Just because they're activist groups doesn't mean you can trust them

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." But how about "Fool me always?" That's the mainstream media's relationship with self-styled "environmental" and "consumer" activist groups. And you wonder to what extent the media are being fooled _ as opposed to simply repeating what they want to believe.

As Brian Ross says, "I'm not a science reporter." (But he plays one on TV.)

Why your clothes cost so much

Quotas add a little over 70 cents to the cost of each pair of underwear from China and nearly $54 to the cost of a woman’s wool coat.

Affirmative action is OK, though

...studies that show the number of Democratic professors is generally much larger than the number of Republicans. A survey in 2003 by researchers at Santa Clara University found the ratio of Democrats to Republicans on college faculties ranged from 3 to 1 in economics to 30 to 1 in anthropology.

...the professors association...argues that conservatives are overstating the problem and, by seeking government action, are forcing their ideology into the classroom.

"Mechanisms exist to address these glitches and to fix them," said Joan Wallach Scott, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and former chairwoman of the professors association committee on academic freedom, in testimony at the Pennsylvania Legislature's first hearing. "There is no need for interference from outside legislative or judicial agencies."

Some surveys here. Me, I'm opposed to quotas of any kind, even if there are certain imbalances.

Working for the Terrorists

The American media seems to be either unaware or unconcerned that when it carries video of an improvised bomb attack, it is running terrorist video and thus doing their work for them.

That's the whole idea. The terrorists prey on our free press to terrorize us, even though the numbers of us they kill are pin-pricks, compared to, say, those who die in traffic accidents.

At ease when talking to an android

Few Japanese have the fear of robots that seems to haunt westerners in seminars and Hollywood films. In western popular culture, robots are often a threat, either because they are manipulated by sinister forces or because something goes horribly wrong with them. By contrast, most Japanese view robots as friendly and benign. Robots like people, and can do good.

The Japanese are well aware of this cultural divide, and commentators devote lots of attention to explaining it. The two most favoured theories, which are assumed to reinforce each other, involve religion and popular culture.

Most Japanese take an eclectic approach to religious beliefs, and the native religion, Shintoism, is infused with animism: it does not make clear distinctions between inanimate things and organic beings. A popular Japanese theory about robots, therefore, is that there is no need to explain why Japanese are fond of them: what needs explaining, rather, is why westerners allow their Christian hang-ups to get in the way of a good technology...

Although they are at ease with robots, many Japanese are not as comfortable around other people...

Karl MacDorman, another researcher at Osaka, sees similar social forces at work. Interacting with other people can be difficult for the Japanese, he says, "because they always have to think about what the other person is feeling, and how what they say will affect the other person." But it is impossible to embarrass a robot, or be embarrassed, by saying the wrong thing...

When answering [questions put by the android ReplieeQ1], Mr MacDorman's Japanese subjects were much more likely to look it in the eye than they were a real person. Mr MacDorman wants to do more tests, but he surmises that the discomfort many Japanese feel when dealing with other people has something to do with his results, and that they are much more at ease when talking to an android.

This is where political correctness has brought us

Because some courses (including biology, history, literature and government) offered by Calvary Chapel Christian Schools do not reflect "knowledge generally accepted in the scientific and educational communities and with which a student at the university level should be conversant," they do not meet the admission standards of the University of California, and so various Christian schools are suing the university, whose campuses include that traditional bastion of liberal thought, Berkeley, as well as the huge UCLA campus, for what they call "viewpoint discrimination".

Fifty years ago there were only a handful of "megachurches", drawing more than 2,000 each Sunday; today, there are more than 1,200 such churches, three of them with congregations of over 20,000. Not only is the nation's president a born-again Christian, but so (according to the Pew Research Centre) are 54% of America's Protestants, who are 30% of the population.

Will America's public universities take on a similar tinge? To the extent that educational establishments reflect cultural reality, it may be inevitable. After all, before the liberal era of the 1960s, there were no such things as courses in "Women's Studies" or "African-American Studies". Now, no prudent American university would be without them. It would be odd if conservative Christians did not leave similar footprints on the syllabus.

