Just as Clara Peller asked “Where’s the beef?” in the 1980’s, the question here appears to be “Where’s the pass-though?”
Is that the right question, though? After all, a number of non-food items (energy, most conspicuously) fall under the aegis of price controls and thus should not be expected to show a price rise. And given the number of Chinese citizens living on a subsistence or quasi-subsistence basis, it is surely not in the best interests of a regime focused on stability to see food inflation (which has now hit 18.2%!) foment unrest in the hinterland.
Macro Man’s whole post is well worth reading.