A Stitch in Haste

"A building has integrity, just like a man — and just as seldom."
--The Fountainhead

Goldilocks and the triplicate permit forms:

John Jessop earned a cult following among his colleagues after his withering comments were leaked in an e-mail which has been sent all round the country.

After being asked to fill in a "design access statement" for a storage shed on a small farm, he wrote: "The density is like on a farm, the social context is a farm in the country, the economic context is farming in the United Kingdom in 2008 (which is not very economic), the opportunities are to store equipment inside rather than the outside, the constraint is the planning system."

And under a section headed Context Analysis, he said: "The use is compatible with a farm because it is a farm building."

"It is located where it is because it is in the most convenient place, being on the farm and near the farmhouse."
...
"It can not be lower because nothing could be stored in it. It is not made any higher because that would be silly."

But since when did being "silly" stop a planning bureaucrat?

The notion that a farmer needs anybody's permission to build a farming shed on his farming land to store his farming equipment that he uses to earn his farming income shows how far the half-sibling notions of "zoning" and "environmental impact statements" have corrupted what used to be a rationally based concern for negative externalities. In the past, such reviews were cursory, common sense inquiries. Today? Yes, we the central planners have graciously allowed you to call your land a "farm," but that obviously did not mean that we would also allow you to "do farming" on it. We'll get back to you on that after we review your design access statement...

Other gems omitted from the media account:

--"Landscaping: The applicant and pervious [sic] occupants have spent a long time, probably more than a thousand years, making the countryside around the house look like farmland so that everyone can enjoy the pretty English countryside."

--"Access: There is an airport at Bristol which can be accessed by driving your tractor along the road. This gives direct access to warm sunny places all over the world."

--"Appearance: It looks like a typical modern agricultural shed in green profiled metal sheeting because that is what it is, and a great architect once said, 'Buildings should look like what they are'."

Methinks Mr. Jessop has read The Fountainhead.

Kip's Law: Every advocate of central planning always — always — envisions himself as the central planner.

Original 3-page document PDF here. (Via Fark.)

When word first started to emerge that a major cyclone had hit Burma, the first thought of many of us was, "Here we go again..."

"Again" not only in the context of the natural disaster, but also in the context of the authoritarian disaster:

The death toll from Cyclone Nargis, the deadliest in Asia since 1991, rose to nearly 22,500 with an additional 41,000 missing, even as Myanmar's leaders continued to refuse entry to U.S. disaster response teams.
...
The disaster's scale has drawn a rare acceptance of outside help from Myanmar's generals, who spurned such approaches in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

The ever-escalating death toll from the cyclone continues to be "new news." The paranoid insanity of Burma's military dictatorship is not, as I chronicled after the Boxing Day Tsunami in a piece originally published 16 February 2005:

---

Slate has a Bush-bash piece on Burma essentially asking why we are not effecting regime change in what has been described as the second worst dictatorship in the world.

Nobody in Washington loses sleep over Burma policy. Burma isn't a vital oil supplier like Saudi Arabia, we don't do much trade with Burma as we do with China, and there are no al-Qaida operatives to kill and capture as in Pakistan. Our hard interests in curbing Burma's massive opium production, preventing Burma from becoming a full-fledged Chinese satellite state, and tapping its modest oil and gas reserves are low priorities. Washington is happy to apply economic sanctions on Burma in the name of high-minded principles because those interests are small in comparison to the magnitude of human rights abuses in the country. And, oh yeah, we have other regional headaches, like figuring out what to do with North Korea.

This seems to me to be a case of wanting it both ways — the U.S. is wrong on regime change because we do it at all, and it's also wrong because we don't do it enough? Go figure.

Anyway, I found it utterly stupefying that such a piece could have not one word about the current, and far more important, scandal regarding the international community and Burma — the ludicrous "official" tsunami casualty count of 90 — not 90,000, but 90.

