Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.

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	February 6, 2003

STILL THE BEST ANTI-IRAQ-WAR CARTOON Alas a Blog talks about the shortage of pro-war cartoons at http://www.amptoons.com/blog/arc20030202.html#BlogID216 and I agree with the comments that say the reason for this has more to do with the cartoonists' natural bent to lampoon those in power, than it does to cartoonists being the last vestige of the 'liberal media'. My favourite cartoon on the Iraq war is still this one: http://www.ucomics.com/rallcom/2002/11/23/ To simultaneously skewer the administration for its insane domestic and foreign policies is sheer genius. 10:37:55 PM  trackback []  comment []

DO YOUR OWN IRAQ WEAPONS INSPECTION, COURTESY BBC The BBC has a really neat interactive map here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/middle_east/02/iraq_navigator/html/default.stm that lets you zoom in and see suspected weapons sites, location of Saddam's palaces etc. If you find anything, don't forget to report it to Colin Powell-- he's a little short on evidence this week. (Thanks to fellow Canadian Daragh Sankey for the link http://sankey.ca/d/blog/ ) 4:35:34 PM  trackback []  comment []

DOES MONEY BUY A PLAYOFF POSITION IN PROFESSIONAL SPORTS? This scatter diagram shows that, for NHL hockey, the answer is 'maybe'. Annual team salaries in $US are shown on the left axis, and points per game this season-to-date are shown on the bottom axis, which suggests: 1. Since in an average year you need 1.1 pts/game over the season to make the playoffs, on average (see trend line) $45M will get you into the playoffs, and generally the more you spend the more you get. But... 2. Spending money doesn't seem to help if you're the NY Rangers, and 3. If you have great management or coaching like Minnesota (first year in the league!), Vancouver or Ottawa (so poor they're in bankruptcy protection) you can do just fine on a shoestring. Would be interesting to see if that applies in other sports... 3:49:22 PM  trackback []  comment []

SPAM CAN BE FUN I've decided to try to reduce the tedium of deleting the 150+ pieces of spam I get each day (yes I know there are spam filters out there) by making a game of it. Herewith the first installment of 'Best of Spam': Best tease in a subject line:What is it going to take to get you to answer me? Most provocative subject line:An important message from John Ashcroft Funniest subject line: Lose 30 pounds in 3 weeks eating pizza Unintentially funniest subject line: Get an University Degree This is just from this morning's mail. I'm sure there are much better candidates for 'Best of Spam': e-mail me or comment me back with your nominations and if there's enough interest I'll do a follow-up. 1:56:16 PM  trackback []  comment []