Now we'll just have to take science off the curriculum

Judge John E. Jones III in the Dover evolution trial makes these points:

• intelligent design invokes "a supernatural designer"
• science, by definition, deals only with natural phenomena
• "science has been a discipline in which testability, rather than any ecclesiastical authority or philosophical coherence, has been the measure of a scientific idea's worth"
• intelligent design's views on how the world got to be the way it is offer no testable facts, choosing instead to rely on authoritative statements
• people would be well advised to remember that an argument against one thing cannot necessarily be interpreted as an argument for something else
• just because a complex organ cannot work today with one component removed does not mean the component did not evolve independently to serve a different purpose and later took on a new role when combined with other parts

So what next? Neo-creationists will have to ban science entirely?

Attracting the world's wrath

The anti-Wal-Mart movement is, in the end, both more and less than the sum of its parts. It is less, in that it seems likely that most critics of the company are—at least initially—motivated not by the full bill of indictment, but by one or two pet issues: An affection for small shops, or a distaste for outsourcing. It is more, in that Wal-Mart has by now, perhaps as a function of its sheer size, taken on a symbolic role as an emblem of necrotizing corporate power that is, in the end, unmoored from the particulars of the charges against it. The same people who complain bitterly about the legal fiction that a corporation is a person have succeeded in thoroughly anthropomorphizing Wal-Mart, until it is no longer a collection of persons and policies, but a kind of malevolent intelligent force—perhaps with its own twisted corporate soul.

Wal-Mart has become, to put it less poetically, a Schelling point. It attracts the wrath of so many environmentalists, living wage advocates, and sprawl opponents not because it is necessarily the most egregious offender against any of their ideals but because its size and visibility provide them all a common banner under which to rally.

Just like the hated United States

Niger is a victim of its own government

...Niger is a victim of its own government. Early this year, the government refused to heed warnings that a food crisis was imminent. When the crisis arrived, it denied there was mass starvation and claimed the harvest had in fact produced a surplus. The government later proceeded to accuse the World Food Programme of exaggerating fears that Niger could face another famine within months. Now, a few months later, at least 2,5-million people are short of food.

In many respects Niger is still a command economy: it is up to the rulers in Niamey to decide prices. But economic sense, let alone common sense, dictates that when producers, particularly farmers, can sell to willing buyers at a mutually agreed price, then it gives them an incentive to produce more. This in turn enables producers to afford basic necessities instead of waiting for the government to provide them.

In a command economy, growth remains elusive. Take for instance the great famines of the 20th century -- in China (25- to 40-million deaths), Soviet Ukraine (7- to 10-million), North Korea (2- to 3-million) and Ethiopia (nearly a million) -- it was food requisitioning and economic control by communist governments that destroyed incentives to produce. When countries free their markets, they cut undernourishment down and abolish famine, as in east and south Asia in the past three decades.

But Niger's agricultural sector is still government-run and still involves mainly subsistence farming. This does not encourage quick responses to changing conditions or bad harvests. The locusts in power are well fed so there is a tendency to pretend that all is well without bothering about the starvation their policies cause.

The crisis is further compounded by regional trade barriers. World Bank figures show that African nations slam tariffs as high as 33,6% on agricultural commodities from their neighbours.

Some groups have blamed Niger's famine on its alleged "free market" policies. In fact, Niger has one of the least free economies in the world, ranking 107th out of 123 countries in the Fraser Institute's report on economic freedom in the world last year. A few government-owned companies have been privatised and some financial services liberalised, but these have had little impact on the majority of Nigeriens. Crucially, farmers lack secure rights to the land they till, which means they have little incentive or ability to improve productivity.

Meanwhile, entrepreneurs face government regulations and restrictions at every turn: for example, the cost of setting up a company is equivalent to about four years' average income. These problems are compounded by inflexible labour laws, which discourage people taking on employees and so prevent the development of larger-scale businesses.

No wonder there is so much poverty.