Leave it to a self-described "grassroots" newspaper (and Canadians, no less!) to do the real reporting:

Refusing all international aid, Burma's authorities have not let any international monitors enter its borders, even to assess the damage.
...
The [Burmese junta] SPCD has [a] reputation for downplaying disaster, and for keeping stringent control over outbound media.

Condemned by critics for outlawing fax machines, censoring television broadcasts and taking prisoners of conscience, Burma has been called the most information-starved country on earth. One example involved an attack on the convoy of Nobel Peace Laureate and democratic opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, during her brief release from house arrest in 2003. Eyewitnesses estimated some 60 dead in the ensuing clash, while the SPDC reported only four.
...
On August 8, 1988, at the height of three-weeks of carnage, junta soldiers opened fire on thousands of unarmed demonstrators in the streets of Yangon. Reporting some 500 dead ... the massacre of 8-8-88 is believed by ambassadorial staffs that witnessed it to have claimed over 10,000 lives — more, that is, than Tiananmen Square.

They claimed 500 dead, it likely turned out to be over 10,000. That's a factor of 20, which would imply not 90 tsunami casualties, but 1,800 — and if you're going to lie by a factor of 20, then why not 200 or whatever number suits your dictatorial fancy?

Not to be a Broken Window type, but the tsunami provided a unique opportunity to make some real progress in ending the Burmese nightmare. The international political community, and the international charitable community, are dropping the ball. Which doesn't stop fools from laying it all at the United States' doorstep.

How very sad.

Thomas More would be pleased:

The Bishop of Nottingham Malcolm McMahon says his diocese will cut its ties with an adoption agency because it cannot accept the government's new laws on homosexual rights.

Bishop Malcolm McMahon said he and the trustees of the Catholic Children's Society adoption agency felt that they had been forced into the decision by the Sexual Orientation Regulations which bans discrimination against gays in the provision of goods and services. The law would compel the diocese in certain circumstances to place children in the care of same-sex couples.

"We have been coerced into this, I am not happy about it at all," Bishop McMahon said. "The regulations have coerced the children's society into going against the Church's teaching, and we don't wish to do that."

A Vatican directive issued in 2003 said it was morally wrong to place children in the care of same-sex couples.

As I have noted previously, the "Catholic" opposition to gay adoption is invariably imposed from on high -- from Church officials and not from the Catholic adoption professionals themselves. Vatican theocrats and their henchmen bishops in the dioceses not only turn a blind eye to the independent objective research that universally shows that gays as a group make as good parents as straights, but they even ignore their own employees working in and running the charities -- people whom, one would think, the Church has no basis to mistrust when it comes to the best interests of children (unlike, say, the Church's own child-rapist priests here in the U.S.).

Incidentally, this particular Catholic adoption agency -- one of 13 in the U.K. -- will not close but will simply merge with its Anglican counterpart. The Church has hinted that this will be the preferred approach rather than to shut the remaining agencies down. While this is obviously good news for the children, it suggests a touch of hypocrisy on the Church's part: Isn't gay adoption arranged by Anglicans just as abominable as gay adoption arranged by Catholics? Isn't the Church conspiring in the commission of an egregious sin by turning its facilities over to heretics and their sodomite clientele?

In reality, this merely confirms that the people actually running these agencies in fact have little or no problem with gay adoption -- Catholic, Anglican or otherwise. They're not the ones quitting over this, the Catholic priests are. That speaks volumes.

(Via Religion Clause.)

Separated at birth?

Megalomaniacal villain with evil creation:


Megalomaniacal villain with evil creation:


Just saying...

---

Meanwhile:

A top Iranian judiciary official has warned against the "destructive" cultural and social consequences of importing Barbie dolls and other Western toys.

Prosecutor General Ghorban Ali Dori Najafabadi said in an official letter to Vice President Parviz Davoudi that the Western toys was a "danger" that needed to be stopped.

Iranian markets have been inundated with smuggled Western toys in recent years partly due to a dramatic rise in purchasing power as a result of huge increase in oil revenues.

In Monday's letter, Najafabadi called for a crackdown on the smuggling of these toys which threatened Iranian culture.

