When I do not have an answer to a question I often will start with what Charles Krauthammer's discussion on a topic. In today's column, Mr. Krauthammer suggests Tehran is about to crack knowing economic sanctions are upon them.
I agree economic sanctions are feared, for reasons Mr. Krauthammer sights, as their shaky reign due to the folks in Iran feel the mullah's control of the country is not best for them. There have been protests in the recent past from namely Iranian students for a revolution.
Mr Krauthammer also says military action would be feared much more than economic sanctions. And why would it not?
If Iran is sweating over the idea the EU, UN or most importantly the US is serious about them not having nuclear capability on any level, this fear comes primarily from the fear of US decision making. Those who cheer loudly for their disdain for the US may or may not have a credible reason for their hatred. They may President Bush for equally as justifiable/unjustified reasons. President Bush has made a name for himself in the international community. He does what he says he is going to do. President Bush is not afraid to make decisions whether they turn out as planned or otherwise. Quoting Charles Krauthammer said, "Mark my words." Unilateralism in the face of arguable complacency may be reason to hate President Bush, but I think it is fear from Iran and jealousy from the EU.
Friday, May 26, 2006
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Senate Passes Boarder Wall
It was a great day for this country, the Senate passed a border wall bill for 370 miles of triple fence. It passed by more than a 5 to 1 ratio.
Dick Durban from New York said the wall would just hurt relations with Mexico. With this comment I believe he is pandering to a small group of his constituents or possibly just trying to look strong for them, when he has no ideas of his own.
I caught the middle to end of an interview yesterday on Hugh Hewitt's evening radio show... an individual who was being interviewed explained a 3 layer wall would consist of a combination of actual wall structure, long ditches (anti-vehicle crossing) and digital equipment for surveillance.
This individual stated there is not a need for a 2000 mile wall from California to Texas due to many parts of the southern US/Mexico border have geographic barriers such as the Rio Grande River and cliffs which in some places in Texas grow 200 feet just inside the US. Crossing at these points is nearly impossible for an illegal alien, therefore would rarely be attempted. The actual triple fence would be constructed inside and on the flanks of metro areas of border towns.
Three cheers for the Senate and the President!
Dick Durban from New York said the wall would just hurt relations with Mexico. With this comment I believe he is pandering to a small group of his constituents or possibly just trying to look strong for them, when he has no ideas of his own.
I caught the middle to end of an interview yesterday on Hugh Hewitt's evening radio show... an individual who was being interviewed explained a 3 layer wall would consist of a combination of actual wall structure, long ditches (anti-vehicle crossing) and digital equipment for surveillance.
This individual stated there is not a need for a 2000 mile wall from California to Texas due to many parts of the southern US/Mexico border have geographic barriers such as the Rio Grande River and cliffs which in some places in Texas grow 200 feet just inside the US. Crossing at these points is nearly impossible for an illegal alien, therefore would rarely be attempted. The actual triple fence would be constructed inside and on the flanks of metro areas of border towns.
Three cheers for the Senate and the President!
Monday, May 15, 2006
Time Magazine and Image Picking
Time Magazine published there 100 most influential people in the May 8, 2006 issue. Perhaps this not the first year Time has used other influential people to write about Time's chosen 100 influentials. An example is Laura Bush wrote the piece on the first Female President in Africa, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. Condoleeza Rice wrote in for Oprah Winfrey, and on the page previous to Oprah was Justice O'Connor on Chief Justice Roberts. I found most of the segments inspiring and not just a few paragraphs of canned ungenious.
One long critique of the May 8, 2005 issue;
George W Bush was front and center, covering the first two pages. James Carney was chosen to write on the President. Was his assessment balanced? A stretched... yes. The first 2/3 was a list of issues the President has handled. Mr Carney feels on all the issues he listed the president has mishandled. MoreThancorn could have written an article with similar content and painted a much different picture of the president. All the issues listed can be argued as current failures, successes or maybe there has not yet been enough time to decide.... these are truly up for debate. In order on page 52; "Hurricane Katrina, high gas prices, the Jack Abramoff scandal, the CIA leak investigation, the Dubai Ports deal, a bulging deficit and above all Iraq. An invasion the President sold as vital to national security is now seen by most Americans as a war of choice-and a bad choice."
The photo of the President is large and black and white. It shows detail which would have been lost in a color photo.
It is a face of a be-wildered President Bush. His photo shows up earlier on the cover, page 22, 31, and twice in the center fold. Bono comes close with possibly 4 pictures in this issue.