People are starving in Niger -- and in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia and elsewhere in Africa -- but not because of free markets. Rather, they are starving because of the lack of markets and their underlying institutions: property rights, the rule of law and limited government.

More aid won't solve these problems -- so far it has perpetuated poverty, corrupt politicians and malign policies. But next week ministers from around the world will meet in Hong Kong to discuss trade reform. There, rich countries should lead by example, committing themselves to liberalising trade and reducing subsidies -- then maybe political leaders in Africa will follow suit.

Tarzan and Jane

...the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help - not to mention celebrities and charity concerts - is a destructive and misleading conceit. Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions....I am speaking of the "more money" platform: the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labor and debt relief. We should know better by now. I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for - and this never happens. Dumping more money in the same old way is not only wasteful, but stupid and harmful; it is also ignoring some obvious points.

If Malawi is worse educated, more plagued by illness and bad services, poorer than it was when I lived and worked there in the early 60's, it is not for lack of outside help or donor money. Malawi has been the beneficiary of many thousands of foreign teachers, doctors and nurses, and large amounts of financial aid, and yet it has declined from a country with promise to a failed state...

When Malawi's minister of education was accused of stealing millions of dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was charged with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? The simplifiers of Africa's problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper reasons these countries are failing.

...Malawi had two presidents in its first 40 years, the first a megalomaniac who called himself the messiah, the second a swindler whose first official act was to put his face on the money. Last year the new man, Bingu wa Mutharika, inaugurated his regime by announcing that he was going to buy a fleet of Maybachs, one of the most expensive cars in the world.

...because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth. Such people come in all forms and they loom large. White celebrities busy-bodying in Africa loom especially large. Watching Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie recently in Ethiopia, cuddling African children and lecturing the world on charity, the image that immediately sprang to my mind was Tarzan and Jane.

Cancer dropping for 50 years

...pinning cancer on trace levels of poisons in the environment or even in the workplace is turning out to be a vexing task. There has been recent progress in addressing the issue, but the answers that many people believe must be out there remain elusive.

"It's an area where there's certainly been a lot of heat and not a lot of light for some time," said Robert Hoover, director of the epidemiology and biostatistics program at the National Cancer Institute. For the most part, Dr. Hoover said, "we are down to speculations based on some data but without having the information we need."

Members of advocacy groups agree that there is much to learn, but they say the questions are too important to brush off by saying the research is difficult or the questions complex.

...While most scientists think that only a tiny fraction of cancers might be caused by low levels of environmental poisons, these are cancers that could, in theory, be avoided.

"All it takes is the political will to ban them or impose regulations to minimize exposure, and the cancers are gone," Dr. Hoover said.

The problem is to decide which chemicals might be causing cancer, and in whom.

Some scientists, like Aaron Blair, an epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute, see hints that environmental pollutants like pesticides, diesel exhaust in cities and workplaces and small particles in the air may instigate cancer.

But, Dr. Blair says, there is a huge problem in following up on these hints because scientists need to figure out who was exposed to what and when the exposure occurred. Asking people is not much help. Most people do not know what they were exposed to, and even if they think they know, they often are wrong, he said.

So Dr. Blair and his colleagues decided to try for the greatest possible rigor by focusing on one group, farmers, that is not only routinely exposed to pesticides that may increase cancer risk, but also keeps excellent records of exposure.

The effort, a collaboration involving the cancer institute, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the Environmental Protection Agency, began in 1993 and includes nearly every farmer and farmer's spouse in Iowa and North Carolina - 55,000 farmers and 35,000 spouses.

Investigators have been asking the farmers what pesticides and herbicides they used, when they used them and how much they used, and have been obtaining information on other risk factors like smoking. Then they use the medical records from tumor registries to determine who developed cancer and what type was developed.

"We're now just in the period of time where we can look at outcomes," Dr. Blair said. So far, the researchers have found a few associations, but nothing that is definitive.

"I would call it, at this stage, interesting leads," Dr. Blair said. "None are large enough for any regulatory agency to take action or to say they are a human carcinogen. They are leads." They include, for example, a slightly higher rate of lung cancer and leukemia in farmers who used the insecticide diazinon and a possible increase in prostate cancer among farmers who used methylbromide to fumigate the soil.