No word yet on whether Iran will seek to -- wait for it -- "exterminate" toy Daleks.

---

Some classic Doctor v. Davros:

"We need a real world and not the world of economic theories."
--United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

I noted, several times, the unfortunate phenomenon of rising food commodity prices — especially the "ethanol connection" — long before it was fashionable.

By "fashionable," I mean:

--United Nations bureaucrats calling the situation a "silent tsunami."

--Hugo Chavez' silly little "Mini-me," Bolivian socialist (and drug kingpin) Evo Morales, using the crisis as an excuse to demand the worldwide abolition of all capitalism (including, no doubt, the marketplace of ideas).

--Bureaucrats at the Asian Development Bank calling for an end to ethanol subsidies.

--Paul Krugman lamenting that we are "running out of planet to exploit."

--All of the above failing to connect the dots:

Just over 1 billion people live on $1 a day, the benchmark of absolute poverty; 1.5 billion live on $1 to $2 a day. Bob Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, reckons that food inflation could push at least 100m people into poverty, wiping out all the gains the poorest billion have made during almost a decade of economic growth.

The problem of course is thinking of "all the gains the poorest billion have made" solely in terms of "economic growth." But the "absolutely poor" of the world also tend to be the "absolutely oppressed" of the world — the two populations are essentially identical. Show me a hyper-poor economy, and I'll show you either a Communist dictatorship, a military junta, or a mob-installed socialist "worker's paradise" where the state has made it simply impossible for most of its people (other than state-installed crony capitalists and other politically connected elites) to do any better than "$1 to $2 a day."

When rising food prices turn "$1 to $2 a day" into "death by starvation," perhaps the problem isn't the "food prices" part but rather the "$1 to $2 a day" part. And fixing that requires fixing (i.e., scrapping) anti-democratic and anti-capitalist regimes and rhetoric.

The United States could, by itself, feed the world. Add in Europe, Canada, Australia and all the other free or mostly free Western economies that have significant (i.e., excess) agricultural capacity, and the world is simply drowning in food (has everyone forgotten the "obesity epidemic"?). The problem is not that we are "running out of food" — the problem is that we are running out of capitalism — and we need to start producing more of it. A lot more.

It's quite simple really: Give a man a fish and he's fed for a day. Stop stealing his fish and he's fed for a lifetime.

(Via Concurring Opinions. More thoughts from Reason's Matt Welch.)

It makes perfect sense to two groups of people — professional journalists* and bloodthirsty dictators:

At around 2 p.m. yesterday, a Zimbabwean police unit raided the York Lodge, a Harare hotel being used by several foreign reporters covering the elections. Five journalists were arrested. Three of them were later released, but two are still being held at Harare police headquarters. One of them is New York Times correspondent Barry Bearak.

Their lawyer, Beatrice Mtetwa, said they would be charged ... with working without accreditation in violation of a 2002 press law known as the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, under which journalists can be sentenced to up to two years in prison for working without a permit from Media and Information Commission (MIC).

Look on the bright side: Zimbabwe's barbarian censorship laws (two years in jail) are better than China's barbarian censorship laws (3.5 years).

(*One example here.)

---

Meanwhile:

The inner circle of President Robert G. Mugabe of Zimbabwe met Friday to decide how to handle the outcome of elections that the opposition contends the president lost.

The options that confront the senior leadership of the ruling party include having the president step down, holding a runoff vote later this month or prolonging their control over the country, regardless of the outcome national elections last Saturday.
...
Before the election, Mr. Mugabe repeatedly said he would not allow the opposition to take power, and since then his aides have said that he "is going to fight to the last."

The first presidential inauguration I remember watching was Reagan's in 1981:

The orderly transfer of authority as called for in the Constitution routinely takes place as it has for almost two centuries and few of us stop to think how unique we really are. In the eyes of many in the world, this every-4-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.

Mr. President, I want our fellow citizens to know how much you did to carry on this tradition. By your gracious cooperation in the transition process, you have shown a watching world that we are a united people pledged to maintaining a political system which guarantees individual liberty to a greater degree than any other, and I thank you and your people for all your help in maintaining the continuity which is the bulwark of our Republic.