An observation could be made for marketing an image for which pictures are chosen to represent people in their articles. For the President capturing him in a whince, a sigh, upset or surprised would always project one image of the President.
Add the above pictures to an arguably negative article and you come away from reading the magazine with an awful feeling about our country and President.
If pictures of the president saluting troops in Iraq, shaking hands with the crowd, dinner with Mrs Bush, or a meeting with his friend Tony Blair were chosen, different image and feeling would have been invoked.
Compare these with three descenters of the president;
Hillary Clinton's segment. The picture, also black and white, softening the lines of a beautiful smile, showing calm and class.
One long critique of the May 8, 2005 issue;
George W Bush was front and center, covering the first two pages. James Carney was chosen to write on the President. Was his assessment balanced? A stretched... yes. The first 2/3 was a list of issues the President has handled. Mr Carney feels on all the issues he listed the president has mishandled. MoreThancorn could have written an article with similar content and painted a much different picture of the president. All the issues listed can be argued as current failures, successes or maybe there has not yet been enough time to decide.... these are truly up for debate. In order on page 52; "Hurricane Katrina, high gas prices, the Jack Abramoff scandal, the CIA leak investigation, the Dubai Ports deal, a bulging deficit and above all Iraq. An invasion the President sold as vital to national security is now seen by most Americans as a war of choice-and a bad choice."
The photo of the President is large and black and white. It shows detail which would have been lost in a color photo.
It is a face of a be-wildered President Bush. His photo shows up earlier on the cover, page 22, 31, and twice in the center fold. Bono comes close with possibly 4 pictures in this issue.
An observation could be made for marketing an image for which pictures are chosen to represent people in their articles. For the President capturing him in a whince, a sigh, upset or surprised would always project one image of the President.
Add the above pictures to an arguably negative article and you come away from reading the magazine with an awful feeling about our country and President.
If pictures of the president saluting troops in Iraq, shaking hands with the crowd, dinner with Mrs Bush, or a meeting with his friend Tony Blair were chosen, different image and feeling would have been invoked.
Compare these with three descenters of the president;
Hillary Clinton's segment. The picture, also black and white, softening the lines of a beautiful smile, showing calm and class.
This picture potrays what I see as expressions and emotions which are not often seen with the Senator from New York. The picture of a powerful Hillary Clinton is not donning the angry face I seen on C-Span. A face of condescending impatience, sometimes lightly filtered anger. The article about Senator Clinton was fare and right on the mark. Balanced, giving credit to her where credit is due; powerful due to her married name and a contender in 2008.
Al Gore is also an angry figure, with yelling and accusation filled speeches against the President. 
(Yelling) "He played on our fears!" Remembering a speech he gave about Iraq in which he was screaming.
He is being shown with a grin ear to ear. A greying and growing-wiser former Vice President. The article is everything one could hope; complimentary, endorsing, inspiring, bigger than himself "And in the meantime, Gore has decided, there's a planet to save" [global warming]. It appears the author of this article, Karen Tumulty, is not hiding her agenda.
Another glaring difference in image is of Hugo Chavez and his article written by a Tim Padgett... The artist draws a rendition of a Hugo rant, some weeks lasting 6-hours. The picture portrays power, aggression and anger to be respected. 
The article contains: "The rise of Venezuela's left wing President Hugo Chavez is a lesson in what can happen when the US disses an entire continent. After 9/11 when most Latin American nations refused to endorse the US invasion of Iraq, President Bush testily turned his back on the region....I sting those who rattle me."
A poor image was painted of the president with suttle picture choice. While those opposed to President Bush received flattoring pictures for their articles. It is my opinion the above pictures bring into question the objectivity of the Time editor.
It appears I have written about 2/3 of my post as negative this Time issue. Because it is not yet a balanced post, I will admit enjoyment in reading Time and would consider buying another issue in the future.
If there is another "got milk?" advertisement with Elizabeth Hurley, I will consider a subscription. Who's thirsty?
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Losing Focus For A Lady
My cycling teammates here in Arizona are 30 and 40 year old teenagers. There is an important race to which the team has planned to make a showing, here in 3 weeks. In the middle of our intensity our charismatic VP sees two young ladies we all know, cycling. They are possibly the best looking individuals to ever pull on a pair of spandex.
The team stops our training mid-stream and fakes two consecutive flat tires as to let Cleopatra (eligible) and Marilyn (married) catch up. As soon as they are within vocal range, we hear Cleo say to Mari "Did they just fake a flat so we would ride with them?"
We miss nothing, but they don't either.
