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Tuesday, November 25, 2003 |
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Posted here Tuesday, November 25, 2003 at 1:20:29 PM  Must read summary analysis November 24, 2003 The Scorecard By Tom Engelhardt More than two years after the World Trade Center towers came down and the President declared his "war on terrorism," it seems reasonable to offer a little scorecard on the "war(s)" of choice for this administration. Though it leaves out the larger strategic picture: Pakistan, mafia, south Asian security. and alternatives. http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=1086 ******** |
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Posted here Tuesday, November 25, 2003 at 12:21:50 PM A FEW OF HIS FAVORITE THINGS....Bill Clinton has been catching a bit of flak for his list of 21 favorite books. Here they are:
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," Maya Angelou "Meditations," Marcus Aurelius "The Denial of Death," Ernest Becker "Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963," Taylor Branch "Living History," Hillary Rodham Clinton "Lincoln," David Herbert Donald "The Four Quartets," T.S. Eliot "Invisible Man," Ralph Ellison "The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-First Century," David Fromkin "One Hundred Years of Solitude," Gabriel Garcia Marquez "The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes," Seamus Heaney "King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa," Adam Hochschild "The Imitation of Christ," Thomas a Kempis "Homage to Catalonia," George Orwell "The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis," Carroll Quigley "Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics," Reinhold Niebuhr "The Confessions of Nat Turner," William Styron "Politics as a Vocation," Max Weber "You Can't Go Home Again," Thomas Wolfe "Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny," Robert Wright "The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats," William Butler Yeats
From http://www.calpundit.com/
I don't know where he got the list, ah, Aamzon.com , but he is fairly contemptuous. There are some very interesting choices.
On sense of the past stands out, and the faming by some interesting literature such as Eliot and Styron.
Wright's Non-Zero might help explain Clinton's optimism about the future and
globalization. I myself am more skeptical about that book and its view that
complexity always wins. Remember the book, Why there are so few large
carnivores"? There are limits to complexity before the system self devours.
The Daly article cited earlier points to this as does the Collapse of
Complex Societies. |
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Posted here Tuesday, November 25, 2003 at 11:05:18 AM From agonist.org
Some Unpleasant Budget Arithmetic 11/24/03 7:53am EST The US budget is out of control. The sharp shift from surplus to deficit in recent years is by far the biggest setback in 50 years--and it isn't over. Most observers expect tax cuts and higher outlays for defense and related items to push the fiscal-2004 deficit up into the $500-billion vicinity. Any thoughts of relief thereafter are a pipe dream until political priorities adjust. Some simple arithmetic shows that continued deficits of this size are the best we can hope for in coming years. Thus, our projection of a $5.5-trillion ten-year deficit is at risk of another upward revision. It is troubling that this has not set off alarm bells in Washington, where the two-point mantra is that the deficit is no larger relative to GDP than at prior cyclical extremes and has no serious impact on interest rates and the economy. The first point, while true, fails to recognize that the prospects for cyclical improvement are quite poor. As for the second point, it defies common sense and lots of careful research to think that the highest-rated credit on the planet can borrow half a trillion dollars a year without pushing aside some private investment and ultimately hurting productivity growth.
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Posted here Tuesday, November 25, 2003 at 11:05:15 AM And,
ROME-- The war on hunger has suffered a setback as the number of malnourished people has risen after having fallen steadily during the first half of the 1990s, according to a UN report.
The number of chronically hungry people around the world rose to 842 million in 2000, an increase of 18 million, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Around 25 million people die annually from hunger. Developing countries account for nearly 800 million undernourished people. This number is climbing at a rate of almost five million a year, the report said. About 34 million people were reported hungry in countries of the former Soviet bloc, followed by 10 million in industrial countries. The report said meeting the UN goal of reducing by half the number of malnourished people by 2015 is becoming "increasingly remote." "There is enough food available in world markets and even often in countries, but people who are affected by hunger don't have access to it, either through income and purchasing power or through access to land and water," FAO assistant director Hartwig de Haen says. De Haen added that a rising number of these food emergencies are "caused by humans, and that means mainly conflict and civil strife." Nineteen countries, including China, Vietnam, Thailand, succeeded in reducing the number of undernourished throughout the 1990s. Afghanistan, Congo, Burundi, North Korea, Somalia, Tanzania, Guatemala, Liberia and Sierra Leone were among the 26 countries where hunger increased.
http://www.cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/print.cgi?/2003/11/25/hunger031125 |
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Posted here Tuesday, November 25, 2003 at 11:05:12 AM This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_0089_01C3B323.E6B98110 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_NextPart_001_008A_01C3B323.E6B98110" ------=_NextPart_001_008A_01C3B323.E6B98110 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit We have forgotten how to think in big numbers and basic trends. News tends to focus on local events.
World hunger on the increase By Mark Turner at the United Nations Published: November 25 2003 9:00 | Last Updated: November 25 2003 9:00
World hunger is back on the increase, the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation has warned, threatening to torpedo international efforts to halve the number of undernourished people by 2015.
During the early 1990s, the number of hungry people worldwide fell by 37m.
But according to the FAO's annual hunger report, released on Tuesday the
second half of the decade saw an increase of 18m. Some 842m people were
undernourished in 1999-2001, it said, including 10m in industrialized
countries, 34m in countries in transition and 798m in developing countries.
As of July this year, 36 countries faced serious food emergencies
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We have forgotten
how to think in big numbers and basic trends. News tends to focus on local
events. World
hunger on the increase By Mark Turner at the
United Nations Published: November 25
2003 9:00 | Last Updated: November 25 2003 9:00 <img width=1 height id="_x0000_i1025"
src="cid:image001.gif@01C3B323.E47620C0"> |