The investigators looked for an association between pesticides and herbicides and breast cancer, but they did not find one, Dr. Blair said, adding that one pesticide, atrazine, was under particular suspicion because it causes breast cancer in rats and has estrogenlike properties.

Even if the study finds that some chemicals have increased farmers' cancer rates, it remains unclear what that means for the general population, where exposures are usually much lower. Also unclear is whether those chemicals should be banned.

Dr. Blair noted that such decisions were difficult because they were, in part, political, balancing the costs of getting rid of the chemical against the benefits...
..."People differ very greatly in their response to chemical carcinogens," [Gerald N. Wogan, a chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] said. "Almost all chemicals, with relatively few exceptions, have to be converted from what they are into something more chemically active to be carcinogenic.

"If you encounter one of these compounds, most of it is converted to less toxic material that is excreted," he continued. "Only a tiny amount is converted to a form that could cause cancer. A small fraction of 1 percent gets converted. And people can differ enormously in their genetic ability to do these metabolic conversions."

Further complicating the issue is that a person's diet, or components of the diet, can increase the activity of enzymes that convert chemicals into carcinogens. And other dietary components can inactivate enzymes that detoxify chemicals.

The calculus grows so complex that it can be virtually impossible to predict what will happen in an individual person exposed to low levels of a possibly toxic chemical. For example, Dr. Wogan said, "The same food, broccoli, can affect both types of enzymes."

Added to this are the effects of chronic infections, like hepatitis B, in which the immune system releases chemicals that can magnify the effects of carcinogens.

In theory, Dr. Wogan said, there is hope for untangling the mess....

In the meantime, he and others say they take comfort in cancer statistics that do not indicate a cancer epidemic. Rates of cancer have been steadily dropping for 50 years, if tobacco-related cancers are taken out of the equation, said Prof. Richard Peto, an epidemiologist and a biostatistician at Oxford University.

What appear as increases in cancers of the breast and prostate, Dr. Peto added, are in fact artifacts of increased screening. When healthy people are screened, the tests find not only cancers that would be deadly if untreated, but also a certain percentage of tumors that would never cause problems if let alone.

His analysis of cancer statistics leads Dr. Peto to this firm conclusion: "Pollution is not a major determinant of U.S. cancer rates."

Of course "advocates" will have none of it, and want to make everything illegal. Besides, Whatever doesn't kill you might make you stronger.

Blame the media?

How is it, then, that 64 percent of U.S. military officers think we will succeed if we are allowed to continue our work? Why is there such a dramatic divergence between American public opinion and the upbeat assessment of the men and women doing the fighting?

Open optimism, whether or not it is warranted, is a necessary trait in senior officers and officials. Skeptics can be excused for discounting glowing reports on Iraq from the upper echelons of power. But it is not a simple thing to ignore genuine optimism from mid-grade, junior and noncommissioned officers who have spent much of the past three years in Iraq.

We know the streets, the people and the insurgents far better than any armchair academic or talking head. As military professionals, we are trained to gauge the chances of success and failure, to calculate risk and reward. We have little to gain from our optimism and quite a bit to lose as we leave our families over and over again to face danger and deprivation for an increasingly unpopular cause. We know that there are no guarantees in war, and that we may well fail in the long run. We also know that if we follow our current plan we can, over time, leave behind a stable and unified country that might help to anchor a better future for the Middle East.

It is difficult for most Americans to rationalize this optimism in the face of the horrific images and depressing stories that have come to symbolize the war in Iraq. Most of the violent news is true; the death and destruction are very real. But experienced military officers know that the horror stories, however dramatic, do not represent the broader conditions there or the chances for future success. For every vividly portrayed suicide bombing, there are hundreds of thousands of people living quiet, if often uncertain, lives. For every depressing story of unrest and instability there is an untold story of potential and hope. The impression of Iraq as an unfathomable quagmire is false and dangerously misleading.

