Wednesday, June 02, 2004

Posted here Wednesday, June 02, 2004 at 5:16:00 PM     Overheard - In Florida, construction projects have been put on hold, contractors are panicking and cement is nowhere to be found. It's all being sucked up by China. The reason is simple: An economy the size of France or Italy is growing at rates usually reserved for small island economies; China grew at a 9.8% annual growth rate in the first three months of the year. - China has 4,813 cement plants, more than the rest of the world combined, and they still don't have enough. Projects like the Three Gorges Dam and Beijing Olympics forced China to gobble up 55% of the world's supply of cement, 40% of its steel, and 25% of its aluminum. Yesterday we learned that, in Shanghai, real estate prices rose by 28.3% in the first quarter, according to the Detroit Free Press, causing the local bureaucrats to ban developers from selling apartments before they have been built... these are more than mere details for our Pao Mo file... they're affecting markets all over the world. http://www.dailyreckoning.com/whitelist.cfm ********

Posted here Wednesday, June 02, 2004 at 4:21:55 PM     A very good summary of the state of the new government. not yet definitive, because it can't be, but lays out the issues. http://billmon.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1482 An see the Chalabi article in the New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040607fa_fact1 ********

Posted here Wednesday, June 02, 2004 at 4:10:58 PM     The difficulty of evidence. Health Prozac Appears Safe, Effective in Teens By E.J. Mundell HealthDay Reporter http://www.forbes.com/lifestyle/health/feeds/hscout/2004/06/02/hscout519310.html WEDNESDAY, June 2 (HealthDayNews) -- While it may not settle the debate entirely, preliminary findings from a major U.S. government-funded study suggest that antidepressants do not raise the risk of suicide in adolescents.   Reducing ill effects to suicide is a rather rough measure of what may be psychological dependence, ego depleting (I am ok because I tkae pills), prelude to otehr ways of mood management from drugs.  There were 378 adolescents, or about 90 per group of four combiantions of prozac and talk. In the prozac only ther were five of six attempted suicides.Lets say that for half the kids prozac helps depression and for half it does not. a double rate in the "not helped group" would indaicte a low rate, but double for the not helped group that if the norm was 6 for a whole group of 90. The numbers however are so small, one wonders at the wisdom of data presentation, especially when 5 of the six attempts were in the prozac only group! But the deeper isues are the psychological and social - and the way the reporter bannered the story. and then the quote! However, "people who are concerned about this issue can be reassured" by the results of the new research, said Dr. Marvin Lipkowitz, chairman of psychiatry at Maimonides Medical Center in New York City. "The take-home message," he said, "is that the medication is, overall, excellent -- there's no question." ********

Posted here Wednesday, June 02, 2004 at 1:22:01 PM     Costs of war..   From the Revolutionary War to the present nightmare in Iraq, 1,200,000 American soldiers and sailors have been killed. Tens of millions more have been marked with the indelible scars of war – physical and psychological – they’ve been doomed to carry to their graves. Veterans who’ve seen action and want to go back for seconds are rare birds, and it’s hard to find a vet who’s a hawk. Those who’ve faced down the dragon know too well the waste, the stupidity and the unmitigated horror of war.              The United States has fought 11 major wars. The vast majority of these conflicts wouldn’t have occurred had our politicians done their due diligence, employed moral courage and not bought into spurious rationales for bloodletting. Certainly our history demonstrates the extreme caution we should exercise before employing the always-ugly, always-costly military solution.   And then ther are the wives, and children, parents, bothers, friends... lost talent, memory, hope. Seas of blood and money. From the revolutinary war to my father, every male down the fatehr line fought in a war.   Then we have the Bush below. ********

