27 September 2004

Can't we just veto it in the Security Council?

[source]

I figure we are about two weeks away from the first article claiming that the re-election of President Bush would violate international law.

Peter Burnett

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Who asked for negotiations?

[source, source]

“Given the sensitivity, we are saying nothing,” one Downing Street official explained. Privately, Blair recognises the Bigley family’s predicament is “ghastly”, but he will not negotiate with terrorists.

This does not seem to bother the hostage-takers. They began taunting Western governments over their efforts to seek their citizens’ release from captivity. Late on Friday a fresh message appeared on a website believed to be used by al-Zarqawi which read: “What is laughable is the insistence of the ministers of all infidel nationalities on the phrase ‘no negotiations’. As if there was any question of negotiation. Far from it - they must obey the demands of the Mujahadeen. If you refuse, we slaughter.”

What’s sad is that this attitude is still a surprise to many in the West.

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The most pernicious myth in America

[source, source]

Macroeconomic model builders have finally realized what Henry Hazlitt and John T. Flynn (among others) knew in the 1930s: FDR’s New Deal made the Great Depression longer and deeper. It is a myth that Franklin D. Roosevelt “got us out of the Depression” and “saved capitalism from itself,” as generations of Americans have been taught by the state’s educational establishment.

This realization on the part of macroeconomists comes in the form of an article in the August 2004 Journal of Political Economy entitled “New Deal Policies and the Persistence of the Great Depression: A General Equilibrium Analysis” by UCLA economists Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian. This is a big deal, since the JPE is arguably the top academic economics journal in the world.

It’s nice to know that even top academic economic journals must eventually bow to reality.

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