It is this false impression that has led us to a moment of national truth. The proponents of the quagmire vision argue that the very presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is the cause of the insurgency and that our withdrawal would give the Iraqis their only true chance for stability. Most military officers and NCOs with ground experience in Iraq know that this vision is patently false. Although the presence of U.S. forces certainly inflames sentiment and provides the insurgents with targets, the anti-coalition insurgency is mostly a symptom of the underlying conditions in Iraq. It may seem paradoxical, but only our presence can buffer the violence enough to allow for eventual stability.

The precipitous withdrawal of U.S. troops would almost certainly lead to a violent and destabilizing civil war. The Iraqi military is not ready to assume control and would not miraculously achieve competence in our absence. As we left, the insurgency would turn into internecine violence, and Iraq would collapse into a true failed state. The fires of the Iraqi civil war would spread, and terrorists would find a new safe haven from which to launch attacks against our homeland.

Anyone who has spent even a day in the Middle East should know that the Arab street would not thank us for abandoning Iraq. The blame for civil war would fall squarely on our shoulders. It is unlikely that the tentative experiments in democracy we have seen in Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere would survive the fallout. There would be no dividend of goodwill from heartbroken intellectuals or emboldened Islamic extremists. American troops might be home in the short run, but the experienced professionals know that in the long run, quitting Iraq would mean more deployments, more desperate battles and more death.

Sixty-four percent of us know that we have a good shot at preventing this outcome if we are allowed to continue our mission. We quietly hope that common sense will return to the dialogue on Iraq. Although we hate leaving our families behind, many of us would rather go back to Iraq a hundred times than abandon the Iraqi people.

Emphasis mine.

Hard-wired to learn by imitation

The box was painted black and had a door on one side and a bolt running across the top. The food was hidden in a tube behind the door. When they showed the chimpanzees how to retrieve the food, the researchers added some unnecessary steps. Before they opened the door, they pulled back the bolt and tapped the top of the box with a stick. Only after they had pushed the bolt back in place did they finally open the door and fish out the food.

Because the chimps could not see inside, they could not tell that the extra steps were unnecessary. As a result, when the chimps were given the box, two-thirds faithfully imitated the scientists to retrieve the food.

The team then used a box with transparent walls and found a strikingly different result. Those chimps could see that the scientists were wasting their time sliding the bolt and tapping the top. None followed suit. They all went straight for the door.

The researchers turned to humans. They showed the transparent box to 16 children from a Scottish nursery school. After putting a sticker in the box, they showed the children how to retrieve it. They included the unnecessary bolt pulling and box tapping.

The scientists placed the sticker back in the box and left the room, telling the children that they could do whatever they thought necessary to retrieve it.

The children could see just as easily as the chimps that it was pointless to slide open the bolt or tap on top of the box. Yet 80 percent did so anyway. "It seemed so spectacular to me," Mr. Lyons said. "It suggested something remarkable was going on."

...Mr. Lyons loaded a movie on his computer in which Charlotte eagerly listened to him talk about the transparent plastic box.

He set it in front of her and asked her to retrieve the plastic turtle that he had just put inside. Rather than politely opening the front door, Charlotte grabbed the entire front side, ripped it open at its Velcro tabs and snatched the turtle. "I've got it!" she shouted.

A chimp couldn't have done better, I thought.

But at their second meeting, things changed. This time, Mr. Lyons had an undergraduate, Jennifer Barnes, show Charlotte how to open the box. Before she opened the front door, Ms. Barnes slid the bolt back across the top of the box and tapped on it needlessly. Charlotte imitated every irrelevant step. The box ripping had disappeared. I could almost hear the chimps hooting.

Ms. Barnes showed Charlotte four other puzzles, and time after time she overimitated. When the movies were over, I wasn't sure what to say. "So how did she do?" I asked awkwardly.

"She's pretty age-typical," Mr. Lyons said. Having watched 100 children, he agrees with Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten that children really do overimitate. He has found that it is very hard to get children not to.

