Category: Internet

According to one of Sploid’s sources, Germany is planning for the expected overflow in one of their cherished industries during next year’s unruly World Cup:

Prostitution is legal in Germany in designated areas.

“In Dortmund we have an official red light district on the outskirts, but there is a problem. There is not enough space for everyone to park.”

Dortmund plans to arrange the Dutch-designed huts, which have been introduced in the city of Cologne, another World Cup venue, in an area with condom machines and snack bar.

The snack bar will only sell organic, low -carb, whole-grain treats.

Economist Keith Chen teaches monkeys to use money and sits back and watches what they do:

Chen next introduced a pair of gambling games and set out to determine which one the monkeys preferred. In the first game, the capuchin was given one grape and, dependent on a coin flip, either retained the original grape or won a bonus grape. In the second game, the capuchin started out owning the bonus grape and, once again dependent on a coin flip, either kept the two grapes or lost one. These two games are in fact the same gamble, with identical odds, but one is framed as a potential win and the other as a potential loss.

How did the capuchins react? They far preferred to take a gamble on the potential gain than the potential loss. This is not what an economics textbook would predict. The laws of economics state that these two gambles, because they represent such small stakes, should be treated equally.

So, does Chen’s gambling experiment simply reveal the cognitive limitations of his small-brained subjects? Perhaps not. In similar experiments, it turns out that humans tend to make the same type of irrational decision at a nearly identical rate. Documenting this phenomenon, known as loss aversion, is what helped the psychologist Daniel Kahneman win a Nobel Prize in economics. The data generated by the capuchin monkeys, Chen says, ”make them statistically indistinguishable from most stock-market investors.”

And then there’s the prostitution.

H/T Amy Alkon.

The Air America crowd is bleary-eyed with excitement over the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair’s cabinet in 2002 where the pending liberation of Iraq was discussed. Their claim that the memo is some sort of “smoking gun” on secret plans to falsify intelligence is a testament to their illiteracy. Here’s the passage that gets their hearts pounding:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

The term “fixed” is understood by Franken’s minions as meaning “fabricated”, but it should be properly understood in its British sense as “placed”, this being a British document and all. The document is saying that Bush will furnish the evidence of Saddam’s misbehavior. There was, of course, general consensus around the world in the late 90s and early 00s that Saddam’s government would likely arm terrorist groups at some point with deadlier weapons than they could come up with on their own. This was the predicate for the Iraq Liberation Act the US Congress passed in 1998, and the basis of some vigorous anti-Saddam campaigning from Blair during the Clinton Administration. So there was no reason to believe that evidence supporting the liberation of Iraq would be anything but genuine.

The memo simply indicates that Bush and Blair had both decided that it was time to stop bullshitting and start walking the walk on Iraq. That we didn’t find a ready stockpile of weapons doesn’t really matter – they would have been manufactured as soon as the embargo was lifted, and by then it would have been too late to act.

I don’t expect this memo to bring down any governments; it was published in Britain before the recent elections that Blair won handily. Making Franken’s minions even more hungry for Ben and Jerry’s than usual is its only consequence.

Communist China has shown its brutal and oppressive character again:

A JOURNALIST considered the doyen of China correspondents has been held in Beijing and could be charged with stealing state secrets after he tried to obtain a copy of interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the Communist leader who was purged after the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Ching Cheong, a Hong Kong national who works for The Straits Times, a Singaporean newspaper, would be the first reporter for a foreign publication to face charges in China.

His wife, Mary Lau, said: “He told me that he expected to be shut up for a long time. It seems they suspect him of stealing state secrets.” Mr Ching, 55, was detained in the southern city of Guangzhou on April 22. He had been trying to obtain a copy of interviews with the late Zhao, who opposed the use of military force to suppress the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Imprisoning foreign journalists is a step up from the Tibetan genocide, but countries that behave this way aren’t ready for full membership in the community of civilized nations. China is effectively a criminal enterprise, nearly as savage as its client state, North Korea.

Michael Totten is all riled-up over the Sufi massacre and Reuters:

A person who deliberately mass-murders his fellow citizens because they belong to the “wrong” religious sect is not an insurgent. The “insurgents” are not oppressed by a Sufi regime in Iraq, nor can Iraq’s government be considered even remotely dominated by Sufis. Those killed weren’t part of the government or police force in the first place.

“Insurgent” is a morally and ethically neutral term. There are good insurgents and bad in this world, just as there are good guerillas and bad. There are not, however, good mass-murdering terrorists.

