A clear conscience

Children as young as 10 years old used to stitch footballs until there was an international outcry about it. The sports companies, accustomed to nurturing their image with huge sums of money, got worried about their reputation. So they sided with human rights campaigners and exerted pressure. In 1997, Pakistani suppliers and representatives of Unicef and the International Labor Organization signed the Atlanta Agreement in which the industry agreed to stop the use of child labor.

Thousands of children lost their jobs overnight...

Children Now Work in Brickworks Instead

Parents now send their children to the brickworks and into metalworking companies where no one is worried about corporate image. The families need the money to survive. The local sports companies are aware of what's happened but they want to fulfil the wishes of their Western customers. After all, the people who spend a lot of money on footballs want to do so with a clear conscience. The customer in a sports retail outlet doesn't realize that young girls are now hauling bricks right next door to Danayal, the stitching factory.

"Ten or 12-year-olds were well off here," says one manager who asked not to be named. "They learned a trade here that secured them an income for life. Now we're having trouble finding new stitchers."

There's a difference?

Many who have lived through the turmoil...believe that the root problem is his inability to grasp the difference between running a fast-food business and an institution of higher learning.

pass me that cake

Yesterday my lunch companion announced his new weight loss strategy—he’s eating more cake. He’s got it figured that if he eats enough cake now, it will motivate him to take up running someday (even though he’s never run before). So he ordered a slice of chocolate cake and announced that he’d just lost two pounds.

Of course, my friend wasn’t entirely serious; he was just gearing up for a possible future at the Congressional Budget Office, which says we can reduce government spending by enacting the president’s health reform proposal. They’ve got it figured that if we pass this proposal now, it will motivate future cuts in Medicare (even though nobody’s ever had the stomach for those cuts before). If I understand the numbers right, they’re counting that as a “saving” of several hundred billion dollars. Well, pass me that cake.

Occupational Safety and Health in China

...after a while, with too many fines being docked off their salaries, workers began to leave the factory in droves to work at other factories where stringent health and safety requirements were not in place. So the factory gave up the scheme.

Oddly enough, it's not only factory bosses who don't care much for worker safety. It appears that workers themselves don't care much for their own protection either. Unlike in the West, where things have almost gone to the other extreme, there is no health and safety culture among folk in China. The only way health and safety standards can be improved in Chinese factories is for tougher laws to be introduced and for stricter enforcement of existing health and safety legislation.

If workers don't want a safe and healthful workplace, is it right for us to force it on them?

The Obama administration complains about rising health care costs, but...

Make it more expensive for insurers to do business, and insurance will become more expensive.

Politicians don't believe people respond to higher prices

Opponents of [a proposed tax on high-cost health insurance plans], including many House Democrats, doubt it will slow the growth in costs, arguing that consumers have a limited role in driving health-care spending.

No wonder their plan's such a mess.

Recognizing reality?

Roger Pilon:

...suggesting that some Golden Age of congressional comity has been lost, a candid look at our history shows that comity has been the exception, not the rule. And it’s occurred mainly when one party dominated Congress, as Democrats did during a fair part of the post-War period while Republicans were searching for their identity. So why not over the past year, when those conditions seemed to be in place? Is there something about today’s congressional divisiveness that distinguishes it from the past? I submit that there is, that it’s not narrow policy differences that mainly underpin what we’re seeing, but that the nation is up against a fundamental reality that much of the public is coming to see, even if many in Congress are slow to grasp it.

To barely summarize the matter, the Constitution sets forth a plan for limited government, not for government engaged in all manner of “problem-solving,” as Bayh put it – the problems of private life, mostly, from retirement security, to health care, education, job-creation, you name it. But for more than a century, Progressives have worked to overturn that design. And their something-for-nothing promises that have spurred the ever-greater socialization of life have attracted enough people to make it seem that we were, wonderfully, “all in this together,” especially since the costs of socialization were largely put off to the future. That’s the “comity” of the good life on borrowed money. But those costs cannot be put off forever. Eventually, they come due. And when they do, the differences between those who come finally to recognize reality, and those who still live the dream, are irreconcilable — because reality doesn’t “compromise.” I submit that we’re now at that point.