Posted here Wednesday, June 02, 2004 at 12:47:46 PM     This headline gets it right. The cost is the cost of alternatives, and defining a new war is not what most of us wanted to live in. In this case we had a choice. Not appeasment, but reasonableness would gradually attrite the drawing power of terror, just as reactive violence will renew it. Tar baby... didn't anyone read? Bush outlines ideology of war From correspondents in Air Force Academy, Colorado June 3, 2004 http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,9731783%255E1702,00.html US President George W Bush, preparing new Air Force officers for war, cast the fight against terrorism as a struggle between freedom and tyranny similar to World War II and the Cold War. "Our goal, the goal of this generation, is the same," Bush said today, after referring to World War II. "We will secure our nation and defend the peace through the forward march of freedom." Bush told 981 graduates that they will be joining a war whose central front is Iraq. "Each of you receiving a commission today in the United States military will also carry the hopes of free people everywhere," the president said.   ********

Posted here Wednesday, June 02, 2004 at 10:29:56 AM     Frm Brad deLong, finding a review by Keynes of Trotsky. Quoting Keynes, http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001717.html He assumes that the moral and intellectual problems of the transformation of Society have been already solved--that a plan exists, and that nothing remains except to put it into operation. He assumes further that Society is divided into two parts the proletariat who are converted to the plan, and the rest who for purely selfish reasons oppose it. He does not understand that no plan could win until it had first convinced many people, and that, if there really were a plan, it would draw support from many different quarters. He is so much occupied with means that he forgets to tell us what it is all for." ********