At this week’s Portland liberal hawks drinking club meeting, Sufism was discussed in some detail in connection with Friedman’s claim that Islam needs a reformation. My recollection of history is that the Sufi Muslims were at the center of Islam’s Golden Age, so what they really need is to return to their roots. Apparently these murdering terrorists agree that the Sufis are way too civilized for current events in Iraq.

Tom Friedman should think this over.

Check the transcript of a debate between Hitchens and several commies on the liberation of Iraq:

Andrew Marr – And you’re still cast-iron certain, that despite the large numbers of deaths in the post war Iraq, and despite all the problems of putting together that democracy, that we will end up with a much more tolerable, decent and peaceable country?

Christopher Hitchens – Well, it doesn’t take much of a cast-iron certainty, Andrew, to do that because we know that it could not possibly have been worse and that proposition was given a very solid test. I would say that the possibility of defeat of this enterprise exists in Iraq, partly because we left it so long and the country became so beggared and ruined. But it’s not the kind of defeat that it would have been if we’d left it to be deeded to the Uday-Qusay succession and that was the alternative offer that was being made by the peaceniks.

More than that I think Iraq will be remarkable. We’re going to live to see great things. We already have in Lebanon. We’re about to I think in Egypt, with the reopening of the Egyptian democracy. The Ba’ath party in Syria in my judgement will not be there in two years time And there will be extraordinary, are already extraordinary developments in Iran which I have just come back from. And so the essential point of the Blair-Bush policy, which is to change the balance of power in the Middle East, that has already been conclusively vindicated.

Indeed it has been conclusively vindicated, which is more than many of my friends on the Left can bear.

Damage control notwithstanding, the Pepsi chick’s speech did sound vaguely insulting:

What is most crucial to my analogy of the five fingers as the five major continents, is that each of us in the U.S. – the long middle finger – must be careful that when we extend our arm in either a business or political sense, we take pains to assure we are giving a hand … not the finger. Sometimes this is very difficult. Because the U.S. – the middle finger – sticks out so much, we can send the wrong message unintentionally.

Unfortunately, I think this is how the rest of the world looks at the U.S. right now. Not as part of the hand – giving strength and purpose to the rest of the fingers – but, instead, scratching our nose and sending a far different signal.

If America’s such a rotten place, why move here all the way from Madras? That being said, the reaction from Power Line, Hewitt, Malkin, and the rest of the Creationist Right is a bit extreme. High-born South Indian women are taught to be arrogant (Arundhati Roy) and don’t generally realize how others see them. Perhaps that’s the point, that America is like a high-born South Indian woman. I can see that.

George Galloway’s performance art didn’t impress his local paper. The Scotsman has seen it all before:

GEORGE Galloway yesterday failed in his attempt to convince a sceptical US Senate investigative committee that he had not profited from oil dealings with Iraq under the UN’s controversial oil-for-food programme.

Despite a typically barnstorming performance full of bluster and rhetorical flourishes, the former Glasgow Kelvin MP was pinned down by persistent questioning over his business relationship with Fawaz Zureikat, the chairman of the Mariam Appeal – set up to assist a four-year-old Iraqi girl suffering from leukaemia.

And it was a Democrat senator, Carl Levin, rather than the Republican committee chairman, Norm Coleman, who gave him the hardest time as Mr Galloway sought to turn the tables on his inquisitors, leaving him no closer to clearing his name than when he took his seat in front of the sub-committee of the Senate’s homeland security and government affairs committee in Washington.

Time and again, Mr Levin questioned him, requesting wearily that he deliver a straight answer to a straight question. But Mr Galloway could, or would not.

The criminal from Glasgow took to screaming and throwing fits about the liberation of Iraq under questioning about the profits he made from Oil-For-Food. This is old tricks for Galloway, who was expelled from the Labour Party for urging British soldiers in Iraq to mutiny.

It’s amazing that this fool (recently elected to parliament on a racist campaign) isn’t in prison.

Here’s an excellent gift for voodoo practitioners.

Portland’s Liberal Hawks are going to convene for a little drinking Monday evening at a local watering hole. Contact me if you’d like to come. Guest of honor is just back from Lebanon, and he’s alleged to be armed with stories about the Cedar Revolution.

Which reminds me of something pertinent to Iraq. Remember how the peaceniks used to say “yeah, that Saddam is a Bad Guy, but there’s lots of Bad Guys and we can’t invade ALL their countries, can we?”

It turns out the answer to that question has become apparent from recent happenings in Lebanon as well as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Libya: we don’t have to invade ALL their countries, just enough so that they get the message. But thanks for asking.