Monday, October 28, 2002 :::
sports and sportsmanship don't always go together... but if u r concerned that fans at the world series or superbowl are mean-spirited, check out this article from the BBC online called Footbal faces up to new battle - about how bad racism is in European soccer. they have pull out interviews with their correspondent/ eye witnesses in each country describing the different behaviors etc.
::: posted by h at 3:27 PM
Sunday, October 27, 2002 :::
Dubya, Harken and Harvard???
one always has to wonder about cross purposes for the war on terrorism. a simple reality is that it diverts media attention away from allegations of corporate malfeasance by the nation's CEO. back in the news are connections between Dubya, Harken energy and Harvard University. in a nutshell, according to a couple of articles i've read -
Bush used to run an oil company called spectrum 7 back when his dad was still vp. harken energy bought it, gave Dubya a seat on the board and paid him 100k + a year. as it ran into its own bad patches around 1990 when Bush 41 was in effect, an unlikely investor came in to take it off the ropes. Harvard University has a corporation- managed by seven members. they do what they want with the school's endowment of $18 billion (yes B- second only to the catholic church according to one piece). Harvard and Harken formed what was known as the Harken Anadarko Partnership- (named after some oil fields in Oklahoma). why the school with VE RI TAS for its motto u ask? well the person on the Harvard corporation's board most familiar with energy investments and so forth is a man by the name of Robert G. Stone. apparently hes an oil guy, and was a big supporter of Dubya's daddy back in the day. this partnership was funded in large part by Harvard but Harken managed it. so heres the tricky part- this gets into the land of off-the-book partnerships where essentially Harken transferred its losses to the HAP in an effort to come out smellin' better.
an organization called Harvardwatch has been continuing the digging. their primary purpose seems to be an effort to act as a watchdog on the Harvard Corporation. they put out a memo a couple of weeks ago which has been written about in the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. if you click the take action now link on their site, they have cut and paste all the above articles there, along with others. they also have an online petition you can sign to encourage SEC chairman Harvey Pitt to re-open the investigation into this whole affair. i was led to all this through a well written blog by Matt Bivens called the Failsafe Point.
stay informed,
stay awake.
just stay.
::: posted by h at 9:40 PM
Saturday, October 26, 2002 :::
recommendation for a thought-provoking good time:
one-man play i saw a couple of years ago is back for a short run.
now playing: history and mystery of the universe
::: posted by h at 2:37 PM
Thursday, October 24, 2002 :::
just thought i'd throw down some links to interesting stories that washed ashore during last night's surf...
american's perceptions of risk- in regards to the sniper... fascinating way to break down probabilities-
The logic of Irrational Fear- Economist
david wessel highlights the costs of a war on Iraq calculated by a Yale economist-
The price tag of Victory- WSJ since some folks don't have a wsj accont i'm just going to cut and paste it at the bottom... the chart about best and worst case scenario costs is at the end- and has some staggering numbers.
two very diff. articles about yoga
Yoga hits new heights- CSM
Yogis behaving badly- Business2.0
feature on a guy who chose to sell everything he owns through ebay-
My life for sale- CSM
click on,
h
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The Price Tag on Victory
Over Iraq Will Be Steep
Assume George Bush gets his way, invades Iraq and throws out Saddam Hussein. Then what?
War is costly, in human life and in money. Victory will be costly, too. How costly? That depends. As one senior Bush administration official puts it: "How much do you want to change the society? And how much are you prepared to put into that, and for how long?"
President Bush hasn't answered those questions clearly, though he vows to "help the Iraqi people rebuild their economy and create institutions of liberty." A White House national-security aide, Zalmay Khalilzad, promised earlier this month that the U.S. "will meet the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people ... start immediately a major reconstruction program ... put Iraq on the path to greater economic prosperity."
Mr. Bush can marshal the backing of the American people and politicians for these ambitious goals only if he shows the same intensity that he displayed immediately after Sept. 11. ("You will be asked for your patience; for the conflict will not be short. You will be asked for resolve; for the conflict will not be easy.") He hasn't yet.