Posted here Wednesday, June 02, 2004 at 9:08:05 AM     A very good review of a good book on mostly european history. Read for context of Iraq. Sally Marks, _The Ebbing of European Ascendancy: An International History of the World 1914-1945_. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xi + 468 pp.  Maps, notes, bibliography and index. ISBN 0-340-55566-1 (paper), ISBN 0-340-80768-7 (cloth).   Reviewed for H-Diplo by William D. Irvine (birvine@glendon.yorku.ca), Department of History, York University.   Any specialist in European history who mounts (as I do) a survey course on twentieth-century world history will know how daunting a subject that can be. Feeling more or less at ease with one small chunk of the globe, how does one do justice to the rest of the world, do so in a manner that does not seem utterly Euro-centric, and acknowledge that Uruguay is not at all like Paraguay nor Kenya like the Gold Coast? A good model for all of us would be Sally Marks' recent work, a remarkably concise book, coming in at a bit over 400 pages (which she preemptively reminds reviewers is only slightly half the length of her original manuscript.)   As Marks is a distinguished student of European diplomatic history, her sure-footed handling of European developments will come as no surprise. Her initial discussion of the nature of pre-war European diplomacy is simply brilliant. She manages to sum up origins of World War One (an historiographical mine field if ever there was one) in seventeen pages with nary a misstep. Her discussion of the peace treaties -- again in less than twenty pages -- is chock-a-block with trenchant and perceptive judgements. All of this is made easier by virtue of her robust writing style and her deft hand for the apt quote and the delightful one-liner. Any discussion of the agonizing of German political and military elites about the wisdom of their conduct in the summer of 1914 could go on for pages. Marks sums it up with a quote from Bret Harte:  "Blest is the man whose cause is just; Thrice blest is he who gets his blow in fust." (p. 26) The history of assorted peace feelers from the Central Powers during World War One and the response of the Allied Powers can make for a tedious description of various diplomatic dead ends. Not so when Marks cites Anatole France to the effect that, for the French, a peace without victory was about like "a town without a brothel." (p. 50) And who but Marks could sum up the problems faced by the emerging nation of Yugoslavia with a lapidarian passage asserting that it was "a country of two alphabets, three religions, four languages, five nationalities, six republics, seven bordering states and eight legal systems." (p. 105) Of course this kind of sparkling wit has it down side, most notably the danger that harried instructors of world history courses might be tempted not to assign this text lest they be therefore deprived of the chance to liven up their lectures with her innumerable _bons mots_.   Marks' expertise is in Europe. But she does not skimp on her long chapters on the rest of the world. In fact they are remarkably comprehensive. Anyone curious about the exact status of Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim can find the answer in this book. It is hard to imagine a subject more complex than the assorted -- and bloody -- border wars in Latin America but Marks sorts them out in two succinct paragraphs. Ethiopia is now seen as one of the first victims of fascist aggression; to European contemporaries it was merely a backward kingdom occupying little more than a chunk of sand. But, Marks usefully reminds us, to Africans, it was neither of these things. It was in fact a symbol of "everything the Africans were told they lacked: an ancient monarchy, a history dating from before Biblical times, [and] a Christian church from the era of the Apostles." (p.169) To be sure this degree of comprehensiveness (with its unavoidable textual compression) comes at a cost. The discussion of devolution of Danish colonies occupies more lines of text than the arguably more important Rif war in Morocco. It is misleading to say that the 1937 Peel plan for the partition of Palestine was rejected by "everyone but [Jordanian king] Abdullah" (p. 198) since, as Marks is well aware, the plan was also not rejected by the Zionists.   In order to describe the relative status of the world's nations, Marks adopts throughout a family metaphor, loosely based, it would appear on Shakespeare's seven ages of man. Great Britain is a "bluff and powerful middle aged gentleman" (p. 284); among its dominions, Canada is "the assertive elder son" (p.136); Australia, "typically adolescent" (p. 138); New Zealand, "the little daughter of the imperial family." (p. 137) Germany, is a "muscular, glowering youngish man" (p. 282), The United States is a "muscular, gawky young giant". (p. 254) The Latin American republics are for the most part "still students off at university learning the adult world" (p.224); by contrast the Netherlands appears as "a shrewd little old lady." (p.278) Although Marks makes it very clear she intends only to convey the relative importance of state power, her chosen metaphor will not be to everyone's taste, especially, as she herself acknowledges, her assertion regarding sub-Saharan Africa: "any political playbill would have listed the colonies as a flock of children." (p. 151) The French are unlikely to appreciate France being described as "an ageing fading dowager" (p. 285); the Italians only slightly less disgruntled to learn that Italy was an "ingenue" with "more pulchritude than power". (p. 283) Still, that is a more flattering description than the other offered alternative: "Europe's most expensive whore," (p.350) although in fairness, for once this is not Marks' own trenchant formulation.   No review of a book this good should be without at least a couple of personally picked nits. The author's account of the second Moroccan crisis lays much stress on the ham-handed bullying of Imperial Germany.  This is not altogether wrong; one thinks of the decision of German foreign minister Kiderlen-Wachter to "let all of the dogs bark." Still, the dogs did have some grounds for barking. What Marks describes as "local difficulties in Morocco" were in fact the direct result of France's none-too-subtle violation of the spirit (and arguably the letter) of the Algeciras agreements of 1906. And the German dogs were not the only ones barking; witness the perfectly provocative Mansion House speech by that erstwhile pacifist, David Lloyd George. Treating the Rhineland crisis of 1936, she weighs in on the debate between the conventional view that the western allies lost their last chance to stop Hitler without war and the revisionist view of P.M.H. Bell that it was the last chance to stop Hitler _with_ a war. Marks' characteristically iconoclastic view is that both camps are probably wrong since it was not at all clear, even had they been willing, that Britain and France could have beaten Germany by this point. Perhaps but such a provocative proposition does require more argument and some recognition of recent scholars (such as Peter Jackson) who have suggested that the widespread belief in German military superiority in 1936 said more about the failures of French military intelligence than about the actual balance of forces.   All this said, this is a remarkable book, one all modern historians should read and many should assign.     William D. Irvine Department of History, York University.          Copyright (c) 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits        the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit,        educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the        author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and        H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses        contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.the   ********

Posted here Wednesday, June 02, 2004 at 7:22:55 AM     Interesting to compare the lists Democrats Roosevelt Truman Kennedy Johnson Carter Clinton Republican Eisenhower Nixon Reagan Bush Bush ********