I hope he's right. Don Boudreaux agrees:

The “basic idea of a majority-rule democracy” in the U.S. has never meant the unobstructed and simple rule by majority vote. The Senate, part of a bicameral Congress, is itself an institution explicitly meant to reduce the likelihood that any temporary passions of the majority are enacted into legislation. Countless other features of government have the same aim.

Illinois' pension problems

Charles N. Wheeler III summarizes Illinois' pension problems and concludes,

Cut pension benefits? Raise state taxes? Hammer out a compromise with some of each? Perhaps the only sure thing is that the longer lawmakers and the governor wait, the tougher the measures they’ll have to adopt eventually to put the five retirement systems on sound financial footing.

Chinese propaganda

"Red snippets" are coming [to China]! A high-profile push by government ministries and large mobile operators is spreading a wave of red over mobile phone screens across the country.
...
The term "red snippets" was originally meant to describe a form of SMS distinct from "yellow snippets" (dirty jokes) and "grey snippets" (satiric or mocking jokes).

This definition received an upgrade at the hands of Xu Long, president of China Mobile's Guangdong Mobile subsidiary. He wrote: "'Red snippets' are progressive, thoughtful, and informative text messages, concise in form and healthy in content, and whose message is inspiring."

It sounds painfully out of touch and open to ridicule.

The international expansion of Chinese dam builders

Why boycott child labor?

Moyna, a ten-year-old orphan who has just lost her job, comments: ‘They loathe us, don’t they? We are poor and not well educated, so they simply despise us. That is why they shut the factories down.’ Moyna’s job had supported her and her grandmother but now they must both depend on relatives.

So why do politicians do it?

‘primarily to protect US trade interests’

The myth of widespread hunger in America

- 80 percent of poor American households are air-conditioned;
- the typical poor American has more living space than does the average resident of Paris, London, and most other European cities;
- almost 75 percent of poor households own a car and more than 30 percent own two cars;
- nearly 90 percent of poor households have microwave ovens.

and they've got plenty to eat.

Attention all teabaggers

Use Binder Clips to Keep Tea Bags Out of the Way.

Packaging isn't all that bad

In addition to protecting food from its microbial surroundings, packaging significantly prolongs shelf life, which in turn improves the chances of the food actually being eaten.

...if you take the packaging away and focus on the naked food itself, you have to realize that the food will be rotting a lot sooner than if it weren’t packaged and, as a result, will be heading to the same place as the packaging: the landfill. Decaying food emits methane, a greenhouse gas that’s more than 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Packaging — unless it’s biodegradable — does not. If the landfill is connected to a methane digester, which in all likelihood it isn’t, you can turn the methane into energy. Otherwise, it makes more sense to send the wrapping (rather than the food) into the environmentally incorrect grave.

...[O]ur behavior in the kitchen far outweighs the environmental impact of whatever packaging happens to surround the product. Consumers toss out vastly more pounds of food than we do packaging—about six times as much. One study estimates that U.S. consumers throw out about half the food they buy.

China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC)'s digital certificates

CNNIC’s digital certificate, which is probably in your computer right now, has not been proved to be maliciously spying, but it’s a matter of trust. Do you really trust CNNIC, the overlords of the ‘Great Firewall’, to not be potentially peeking into your email, Facebook, Paypal account or online bank?

More here.

stupid GE

I just had a GE Helical 26W CF burn out and it's been nowhere near the five years the bulb is guaranteed. But it's been long enough that I don't think I can find the receipt. Even if I could, I don't see myself mailing the bulb to them.

What exactly did Bush and Cheney do wrong?

Seriously: if you were a Bush follower, wouldn't you feel as though you were owed a major apology for all the accusations and the fuss that came from Democrats and media figures, accusing you of supporting radical and Constitution-shredding policies when, it turns out, they actually crave those policies in order to feel safe? Doesn't all of this bolster the Republican claim that those attacks on the Bush administration for civil liberties abuses were not due to genuine conviction, but rather for partisan gain (in the case of Democratic officials) and cheap, preening, wet-finger-in-the-air moralizing (in the case of media stars)?