The team stops our training mid-stream and fakes two consecutive flat tires as to let Cleopatra (eligible) and Marilyn (married) catch up. As soon as they are within vocal range, we hear Cleo say to Mari "Did they just fake a flat so we would ride with them?"
We miss nothing, but they don't either.
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Larry Summers - His Questions Are Unanswered
Remember when Larry Summers, the former President of Harvard University, found himself in the middle of an uproar where he was being attacked by faculty at Harvard?
The speech which was the causation of the unwarranted turmoil can be read in it’s entirety at Underrepresented.
Wikpedia has included this in their information on Larry Summers:
Sex and Intelligence Controversy
In January 2005, Summers suggested at an economic conference that one of the causes of the fewer women than men in science and engineering professorships might be that fewer women than men had the very high levels of "intrinsic aptitude" that such jobs required.
Pressure from faculty and the media continued to where Larry Summers chose to step down from his post at the university.
This post is designed to provoke critical thought, and hopefully for opinions to be drawn, conclusions to be made.
Once the speech is read, below are excerpts which may be the most important parts of the speech which detail the dialogue and which lead to pressure by others on Summers and his eventually resignation.
“…It is after all not the case that the role of women in science is the only example of a group that is significantly underrepresented in an important activity and whose underrepresentation contributes to a shortage of role models for others who are considering being in that group. To take a set of diverse examples, the data will, I am confident, reveal that Catholics are substantially underrepresented in investment banking, which is an enormously high-paying profession in our society; that white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association; and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture. These are all phenomena in which one observes underrepresentation, and I think it's important to try to think systematically and clinically about the reasons for underrepresentation….
There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the-I'll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are-the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search….
…And here, you can get a fair distance, it seems to me, looking at a relatively simple hypothesis. It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined. If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it's talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out. I did a very crude calculation, which I'm sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper-looked at the book, rather-looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those-they're all over the map, depends on which test, whether it's math, or science, and so forth-but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates….
Below are pieces taken from the Q&A after the speech.
LHS: ...My point was simply that the field of behavioral genetics had a revolution in the last fifteen years, and the principal thrust of that revolution was the discovery that a large number of things that people thought were due to socialization weren't, and were in fact due to more intrinsic human nature, and that set of discoveries, it seemed to me, ought to influence the way one thought about other areas where there was a perception of the importance of socialization. I wasn't at all trying to connect those studies to the particular experiences of women and minorities who were thinking about academic careers.
Q: Raising that particular issue, as a biologist, I neither believe in all genetic or all environment, that in fact behavior in any other country actually develops [unintelligible] interaction of those aspects. And I agree with you, in fact, that it is wrong-headed to just dismiss the biology. But to put too much weight to it is also incredibly wrong-headed, given the fact that had people actually had different kinds of opportunities, and different opportunities for socialization, there is good evidence to indicate in fact that it would have had different outcomes. I cite by way of research the [unintelligible] project in North Carolina, which essentially shows that, where every indicator with regard to mother's education, socioeconomic status, et cetera, would have left a kid in a particular place educationally, that, essentially, they are seeing totally different outcomes with regard to performance, being referred to special education, et cetera, so I think that there is some evidence on that particular side. The other issue is this whole question about objective versus subjective. I think that it is very difficult to have anything that is basically objective, and the work of [unintelligible] I think point out that in a case where you are actually trying to-this case from the Swedish Medical Council, where they were trying to identify very high-powered research opportunities for, I guess it was post-docs by that point, that indicated that essentially that it ended up with larger numbers of men than women. Two of the women who were basically in the affected group were able to utilize the transparency rules that were in place in Sweden, get access to the data, get access to the issues, and in fact, discovered that it was not as objective as everyone claimed, and that in fact, different standards were actually being used for the women as well as for the men, including the men's presence in sort of a central network, the kinds of journals that they had to publish in to be considered at the same level, so I think that there are pieces of research that begin to actually relate to this-yes, there is the need to look more carefully at a lot of these areas. I would-in addition looking at this whole question of the quality of marginal hires-I would also like to look at the quality of class one hires, in terms of seeing who disappoints, and what it was that they happened to be looking at and making judgments on, and then what the people could not deliver. So I think that there is a real great need on both sides to begin to talk about whether or not we can predict. I hate to use a sports metaphor, but I will. This is drawn basically from an example from Claude Steele, where he says, he starts by using free throws as a way of actually determining, who should-you've got to field a basketball team, and you clearly want the people who make ten out of ten, and you say, "Well, I may not want the people who make zero out of ten," but what about the people who make four out of ten. If you use that as the measure, Shaq will be left on the sidelines.
