Posts by Russell Brown
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(Republican) House majority leader Eric Cantor starts to walk back his words on the occupiers.
Interesting!
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Godwin.
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Hard News: Where are the foreigners?!, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Mostly I find mid level and higher Indian food (and other Asian cuisines) to be watered down in New Zealand to suit our less adventurous palettes (I’m thinking of the over-rated Satya amongst others) but, to me at least, LI doesn’t do that hence the large numbers of Indian families you always see in there. I’m always reminded, too, of my regular trips to Brick Lane when living in London. It was something I long missed when returning to Auckland.
I wouldn't say Little India was the best of its breed in Auckland -- but, then, I'm not sure what is. Its dishes are certainly a notch up from most places for heat, and it does venture a bit beyond the standard tandoori menu.
I did notice that LI in Christchurch -- where there are fewer options -- was feeding a large number of Indian families the time I ate there.
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Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street, in reply to Lilith __,
Cubans have the same life expectancy as Americans. Free and universal healthcare is provided by the communist state. Cubans may be disadvantaged in some ways, but longevity ain’t one of them.
Public health performance is most creditable in Cuba -- as is its amazing public literacy initiative.
But we should remember that at the same time the Cuban government was conducting political executions, torturing prisoners of conscience and persecuting homosexuals.
Some things have improved in recent years, but Cuba remains at or near the bottom of all global measures of press freedom. It remains a very depressing place in many, many respects.
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Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street, in reply to Rich Lock,
One of the lesser tragedies of 9/11 was that all those movements were basically killed stone dead just as they were gaining some mainstream traction. I reckon you could put together and argument that these current protests have their roots in, and are rising from, the ashes of the anti-globalisation movement.
I was a doubter of the anti-capitalist protests. They were often incoherent. The same march would have people demanding trade barriers for developing countries be dismantled marching alongside US steelworkers and farmers demanding protection via increased tariffs and subsidies. Their demands were incompatible.
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Hard News: Where are the foreigners?!, in reply to Rich Lock,
…but I don’t think I’ve ever heard ‘oriental’ used – too awkward a mouthful. I can’t actually think what would be used.
Mostly just "Chinese", from memory.
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George Monbiot's new column on Professor Steve Keen's book, Debunking Economics, seems apposite.
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Hard News: Dropping the Bomber, in reply to Paul Williams,
Craig might’ve meant that; she did front that interview, she just thought it was about something else (if I’ve recalled this correctly). She might also have avoided Campbell for a time after that too, whether that was justified or not…
She was told it was an interview about GM policy in general -- for better or worse, they deliberately gave her no hint that it would be about the events documented in Nicky Hager's book. Or indeed that such a book existed, or even who was making the allegations being put to her.
I wrote about the BSA finding (partially) against TV3 here. Basically, the BSA emphatically endorsed TV3's right to conduct a robust pubic interview without tipping off the subject to the question line, but had problems with a few other things.
I honestly don't think that tactic worked out well. We got a spectacle, but didn't learn much. It was a mad period, and let me be the first to admit that I didn't do my own finest work at that time. It took me a while to work out what I actually thought and, where necessary, walk back some initial statements.
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Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street, in reply to Dylan Horrocks,
Huh. Well, having followed this rather obsessively for more than a week now, I have to say that’s not the video I see posted and tweeted and shared over and over again. Maybe the views it’s getting are partly *because* it’s so out there? Honestly, of all the photos and videos and interviews and tweets I’ve encountered so far, this would be at the fringe of the messages I’m hearing from Occupy Wall Street.
Oh, seriously, I hope so. A coherent, democratic movement for reform would be a historic achievement.
But America's such a weird place.
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Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street, in reply to BenWilson,
One thing that I think that anti-banking sentiment fails to capture at the moment is that the problem is way bigger than just bad banking. A systematic decline in the value of Western economies through the outsourcing of everything that could possibly be outsourced is not just the fault of bankers, it's the entire globalization mentality, for which the blame is considerably more diffuse.
But even globalisation looks different if you're in, say, China or Vietnam and you have a life your parents couldn't have dreamed of.
And capitalism really did pretty well in the 20th Century. This Australian Treasury paper on poverty and inequality in that century is worth reading. On life expectancy:
In 1870, the world's highest life expectancies at birth were in Norway (49.3 years) and Australia (48.0 years). Life expectancy in Japan was 37 years. In the 1880s, Indian life expectancy was 25 years, and it fell to only 20 years in the 1920s, when Spanish influenza swept the country [Crafts (2000) pp 7-8; Caldwell (1999) p 121].
By the mid 1990s, the highest life expectancies in the rich countries of the 1870s had been exceeded by practically every country on earth. The average life expectancy in developing countries was 65 years; in India it was 61.6 years; and only in Angola, Malawi and Mozambique did life expectancies remain lower than the levels in Australia and Norway in the 1870s.
Supporting indicators suggest that the quality of life is improving, as well as sheer longevity, for reasons that include economic gains in nutrition, not just public health gains (such as immunisation). For example, child malnutrition rates have declined by a quarter in the last 40 years, with associated improvements in stunting (low height for age -- an indicator of long-term malnutrition) and wasting (low weight for height-- an indicator of short-term malnutrition). [UNDP (1998) p 19]
Life expectancy inequality between countries halved between 1962 and 1973. We are a more equal world in many respects.
What the paper also shows is that we and our parents in the West grew up in a golden era of prosperity: 1950-1973.
On the other hand, India was still amongst the poorest 20 countries in the world in the late 70s. That's hard to credit now.
The financial clusterfuck we continue to witness is, indeed, predicated on the substantial improvement in per-capita income and, consequently, savings in the economies of the East. That's where the credit has come from.
And, as Alan Bollard explained in his book, the mainstream view was that that was a fine arrangement. The increasingly prosperous East needed somewhere to invest, we needed access to finance.
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