Translation: "Carter, you really sucked. In fact, you sucked so bad that the nicest thing I can say about you is that you at least didn't try to stage a coup when you lost so pathetically. Thanks for that — and don't let the door hit you on the way out." I remember thinking, in my 14-year-old way, "This guy's supposedly a great orator? For saying stuff like that?"

In retrospect, however, it really is the simplest things — like "we can throw the bums out" and "you don't need a license to write" — that make the United States so obviously superior to so much of the rest of the world. And here I am today, not 14 but 41, blogospherically screaming from the rooftop essentially the same simple message, because it so desperately needs to be screamed:

We are a great nation for a reason. To the extent we forget the reason, we cease to be great.

"Subversion" (whatever that means) is still a crime in China — quite a serious one:

Chinese activist Hu Jia was jailed Thursday for three-and-a-half years for subversion, his lawyer said as rights groups said the charge is a campaign by China to silence dissent before the Olympics.

The United States and the European Union immediately spoke out in defence of Hu, who became the second Chinese dissident in less than two weeks to be jailed after using the Beijing Olympics to highlight human rights problems in China.

Hu, for many years one of China's highest-profile human rights campaigners, was found guilty at a Beijing court of "incitement to subvert state power" following a one-day trial last month, lawyer Li Fangping said.

Li said the subversion charge had related to the 34-year-old Hu posting articles on the Internet about human rights issues and speaking with foreign reporters.

Over three years in prison, for the Chinese equivalent of blogging.

Look on the bright side — maybe his jail cell will be in one of those shiny new skyscrapers China's Communist thugs are building. Who knows — maybe he'll even be shackled to a state-controlled TV so he can watch the Beijing Olympics.

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
--Article I, Section 1

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.
--Article II, Section 1

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.
--Article III, Section 1

Article II, Section 1 ... contrasts with the specific enumeration of the powers -- those "herein" -- granted to Congress in Article I.
--Memorandum for William J. Haynes II (a/k/a the "Torture Memo")

It has long been noted by the sanity-based legal community that John Yoo's "unitary executive" theory of Article II's war power is facially absurd for the simple reason that there are clear references to the military in the enumerated legislative powers of Article I, Section 8. Put succinctly, the president cannot be the commander-in-chief of an army if Congress doesn't give him that army in the first place.

In John Yoo's now-declassified "torture memo," he asserts the following:

In wartime, it is for the president alone to decide what methods to use to best prevail against the enemy. (Page 5)

Really? Consider the following hypotheticals in a pre- or non-9/11 scenario:

1. Congress, as part of a routine defense appropriation, authorizes the funding, commissioning and deployment of a fleet of naval destroyers for the specific and sole purpose of patrolling the Gulf of Mexico to protect U.S. oil rigs in that region. The legislation is unambiguous: the Navy ships are only for the Gulf of Mexico and only there to defend oil platforms. Can the president, under a purported "unitary and plenary" commander-in-chief power, order those destroyers to be redeployed to drug interdiction without a revised Congressional authorization? How would that not be an incursion upon Congress' "unitary" appropriation origination function?

2. Could the president then constitutionally defy an explicit bill (assume a veto and override) reiterating the original legislation after the redeployment? How would that not be an incursion upon Congress' "unitary" veto override function?

3. Now assume that a non-nation-state Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organization, in a coordinated attack, destroys the Golden Gate and George Washington Bridges. Could the president, without Congressional authorization, permanently redeploy those destroyers to New York and San Francisco, despite the original, unambiguous dictate by Congress that the destroyers not leave the Gulf of Mexico? (Ignore temporary redeployments under the War Powers Act.)