Forget idle talk about a Marshall Plan. In today's terms, that would cost $450 billion over four years. Modern America isn't that generous. "In virtually every country where the U.S. has undertaken military action over the last three decades, there has been a 'hit and run' philosophy where bombing runs have seldom been followed by construction crews," says William Nordhaus, a Yale University economist.
Relying mostly on published estimates and history, Mr. Nordhaus recently set out to put a price tag on victory, a step the administration has been reluctant to take publicly.
Occupation and peacekeeping are likely to require the U.S. and Britain -- and allies, if any -- to keep troops in Iraq for years. Iraq is eight times as large as Bosnia and has six times as many people. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization deployed more than 50,000 peacekeeping troops in Bosnia at a cost of $10 billion a year; after seven years, about 15,000 remain. The Congressional Budget Office puts the annual cost of a peacekeeper at $250,000 and, citing military experts, figures 75,000 to 200,000 troops will be needed in post-Saddam Iraq.
Best case: Peacekeeping will cost about $75 billion total over several years.
Feeding, housing and caring for refugees and others come next. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the humanitarian aid cost $500 a person a year. Mr. Nord-haus figures that between one million and five million of Iraq's 24 million people will need help.
Best case: at least $1 billion in humanitarian aid over several years.
And then comes the cost of reconstructing Iraq, which depends on much damage we do and how ambitious we are. The World Bank estimates that it cost about $1,000 a person to rebuild Lebanon, East Timor and Bosnia.
Best case: at least $25 billion to reconstruct Iraq over several years.
So the price tag for victory, by Mr. Nordhaus's estimates, works out to at least $100 billion, not counting the initial military costs or any collateral damage to the U.S. economy. Even in Washington, that's a lot of money, the equivalent of 13 years of total U.S. foreign aid to all countries and more than 20 times the international aid pledged to Afghanistan. The administration hopes the rest of the world will contribute; that's yet another reason to act only with the backing of other countries and the U.N.
Iraq does have a huge advantage over Afghanistan: oil. But at best, Iraq can increase production in the near term from its current two million barrels a day to about three million, provided Mr. Hussein doesn't sabotage the oil fields. And some proceeds may go to pay reparations that Iraq still owes from the Kuwait invasion and to service debts. Still, oil revenues will help, and oil will lure more foreign investment than Afghanistan will ever see.
Who is going to do all this work? During the 2000 campaign, Mr. Bush used "nation-building" as an epithet and criticized President Clinton for deploying the U.S. military to that end in Somalia. "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building," he said in one of the presidential debates. "I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war ... to help overthrow a dictator when it's in our best interests."
But it is often the reluctant military to whom the U.S. turns, no matter how ill-suited. "We use the military because we don't have anybody else," says John P. White, a former deputy defense secretary now at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. No wonder retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who was the U.S. commander in Europe during Bosnia, told a congressional panel last month the U.S. shouldn't use force in Iraq until it first recruits people and international organizations to handle the aftermath.
The benefits to the U.S. of disarming Iraq, establishing a democracy there and having Iraq pump more of its oil are undeniable. War is costly, but so is the aftermath. And the American people need to know more about the price of victory before the president leads them into battle.
Write to David Wessel at capital@wsj.com1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cost of Victory
Estimates of the economic cost of war with Iraq over a decade:
Category Short War With Favorable Post-War Scenario // Long war With Unfavorable Post-War Scenario
Direct military $50 billion // $140 billion
Occupation $75 billion // $250 billion
Reconstruction $21 billion // $75 billion
Humanitarian $1 billion // $5 billion
Oil-market impact $10 billion benefit (a)// $420 billion cost (b)
Other economic None //$345 billion(c) impact
Total $141 billion // $1.24 trillion
a. Assumes Iraq increases oil production
b. Assumes seven million-barrel-a-day supply disruption
c. Based on economic impact of 1990-1991 Gulf War
Source: William Nordhaus, Yale University
::: posted by h at 3:02 PM