Consider the example of military commissions. When the Bush administration unveiled those, the reaction from Democrats, progressives and media outlets was overwhelmingly and intensely negative, on the ground that military commissions (no matter what rules they followed) were appropriate only for "battlefield justice," when there was no other alternative. The consensus was that our normal system of justice -- developed over two hundred years -- was the only just and proper venue to try accused Terrorists, had been proven effective, and beyond that, the perception that we were inventing new and inferior tribunals of justice for Muslims would fuel Terrorism and make us more unsafe. What happened to all of that? Was there a single Democrat or progressive defending military commissions when Bush and Cheney unveiled them as their preferred method for trying Terrorists? Now, suddenly, Terrorists belong in military commissions -- at GITMO? So the defining creations of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld approach are now the centerpieces of the Democratic and media consensus.

All of these attacks on the Obama administration really leave one wondering: what is it exactly that Bush and Cheney did wrong? Was it just the waterboarding (the official authorization for which was withdrawn several years before Bush left office and which, in any event, people like Richard Cohen and Michael Crowley still crave)? Everything else other than the "enhanced interrogation techniques" was good? What happened to all the profound talk about how they ruined our image in the world and violated our "core principles" and how we can simultaneously Stay Safe and adhere to our values -- which happened to be a central theme of Obama's successful presidential campaign? How can Democrats and media stars claim to find Bush and Cheney so distasteful as they simultaneously attack Obama for reversing their defining policies in a few isolated instances? In the areas of civil liberties and Terrorism, what exactly did Bush and Cheney do wrong?

“I am not an ideologue”

I rather doubt Obama considers himself an ideologue; he has probably convinced himself that he is what he wants to project: an empiricist, a pragmatist, and person who makes decisions based on evidence and reason instead of ideology. The fact that he has pursued an agenda blessed, in almost every instance, by Nancy Pelosi is the oddest of coincidences.

Skeletons & sacred texts

家家有本難念的經 (jiā jiā yǒu běn nán niàn de jīng, literally, "every family has a hard-to-read scripture") means "every family has its troubles". One translation is "There is a skeleton in every house". There's a story:

There is no principle more destructive to human happiness than Revenge; let it be taken in whatever light it may, it answers no purpose, but tends to aggravate men to scenes of bloodshed and crimes, various in themselves, but terrible in their consequences. When it is had, what better can man feel? It makes him none the richer; happiness it brings not, as the following dreadful tale can testify; peace comes not within the boundary of revenge, but it leaves him conscious of his guilt and a prey to his passions.