4. The nation subsequently learns that the Islamic terrorist organization operates mainly from bases in Hypothestan. Subsequent to either a traditional declaration of war or some analogue to the AUMF, President Sally Kern deploys ground forces to Hypothestan to fight the Islamic terrorists -- and gays (who are, recall, a greater threat to America than Islamic terrorists). Congress did not authorize the use of military force against gays, and indeed expressly forbids it in subsequent legislation comparable to Hypothetical #2. Can Commander-in-Chief Kern disregard the "incursion" of Congress upon her "unitary and plenary" commander-in-chief power under Article II, to "keep America safe"?

To the extent that these hypotheticals are absurd, they are nevertheless robust given how absurd the original thesis of the unitary executive crowd itself is. These people actually believe that the president is, or ought be, a literal dictator in a time of war -- disregarding the pesky fact that the War on Terror will last perhaps forever.

Whatever those three "Section 1" pronouncements about "powers" were intended to mean -- it surely wasn't that.

Referring my readers to Supreme Court cases, law review articles or Congressional Research Service reports may be a futile attempt at "tough love." But referring them to economics articles? That's just plain blogospheric masochism.

Having said that:

It is easy to learn the average income of a resident of El Salvador or Albania. But there is no systematic source of information on the average income of a Salvadoran or Albanian. In this new working paper, research fellow Michael Clemens and non-resident fellow Lant Pritchett create a new statistic: income per natural — the mean annual income of persons born in a given country, regardless of where that person now resides.

If income per capita has any interpretation as a welfare measure, exclusive focus on the nationally resident population can lead to substantial errors of the income of the natural population for countries where emigration is an important path to greater welfare.
...
The bottom line: migration is one of the most important sources of poverty reduction for a large portion of the developing world.

That is from the abstract of an exciting new paper from the Center for Global Development. The authors are attempting to craft a new metric, "income per natural," that would adjust traditional measures of income and welfare, most notable GDP per capita, to reflect migration trends.

For purposes of U.S. economic policy, such a statistic would be most useful. For critics of U.S. economic policy, especially the Paul Krugman - Robert Frank - Frank Pasquale wing of the radical malcontent left, it would be most damning.

The latest leftist fashion is not to criticize American economic conditions generally (since they can't — recessions and bubbles notwithstanding, the American economy is still a strong cornerstone of the global economic engine and America is still the foremost land of opportunity in the world). They instead now prefer to obsess about some vague gobbledygook "problem" usually referred to as "rising income inequality."

Haters of American capitalism cannot legitimately say, for example, that "the rich get richer while the poor get poorer." It's simply not true. They cannot say that federal income taxes aren't obscenely progressive — they are. They cannot say that recent tax cuts mostly benefited the rich — they did not. They cannot say that working-class Americans are facing stagnant wages — when benefits are included, blue collar workers are making more than ever. Every absolute metric of American economic conditions, over any substantial period of time, shows that, overall and on average, American capitalism works for workers.

So the new tactic of those who are running out of ways to complain about American capitalism is to lament, not the fiction of falling welfare, but the semi-fiction of "rising inequality." The poor may be getting richer, they admit, but not as fast as the rich. The gains from economic growth are "disproportionately" going to the best off among us.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

Just about any measure of income inequality must be based on percentiles — "top 1%, "top 20%, "bottom 20%," etc. But the problem with time series analyses of income percentiles is that those percentiles are not static. The people in the "top 1%" today were not, as a rule, the "top 1%" in the past and will not be the "top 1%" in the future — the demographic is fleeting and comprised at any one moment largely of people enjoying one-time windfalls: celebrities, athletes, lottery winners, people who retire and sell their businesses, farms or property. The longer the time horizon, the greater the "churn" among the hyper-rich. Consider: how many truly enduring (i.e., multi-generational) "mega-rich families" are there in America? Extreme wealth dissipates amazingly quickly here — far faster than in, e.g., Europe or Latin America.

Far more important than the churn at the top is the churn at the bottom. A significant — perhaps the largest — component of the "bottom 20%" of American households are immigrant households. Tired-poor-huddled, etc. But today's immigrant households are not tomorrow's immigrant households: even in post-Ellis-Island America, immigrants move up the economic ladder with an astonishing and magnificent alacrity. Immigrant poverty almost never passes from one generation to the next. Today's immigrant poor are tomorrow's working class and next week's middle class.