If they rush through opening a puzzle, they don't skip the extra steps. They just do them all faster. What makes the results even more intriguing is that the children understand the laws of physics well enough to solve the puzzles on their own. Charlotte's box ripping is proof of that.

Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn.

Markets in Everything

...from Seoul to San Francisco, affluent online gamers who lack the time and patience to work their way up to the higher levels of gamedom are willing to pay the young Chinese here to play the early rounds for them.

"For 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, my colleagues and I are killing monsters," said a 23-year-old gamer who works here in this makeshift factory and goes by the online code name Wandering. "I make about $250 a month, which is pretty good compared with the other jobs I've had. And I can play games all day."

He and his comrades have created yet another new business out of cheap Chinese labor. They are tapping into the fast-growing world of "massively multiplayer online games," which involve role playing and often revolve around fantasy or warfare in medieval kingdoms or distant galaxies.

With more than 100 million people worldwide logging on every month to play interactive computer games, game companies are already generating revenues of $3.6 billion a year from subscriptions, according to DFC Intelligence, which tracks the computer gaming market.

For the Chinese in game-playing factories like these, though, it is not all fun and games. These workers have strict quotas and are supervised by bosses who equip them with computers, software and Internet connections to thrash online trolls, gnomes and ogres.

As they grind through the games, they accumulate virtual currency that is valuable to game players around the world. The games allow players to trade currency to other players, who can then use it to buy better armor, amulets, magic spells and other accoutrements to climb to higher levels or create more powerful characters.

The Joke Was on Him

Never a good driver in his youth, [Walter Smith of Scandia, Minn.] in his mid-80's was declining physically and a serious threat to himself and anyone he might encounter on the road in rural Minnesota.

But try as they might, Mr. Smith's children, who lived a mile away and would take him anywhere anytime, were unable to persuade him to stop driving. So they took his keys away. When Mr. Smith had another set made, they took his pickup away.

But after two months without wheels, Mr. Smith lapsed into a serious depression and the family relented. Just as his family feared, not long after his truck was returned, he backed out of his driveway into the path of a car and died in the crash.

I'd just as soon they didn't protect me.

Surprising as it may be to Americans who think of their country as a bastion of free trade, shoes are just one of many products subject to high tariffs. Although the average tariff on non-agricultural goods imported into the United States is less than 3 percent, tariffs on a number of everyday consumer products -- including clothing, luggage, dinnerware and handbags -- range well into double digits. The same goes for some food, such as butter and cheese. (These tariffs are separate from special duties imposed on certain foreign products that the government has found to be "dumped," or sold at unfairly low prices.)

...the system has evolved in a way that produces a bizarre result: Some of the stiffest tariffs apply to the types of goods that people of modest means tend to buy, and lower duties are imposed on similar products that are more often purchased by upper-income individuals.

Sweaters offer a vivid example: If they're acrylic, the tariff is 32 percent. But if they're wool, the tariff is 17 percent. On cashmere sweaters, the tariff is lower still -- 4 percent -- and on silk ones, 0.9 percent. (Tariffs are levied on the "ad valorem" value of a product when it enters the United States -- the amount the importer pays, excluding insurance and freight. So for an acrylic sweater with an ad valorem value at the border of, say, $10, the 32 percent tariff would be $3.20.)

In the case of low-end sneakers, tariffs range between 48 and 67 percent, but tariffs on higher-end sneakers are only 20 percent, and for leather dress shoes, the tariff is 8.5 percent. Plastic handbags are hit with 16 percent tariffs but reptile-skin ones with only 5.3 percent tariffs. For drinking glasses, the tariff is 28.5 percent if the value at the border is 30 cents or less, but 5 percent if the value is $5 or more.

Why?

The answer in some cases -- though by no means all -- is that Congress has never gotten around to lowering certain tariffs that were once designed to protect major U.S. industries even though the industry in question has undergone major changes or almost disappeared.