WHAT'S REALLY WRONG WITH 'FREE' TRADE The farmers in Mexico are up in arms over NAFTA, even though there is plenty of evidence that what's putting them out of business isn't 'free' trade but the relative inefficiency and protectionism of their own methods (see for example http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/001178.html). But this entirely misses the point about the real problem with 'free' trade and why the Mexican farmers have every right to be furious. Economist Herman Daly says it best (read more in the Developing Ideas interview at http://iisd1.iisd.ca/didigest/special/daly.htm): So the opposite of free trade is not autarky or no trade. The opposite is not state trade or total monopolization of trade. The opposite of free trade, which is deregulatory, is regulated trade. Trade which is regulated in the national interest by governments involved. And the notion that there should be no national interest [in] this trade across national boundaries, that the state has no interest in this, that this should be left entirely to the mutual benefit of the trading parties ... I mean imagine if this logic were applied say to corporations - individuals within corporations just trade with each for their own mutual advantage - nonsense! ... Every deal that corporation people make has to be vetted up through higher authorities to make sure that it's really in the interest of the larger entity. And so I think the same thing is the case with trade across national boundaries. The reason again goes back to community because if you have the free flow of goods and capital and, increasingly, labour across national boundaries, then you really lose any possibility of policy at the national level. You can't have an interest rate policy that's different from your neighbour because capital is mobile. You can't have environmental cost internalization standards that are different from other people because if you have higher standards that'll raise your prices higher than your trading partners', and you put your own people at a disadvantage. So you have to have some equalizing kind of tariff... So the vision of a globally integrated economy is really a single system. You have one tightly integrated system that's mutually dependent across the globe. That's a very dangerous kind of system - something goes wrong, you're in big trouble. We prefer nations to be much more fundamentally self-sufficient, not totally self-sufficient, that's too expensive. But to the degree possible, strive for self-sufficiency and maintain loose international trading relations to make up for where it's hard to be self-sufficient. I mean everyone can make their own aspirin and matches, you don't need to trade multinationally for that. But there are some things that you do need to trade for. That's kind of the vision that we put forward, and you maintain more local control over your economic life. If you don't, then control is shifted far away and the foreigners who control the capital investment in your country may be lovely decent people, they may even be nicer than the local people, but they're far away and they don't really know or have an interest and a feel for what happens there. This is a vision that John Maynard Keynes expressed very similar kinds of notions [to] when he wrote on national self-sufficiency, and his views along with the others have kind of been swept aside in this globalization mania, which really serves the interests of the global multinational corporations because what holds them in check is the nation state - the rules of the nation. In 2008, the last and most critical U.S.-Mexico tarriff barrier is scheduled to fall -- corn. There is already evidence that Mexican farmers will never be able to compete with U.S. corn producers by then, and the result will be devastating to millions of Mexican farmers and the whole communities that depend on them. If they're already rioting in the streets now, expect bloodshed big time in 2008. If we followed Daly's principles, NAFTA wouldn't cover corn, since all three NAFTA countries produce tons of it, and it's in the best interests of the PEOPLE of each country to encourage it to be produced locally by using tarriffs, taxes, duties and subsidies if needed (all anathema under NAFTA) -- when it comes to domestic well-being, 'efficiency' be damned. If NAFTA enabled 'free' trade only in luxury items that aren't domestically produced (and there are lots of them), it would be an employment and creator benefitting everyone, not just MNCs. But since the governments of all 3 NAFTA countries are (at least for now) in the back pockets of the MNCs, don't expect this renegotiation to happen soon. 12:55:45 PM  trackback []  comment []

CIVILIZATION 101 Natasha, author of The Watch (http://mars-or-bust.blogspot.com/) blog, has eloquently said in one sentence what I was trying to say in my Why Bush Is Really Going To War rant below: Civilization is all about separating what you can do from what you should do. 11:11:44 AM  trackback []  comment []

THINGS I THOUGHT I'D NEVER READ IN MY LIFETIME Three really frightening items from a variety of sources via Blogdex: From UPI: http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030204-031831-1626r France is no longer an ally of the United States and the NATO alliance "must develop a strategy to contain our erstwhile ally or we will not be talking about a NATO alliance" the head of the Pentagon's top advisory board said in Washington Tuesday. Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and now chairman of the Pentagon's Policy Advisory Board, condemned French and German policy on Iraq in the strongest terms at a public seminar organized by a New York-based PR firm and attended by Iraqi exiles and American Middle East and security officials. From Mother Jones' interview with EFF founder John Terry Barlow on Bush's Total Information Awareness program http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2003/06/we_268_01.html It's ridiculous, dangerous, grossly unconstitutional, and it's perfectly in keeping with what this administration's been doing across the board. This is an administration that has recently reserved to itself the right to kill American citizens anywhere on the planet for the mere suspicion of membership in Al Qaeda. That's really quite and awe-inspiring breakthrough. And the astonishing thing is that the American people are nodding along in their stupor and saying "Yeah, well, whatever it takes to stop terrorism." I'm so disappointed in my countrymen. From the NYT, on the Rosenthal trial: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/05/national/05POT.html In an unusual show of solidarity with the man they convicted last week, five jurors in the trial of a medicinal marijuana advocate issued a public apology to him today and demanded that the judge grant him a new trial. I've never been a conspiracy theory advocate, but something is terribly, terribly wrong here. 1:20:51 AM  trackback []  comment []

Portrait of the Artist 12:05:58 AM  trackback []  comment []

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