Ted Briggs, last survivor of the HMS Hood, dies at 85.
Every now and again I get reminded that I will soon be living in world that has no surviving veterans of World War II. Sometimes it feels as if time is rushing by too fast and erasing the memory of things that we really need to remember.
In this rant, Derek gives all the demagogues in his profession a stern lecture. The storm of comments that follow make for fascinating reading.
There is a difference between being a method of inquiry and a source of authority. And as this week’s essay of the week shows, the more science becomes a source of the authority, the less it works as a method of inquiry.
I got into a discussion the other night about China’s milk scandal. I was arguing that China’s dairy farmers were unlikely to be responsible for the contamination of the milk. As best as I understand it, China’s Dairy farm’s are all small low budget affairs. In my view, the types of people who run those farms are unlikely to have the accesses to melamine or have the kind of knowledge that it takes to understand how to use melamine to fool milk testing equipment.
This article from the New York Times strengthens my view. Especially this part….
Sanlu, which is 43 percent owned by the New Zealand-based Fonterra Group, one of the world’s largest dairy companies, controls the only milk station in Nantongyi village, giving it monopoly pricing power in the area. Every day farmers guide their cows to the village milking station, pump milk directly into the station tanks and then return home, waiting to hear how much they will earn, if their milk passes quality inspections.
In the first place this shows how poor China’s dairy farmers are. They don’t even own their own milking equipment. In the second place, it makes hard to understand how the farmers could have contaminated their own milk when they sold the milk straight from the cow to the company.
If the article is to be believed, third parity milking stations are quite common in China.
So what’s killing the Russians? All the usual suspects — HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, alcoholism, cancer, cardiovascular and circulatory diseases, suicides, smoking, traffic accidents — but they occur in alarmingly large numbers, and Moscow has neither the resources nor the will to stem the tide. Consider this:
Three times as many Russians die from heart-related illnesses as do Americans or Europeans, per each 100,000 people.
Tuberculosis deaths in Russia are about triple the World Health Organization’s definition of an epidemic, which is based on a new-case rate of 50 cases per 100,000 people.
Average alcohol consumption per capita is double the rate the WHO considers dangerous to one’s health.
About 1 million people in Russia have been diagnosed with HIV or AIDS, according to WHO estimates.
Using mid-year figures, it’s estimated that 25 percent more new HIV/AIDS cases will be recorded this year than were logged in 2007.
And none of this is likely to get better any time soon. Peter Piot, the head of UNAIDS, the U.N. agency created in response to the epidemic, told a press conference this summer that he is “very pessimistic about what is going on in Russia and Eastern Europe . . . where there is the least progress.” This should be all the more worrisome because young people are most at risk in Russia. In the United States and Western Europe, 70 percent of those with HIV/AIDS are men over age 30; in Russia, 80 percent of this group are aged 15 to 29.
Hypo Real Estate, Germany’s second largest real estate lender, teeters on the verge of collapse. The bank has a €400 billion balance sheet, which would make for a failure of a similar scale to Lehman’s (Hypo’s footings are roughly $550 billion, while Lehman’s were $660 billion as of its last balance sheet date).
Even though Hypo it technically a bank, it is not a depositary institution, so rescuing it poses similar difficulties (procedural and political) to the authorities as Bear and Lehman did in the US. The financial system cannot take another body blow of this magnitude. The authorities had better patch this one up over the weekend, or we face even more credit market panic on Monday.
And if that weren’t an ugly enough picture, the failure to salvage Hypo has even broader ramifications. From Marshall Auerbach, independent global strategist who does consultancy for a number of funds, and sometimes financial commentator, via e-mail:
The euro is in serious trouble with this Hypo Real Estate collapse. Germans remain completely in denial. The French get it, largely because their clever finance minister, Christine LaGarde, was educated at the University of Chicago and consequently understands something about markets. Sarkozy, to his credit, appears to be listening to her. The Germans are about to destroy EMU with their pigheadedness, and this will be the stuff of revolution, given that the German people were never consulted on abandoning the DM (if there had been a referendum, the euro would have never been accepted in Germany) and were forced to get rid of arguably the most successful post-war monetary institution, the Bundesbank.
The sop thrown their way was the stupid Stability and Growth Pact, designed by former German Finance Minister, Theo Waigel. So he has hoisted the Germans and the euro zone on a German petard. And that’s made things worse! No EU wide guarantee of deposits, no EU-wide prospect of a major fiscal stimulus and bye bye euro.
Read the rest of Yves post and the comments to get the full scale of Europe’s problems.
From the New York Times….
Gov. David A. Paterson said on Friday that he would seek $2 billion in new cuts to the state’s current budget and challenged lawmakers to abandon Albany’s spending habits amid a deepening financial crisis.
And where are the cuts going to come from?
Many observers believe that when a special legislative session is convened after the election, lawmakers will be forced to cut the two largest areas of the budget, Medicaid and education. Hospitals and their workers and teachers are among the most powerful interest groups in Albany.
Also there is this from the LA Times….
Plans by several state and local governments to borrow in recent days have been upended by the credit freeze. New Mexico was forced to put off a $500-million bond sale, Massachusetts had to pull the plug halfway into a $400-million offering, and Maine is considering canceling road projects that were to be funded with bonds.
Holy cow.
Thirty-three Democrats who opposed the measure on Monday changed their vote on Friday – Washington state Rep. Jim McDermott went the other way, switching from “yes” to “no.” They were joined by 25 Republicans – and retiring Illinois Rep. Jerry Weller, who wasn’t in town for the earlier vote.
And there was also this….
The biggest single constituency to reverse course on Friday was the Congressional Black Caucus. Thirteen CBC members changed from a “no” to a “yes,” and many of them had heard from Obama over the past few days.
Who would have thought that the black caucus would vote to give Bush sweeping powers on the advice of Obama? Who would have thought that supposedly free market Republicans would join with Democrats to enable the government to enter the market in a big way?
I am not surprised the measure passed. But the measure has sure made for strange bedfellows.