In conclusion, since we do not have a caste system in America, what is the use of comparing the "top x%" with the "bottom x%" over time when those percentiles are simply not the same people from one period to the next? Using time series percentiles as indicia of "growing income inequality" is a willful deceit by academics who know exactly what kind of analytical fraud they are peddling. To them, lying in defense of progressivism is no vice.

Meanwhile, this new "income per natural" metric — if it can be adequately measured — would go a long way to debunking the "poor stay poor" myth proffered by the leftist pseudo-intelligentsia, by carving out the immigration component of the "bottom x%" and making time series data more reflective of reality. Bottom line: The fact that the world's poorest people are still desperate to come here skewers the limousine-hating antipathy of limousine liberals. The more and better data we have to show this, the better.

(Via Will Wilkinson.)

---

Meanwhile, to the extent that there actually is a "permanent underclass" in America — particularly inner city, minority, single-parent households — one should ask whose policies brought into being the conditions that make such an underclass possible. Hint: Not any libertarian's or laissez-faire capitalist's. More on that in a future podcast — if I ever get around to editing and posting it (it's already recorded).

Charles Krauthammer, with his typical chest-thumping indignation, accuses critics of John McCain, apparently including me, of "a rank falsehood" for pressing McCain's now infamous "maybe 100" remark:

"We've been in Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea for 50 years or so." Lest anyone think he was talking about prolonged war-fighting rather than maintaining a presence in postwar Iraq, he explained: "That would be fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed." And lest anyone persist in thinking he was talking about war-fighting, he told his questioner: "It's fine with me and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintained a presence in a very volatile part of the world."

There would be a grain of truth — more like truthiness — in Krauthammer's screed but for a few pesky contrasts (i.e., "truthhoods") between Iraq on the one hand and Germany, Japan, Korea and even Kuwait on the other:

--In all the previous occupations there was a clearly delineated switch from "war" to "occupation" — V-E Day, V-J Day, etc. Such a demarcation has not occurred — and cannot occur — in Iraq. Roadside bombs were not exploding in Germany in the 1950s; suicide bombers were not self-detonating along the DMZ in the 1960s, etc. This is exactly the conundrum that McCain cannot bring himself to admit: One cannot "win" an occupation; one can only commence it, prolong it or end it.

--Whether friendly toward U.S. occupation forces or not, the Germans, Japanese, Koreans and Kuwaitis were and are unified peoples. Unlike post-Saddam Iraqis, their agendas never included blowing each other up (especially via women, children and incompetents).

If, for example, post-Hitler Catholic Bavarians had been perpetually obsessed with killing Lutheran Hessians and vice versa (in God's name, of course) — and with U.S. troops perpetually dying as recurring collateral damage — then I sincerely doubt that we would have stayed in Germany as long as we have.

The Iraq that McCain and Krauthammer expect us to be nonplussed to occupy for a century is a geopolitical impossibility. The fact that McCain cannot grasp, or is unwillingness to acknowledge, this self-evident reality makes him all the more untenable as a post-Bush commander-in-chief.

--Two words: Cold War. Only rabid warmongers and "national greatness" fetishists like McCain and Krauthammer could pretend that "Iraq isn't different." We stayed in Germany, Japan and Korea because we had to. As McCain's own recent episode of foreign policy illiteracy demonstrates, the "al Qaeda will take over" bogeyman is a laughable canard. When al Qaeda acquires ICBMs, nuclear submarines and a fleet of tanks along the Elbe, then let's talk about where we need to set up shop for "maybe 100" years.

Unlike our previous great conflicts and their subsequent great occupations — which were fundamentally strategic in nature — the War on al Qaeda requires tactical strikes on a tactical organization — bombing a training compound, assassinating a leader, infiltrating a terror cell, etc. It's a war best fought not by GI Joe but by Tom Quinn.

