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In Iceland, where I have spent the past week, it is illegal to name your son Dweezil or River or your daughter Moon Unit or Fifi Trixabelle. The Government has long maintained a list of legal first names, all of which come from the Norse (Thorgil, Gunnar, Guðrún) or Biblical (Jón, Margret, Kristjana) traditions. There is also a list of middle names, many of which refer to places. For most of Iceland’s history, people had only one name, sometimes with a nickname (Eirik Raud, or Erik the Red) or a patronymic (Leifur Eiriksson, meaning Leif, son of Eirik). [click to continue…]
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McDonald's,
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rotten shark,
Taco Bell,
whale meat,
whaling
In 2003, motivated by the savagery of civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, 75 countries joined a U.N.-sponsored global initiative to prevent trade in “conflict diamonds,” popularly referred to as “blood diamonds.” Conflict diamonds are gems mined in areas afflicted by armed conflict, the proceeds of which go to purchase arms and other materiel to prolong and intensify the conflict, which is usually all about control of those same diamond deposits. This initiative, called the Kimberley Process, instituted a system of certification under which governments of both source countries and purchasing countries would collaborate to prevent conflict diamonds from being sold internationally. The Kimberley Process was endorsed by major diamond producers, including world market leader De Beers, to avoid being tainted by the blood diamond label and, perhaps coincidentally, to reinforce their market dominance by banning trade in stones of uncertain provenance. But it was also a good-faith effort to put an end to the spread of vicious conflicts motivated and fueled by mineral resources.
Less well-known than the conflicts in West Africa is the civil war that continues to rage in parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), known at various points in its history as Zaire, the Belgian Congo, and the Congo Free State, which in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the private preserve of Leopold II, King of the Belgians. The current war, which dates back to the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the overthrow of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997 and has its roots in earlier political and ethnic squabbles, is reckoned to be the deadliest armed conflict since the Second World War, claiming over five million lives between 1998 and 2008. [click to continue…]
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Playstation,
RIM,
Sam Brownback,
Samsung,
Sony,
tantalum,
Zaire
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about the strangest things. I should be like Dagwood and go down to the kitchen to make myself a sandwich, but instead I fire up my computer and start Googling. It’s less fattening, I guess.
I awoke last night wondering whether, in the wake of the Federal Government takeover of GM and Chrysler, the Feds were favoring their new subsidiaries when it came to buying government cars. Instead of returning to my vivid dream of being stranded on a desert island with a bevy of Singapore Airlines stewardesses, I decided to look it up. I couldn’t find any conclusive evidence one way or another, but I did learn a few interesting things.
One provision of last year’s Recovery Act (aka the “stimulus package”) was the Energy-Efficient Federal Motor Vehicle Fleet Procurement program, mandating the purchase of thousands of fuel-efficient cars from American car companies. I know, I missed it too the first time I read through the 1,400 page law. According to Edward Niedermeyer, writing on a blog called “The Truth About Cars,” a Freedom of Information Act inquiry to the General Services Administration revealed that as of June 2009 a total of 17,205 cars were purchased under the plan, of which 7,924 came from Ford, 6,348 from GM, and 2,933 from Chrysler. So there’s no indication the Feds bought more from government-owned GM and Chrysler than their relative market shares and/or production volumes would suggest. [click to continue…]
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Recovery Act,
stimulus package
Obamacare has passed, for better or for worse. Which it is, we probably won’t find out for several years. But it’s worth noting that one key to passage of the bill was the pharmaceuticals industry’s decision to support it. What do they get in return? Potential access to 30 million new customers, certainly. But also, as today’s Financial Times reports, “The industry won 12 years of ‘data exclusivity’ for biological medicines, protecting its most profitable drugs from lower-cost generic rivals; and rejection of a planned ban on ‘authorised generic’ or ‘pay for delay’ deals, by which companies can pay other manufacturers to defer the launch of cheaper versions of their medicines once the patents expire.” Somewhere in the 2,000 pages of legislation is almost certainly buried a raft of other special favors granted to other special interest groups, each one with a cost to both the government and the public. Can someone explain to me how this is supposed to shrink the deficit, as the Congressional Budget Office says it will?
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CNN reported yesterday that China may be on the verge of banning human consumption of dogs and cats and imposing fines of as much as 500,000 renminbi (about $73,000) on shops and restaurants that serve the meat and up to 15 days in jail for their customers. The ostensible reason is cruelty: the animals are treated horribly and confined in tiny cages in deplorable conditions. But this can’t be the real reason. Plenty of other animals are treated as badly, or worse. The life of a pig prior to slaughter is no picnic either. The real reason seems to be that given by a certain Professor Chang Jiwen of the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences, who is one of the law’s top campaigners. “Cats and dogs are loyal friends to humans,” he said. “A ban on eating them would show China has reached a new level of civilization.” [click to continue…]
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dog meat,
horse meat