You might think that getting rid of the tariffs would be a good idea, but industries like the protection, which they claim is all about their workers' jobs, neglecting to mention that the inefficient industries being protected are wasting resources. And then,

industries that rely on tariffs also argue that they need to be sheltered against imports as a matter of fairness because some foreign countries subsidize their exporters. The dairy industry, for example, asserts that subsidized butter and cheese from Europe and elsewhere would wipe out U.S. dairy farmers without lofty tariffs on those products.

Geez, if the Europeans want to subsidize the consumer, I'm all for it.

French reactionaries

Rich nations have been selective free traders — insisting on free trade for industrial goods and services but balking at free trade when it comes to agriculture, where they might find themselves at a disadvantage. The Doha round also entails liberalizing trade in services, but agriculture has been the sticking point from the start.

The United States has plenty of trade-distorting farm subsidies and import quotas, but the European Union is the real villain here, thwarting any progress. While the Bush administration has made proposals that would dramatically overhaul Washington's support to American farmers, the European Union's trade negotiators made it clear before the Hong Kong meeting that they would not go beyond current proposals, which the rest of the world find laughably insufficient.

France's government considers even the current weak-kneed EU position too aggressive and is defiantly threatening to renege on any deal. Britain, the Netherlands and many other EU members have been struggling to roll back the unsustainable Common Agricultural Policy, which eats up nearly half the EU's budget, hurts the developing world and disproportionately benefits French farmers. But French President Jacques Chirac, a former agriculture minister, obstinately insists that he and then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder cut a deal in 2002 to freeze farm support in real terms until 2013. Never mind all those people around the world struggling to get by on $1 a day.

France plays a pivotal role in EU trade policy. It likes to think of itself as a champion of the developing world, but its posture in these trade talks belies that claim and is a moral stain on the nation.

France's business leaders understand that a broader trade deal is in the nation's interest. That concept eludes most of the nation's people, though. Surveys show a deep distrust of free trade, and that's reflected in Chirac's position. Agriculture accounts for only 3% of the French economy, but it looms far larger in the Gallic psyche. French national pride is by nature defensive and nostalgic, and regional foods and gastronomic self-sufficiency are central to French cultural identity.

The Gains Outweigh the Losses

With reference to the poll mentioned below, the LA time editorializes,

...some people invariably lose when free-trade pacts are signed. And the farmer forced out of business by competitors from South America is more visible than the 10 other businesses created by a rising economy. Few economists or international development experts, however, doubt that the gains outweigh the losses. Reliable estimates show that the removal of tariffs, subsidies and other domestic supports would raise global economic output and income by hundreds of billions of dollars a year over the next decade or so. Most of that increase would occur in developed nations such as the United States.

Meanwhile,

Korean farmers...say the liberalisation of the rice market has driven several farmers to suicide, including Lee Kyung-hae, who killed himself at the height of the demonstration in Cancún.

"We want to protest peacefully," said Seo Pil-Sang of the Korean Agricultural Federation Trade Union. "But we are desperate. Lee died in Cancún. And unless the WTO listens to the voice of Korean farmers, I'm worried that someone else may kill themselves."

So to help Korean farmers keep making money, the world has to keep tariffs high and third-world farmers poor.

Hating the out-group

...psychologist Margo Monteith at the University of Kentucky in Lexington found that people can have prejudices against groups they know nothing about. She administered a test in which volunteers, under time pressure, had to associate a series of words with either "America" or a fictitious country she called "Marisat."

Volunteers more easily associated Marisat with such words as "poison," "death" and "evil," while associating America with "sunrise," "paradise" and "loyal."

"A large part of our self-esteem derives from our group membership," Monteith said. "To the extent we can feel better about our group relative to other groups, we can feel good about ourselves. It's likely a built-in mechanism."

"His own self-interest"

"Senator Lieberman is past the point of being taken seriously in the caucus because everything he does is seen as advancing his own self-interest, instead of the Democratic interest," said a senior Senate Democratic aide, who described discontent in that chamber as "widespread."

"His own self-interest"--so that means it's a winning formula?

This seems to be getting nearly as much play as Murtha's dovishness. Still, even setting his religion aside, I'm not sure there's much to like about his fondness for raising taxes and spending.