In the year 1676, there lived at Naples a lady of the name of Corsina, born at Capovana, and wife of a noble cavalier named Ramondo de Balzo. It happened after some years that Heaven was pleased to deprive this lady of her husband, and she was left a widow with an only son. This youth possessed all the excellent qualities and endowments of his father, and became his mother's idol and only care. At length she considered that it would be greatly to his advantage to send him to Bologna, to pursue his studies ; she consequently found him a tutor, provided him with books and every other necessary article, so that his studies might not be interrupted, and sent him away with a tender mother's blessing. He remained at Bologna for a considerable period of time, during which she furnished him with every comfort he could wish or require. The youth having every advantage, improved greatly, became an excellent scholar, and by his gentlemanly manners, correct conduct, and brilliant talents, gained the affection of all his fellow collegians. After a considerable time spent at college, he became a doctor of law, and was on the eve of his return to Naples, when he was taken seriously ill. The bed physicians were summoned to his aid, but none of them gave any hopes of success. De Balzo perceiving he was a lost man, thought of nothing but his mother, and the distress of mind which his loss would occasion her. Contrary, however, to the expectations of every one that saw him, he recovered from his bodily indisposition—but it had left him so nerveless, low and despondent, that nothing that was done for him could rouse him from the lethargic melancholy into which he had fallen. His physicians, as the only chance of removing his complaint, advised his marriage with some beautiful and accomplished young female, who was of a gay cheerful turn of mind, and who might, by her enlivening presence, eradicate the gloomy sensations which had crept over his mind. His mother was accordingly written to on the subject, who immediately set about making the necessary enquiries among every family with which she was acquainted in Naples. The task was a most arduous one—but the restoration of her son's health was the only feeling which her heart contained—that heart had no room for aught else. At length her search appeared to have been crowned with success; she found a being who appeared so gay, so cheerful, so happy and unconcerned, that she seemed incapable of harbouring a single unpleasant thought. She was young and ravishingly beautiful. Madame Corsina, fancying she had found the very person she was in quest of, explained the nature of her mission. The young lady listened attentively to Madame Corsina's story, then replied, "Alas! Madame, instead of being the gayest of the gay, in me behold the veriest wretch that ever crawled the earth; the most miserable being at heart that ever had existence; there never was born, perhaps, a more devoted unfortunate woman than myself, or one who has been more tried by deep sorrows and heavy afflictions : and that you may be convinced of this," said she, " follow me." Taking the hand of Madame Corsina, she led her through a secret passage into an inner chamber or recess, where, drawing aside a sable curtain, she pointed with one hand to a nauseous skeleton which hung dangling to a beam, and with the other to the livid corpse of a man, covered and encrusted with blood, that lay beneath! Madame Corsina started back with horror, consternation, and affright, exclaiming, "Oh God! what means this dreadful sight?" The young lady mournfully sighed; then with eyes bursting with tears, answered—" In me behold the Marchioness de Sartine; that skeleton of bones was once the beloved of my heart; poverty stood in the way of our union; my parents united me to the Marquis de Sartine. My lover came to bid me an eternal farewell ere his departure to foreign climes. The Marquis found us weeping together. Infuriate with rage and jealousy, he drew his dagger and stabbed him in the side, then dragged him (while the life-blood flowed) to this room, and caused him to be hung up as you perceive: then with an unequalled barbarity, confined me with the body, and after my release compelled me to see the unfortunate victim of his rage night and morning of every day. Think of my dreadful anguish! think of the horrid torture of my soul!—I lived but for revenge!—that revenge was sure and terrible!—behold its effects ! With the selfsame weapon that struck my beloved the fatal blow, I stabbed the titled villain to the heart, and dragged him to this spot, where I daily glut my eyes with the food my just vengeance has provided. Now begone, and think for the future that those who appear the most happy are often the most wretched. Begone !—but dare not breathe a word, a whisper of what thou hast seen and heard this day; my power and vengeance are yet terrible !" Madame Corsina quickly departed from the house more dead than alive, and on her return home was still more dreadfully afflicted by the melancholy account of the death of her son, who had suffered a relapse. Bowed down by sorrow, she soon followed him to the grave. The Marchioness de Sartine, continually tortured by remorse, that "worm that never dies," at last made a public avowal of the crime she had been guilty of, and was adjudged to die, but from the particular circumstances of the case, and in consideration of her rank, she was permitted to enter a convent, the rules of which were enforced with unceasing severity, where, by acts of devotion and penance, she endeavoured to conciliate an offended God, and at last died, a true penitent, but with a heart broken with care, remorse, anguish, and sorrow.

Very nice, but not exactly the same thing.

Stock market crash leads to battle over Ill. pensions

Terry Savage:

The State of Illinois has the most underfunded public pension plans in the nation, with a funding gap that is now approaching $50 billion. The low balances in the state's pension accounts have been made worse by the stock market crash...

A financial war is brewing -- and it's likely to pit these public employees against Illinois taxpayers who are responsible for paying those generous pension promises. There simply isn't enough money in all these retirement plans to send out the promised checks. If you think Bernie Madoff had a Ponzi scheme going, wait until the wave of boomer retirement hits the reality of pension underfunding...

Could the state simply default on its pension obligations when the time comes?

James Spiotto, an attorney with Chapman and Cutler in Chicago, is an expert in municipal bankruptcies and says the law can be murky.

"There are varying levels of protection, ranging from strict constitutional rights to general statutory provisions, that might allow for some renegotiation of benefit levels in light of adverse conditions affecting the pension fund," Spiotto said.

In other words, if the state tries to cut back on the promised benefits, there will be a huge court battle.

When companies go bankrupt, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp steps in to cover most defined-benefit pension promises. But the PBGC does NOT cover municipal or state retirement plans.

If city, state and local pension promise are to be kept, it will be up to taxpayers to come up with the money -- either through higher tax levies or lower service levels...