The only basis for wanting to occupy the world is the geopolitical equivalent of excess testosterone — of which we have had more than enough these past five years. That is hardly, to borrow Krauthammer's insolent term, a "rank falsehood."

Similar deceitful apologia from The Washington Post.

The Dalai Lama calls China's bluff:

The Dalai Lama on Tuesday invited international observers, including Chinese officials, to scour his offices here and investigate whether he had any role in inciting the latest anti-Chinese violence in Tibet. He also threatened to resign as leader of Tibet's government-in-exile in the event of spiraling bloodshed in his homeland.

To review:

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has accused the Dalai Lama of masterminding the recent days of demonstrations against Chinese rule in Tibet's capital, Lhasa. Mr Wen said the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader's claim of "cultural genocide" was "nothing but lies".
...
"There is ample fact and plenty of evidence proving this incident was organised, premeditated, masterminded and incited by the Dalai clique," he said.

If there is "ample fact and plenty of evidence," then China's Communist authoritarians should have no problem finding it. And if they can't, then surely they will be able to manufacture. Thus ever with tyrants.

---

Of course, with oppressive regimes like China manufacturing false evidence often goes hand-in-hand with concealing truthful evidence:

Internet users in China were blocked from seeing YouTube.com on Sunday after dozens of videos about protests in Tibet appeared on the popular U.S. video Web site.

The blocking added to the communist government's efforts to control what the public saw and heard about protests that erupted Friday in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, against Chinese rule.
...
Beijing tightened controls on online video with rules that took effect Jan. 30 and limited video-sharing to state-owned companies.

Acts like this (not to mention acts like this or this) ought lay to rest the preposterous notion that "Market Communism" is viable notion or that political freedom can be divorced from economic freedom. No matter how many shiny new skyscrapers (in special economic zones accessible only to loyal elites) China's Communist brutal thugs may build, it will not change the fact that they are brutal thugs.

---

As for the free world's myopic, disgraceful legitimization of China's jackboot regime via the 2008 Olympics, I merely reiterate my long-held position: Shame on anyone who competes in, sponsors, attends or even watches this totalitarian travesty.

...then only outlaws will have potatoes?

A sainsbury's executive is being investigated over claims he received £3million in bribes from a potato supplier. ... The inquiry surrounds payments allegedly made by staff at the potato producer, Greenvale, to Mr Maylam over many years.
...
The allegations raise questions about the murky world of contract negotiations between the all-powerful buyers at the big four supermarkets and their suppliers. The fact that Sainsbury's, Tesco, Asda and Morrisons control 70 per cent of grocery spending in the UK means suppliers are desperate to keep the buyers happy.

In the past this has routinely included wining and dining buyers, offering presents and occasional all-expenses paid trips abroad. However, there have also long been suspicions of under the table payments.

I find both the subject and the tenor of the story very befuddling. First, I'm not sure how one can "bribe" a private party. Only agents of the government can accept bribes, in the same way that only agents of the government can censor. Side payments such as those discovered may constitute breach of contract between Mr. Maylem and Sainsbury's, but how does that leapfrog to "corruption"? Why should this be a criminal matter?

Second, I'm not sure why private contracts between retailers and suppliers should be deemed "murky." A private contract is, um, private -- whether it happened to be openly disclosed, strictly confidential or "murky" is irrelevant. How Sainsbury's gets its potatoes and who got paid what along the way is none of my business -- only the price at which it is selling them is of any legitimate concern to me.

Third, and related, is the leftist presumption of "control" -- that four large "all-powerful" chains "control" 70% of grocery spending in the U.K. I prefer to think that (in the absence of government intrusion) 100% of grocery spending is "controlled" by consumers -- who can manipulate the potato market (i.e., by not buying potatoes) far more easily than a fiercely competitive oligopoly can. It takes very few competitors to bring about the benefits of competition -- especially for a homogeneous, commoditized service such as "grocery retailing."

When a M.P. or a cabinet minister in the U.K. is found to have been accepting potato-related bribes, let me know. Otherwise this is a waste of newsprint.