LHS: I understand. I think you're obviously right that there's no absolute objectivity, and you're-there's no question about that. My own instincts actually are that you could go wrong in a number of respects fetishizing objectivity for exactly the reasons that you suggest. There is a very simple and straightforward methodology that was used many years ago in the case of baseball. Somebody wrote a very powerful article about baseball, probably in the seventies, in which they basically said, "Look, it is true that if you look at people's salaries, and you control for their batting averages and their fielding averages and whatnot, whites and blacks are in the same salary once you control. It is also true that there are no black .240 hitters in the major leagues, that the only blacks who are in the major leagues are people who bat over .300-I'm exaggerating-and that is exactly what you'd predict on a model of discrimination, that because there's a natural bias against. And there's an absolute and clear prediction. The prediction is that if there's a discriminated-against group, that if you measure subsequent performance, their subsequent performance will be stronger than that of the non-discriminated-against group. And that's a simple prediction of a theory of discrimination. And it's a testable prediction of a theory of discrimination, and it would be a revolution, and it would be an enormously powerful finding in this field, to demonstrate, and I suspect there are contexts in which that can be demonstrated, but there's a straightforward methodology, it seems to me, for testing exactly that idea. I'm going to run out of time. But, let me take-if people ask very short questions, I will give very short answers.
It is important to point out, this reader believes the ideas presented by Larry Summers were designed solely for provoking critical thinking and then dialogue. The Q&A portion of the speech was fulfilling this, however based on the subsequent attacks by faculty and the media it brought an end to intelligent discussion.
When discussing the “Xie and Shauman paper”, Larry Summers invokes hard hitting questions and then proposes possible theories.
It is interesting to mention, while listening to the radio the last two weeks I was hearing radio commercials sponsored by the Girl Scouts. The first few times I heard these commercials I overlooked or more precisely did not overhear a related theme as to what Larry Summers had been proposing. Paraphrased, the Girl Scout commercial stated, “... by the 8th grade, girls lose interest in science...”
For argument sake and in defense of Mr Summers, this simple radio broadcast speaks volumes of the dialogue Mr Summers was attempting to begin and I feel the legitimacy of his ideas. For the question is still unanswered. Why are there fewer women than men in the top science positions?
The speech which was the causation of the unwarranted turmoil can be read in it’s entirety at Underrepresented.
Wikpedia has included this in their information on Larry Summers:
Sex and Intelligence Controversy
In January 2005, Summers suggested at an economic conference that one of the causes of the fewer women than men in science and engineering professorships might be that fewer women than men had the very high levels of "intrinsic aptitude" that such jobs required.
Pressure from faculty and the media continued to where Larry Summers chose to step down from his post at the university.
This post is designed to provoke critical thought, and hopefully for opinions to be drawn, conclusions to be made.
Once the speech is read, below are excerpts which may be the most important parts of the speech which detail the dialogue and which lead to pressure by others on Summers and his eventually resignation.
“…It is after all not the case that the role of women in science is the only example of a group that is significantly underrepresented in an important activity and whose underrepresentation contributes to a shortage of role models for others who are considering being in that group. To take a set of diverse examples, the data will, I am confident, reveal that Catholics are substantially underrepresented in investment banking, which is an enormously high-paying profession in our society; that white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association; and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture. These are all phenomena in which one observes underrepresentation, and I think it's important to try to think systematically and clinically about the reasons for underrepresentation….
There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the-I'll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are-the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search….
…And here, you can get a fair distance, it seems to me, looking at a relatively simple hypothesis. It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined. If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it's talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out. I did a very crude calculation, which I'm sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper-looked at the book, rather-looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those-they're all over the map, depends on which test, whether it's math, or science, and so forth-but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates….
Below are pieces taken from the Q&A after the speech.
LHS: ...My point was simply that the field of behavioral genetics had a revolution in the last fifteen years, and the principal thrust of that revolution was the discovery that a large number of things that people thought were due to socialization weren't, and were in fact due to more intrinsic human nature, and that set of discoveries, it seemed to me, ought to influence the way one thought about other areas where there was a perception of the importance of socialization. I wasn't at all trying to connect those studies to the particular experiences of women and minorities who were thinking about academic careers.
Q: Raising that particular issue, as a biologist, I neither believe in all genetic or all environment, that in fact behavior in any other country actually develops [unintelligible] interaction of those aspects. And I agree with you, in fact, that it is wrong-headed to just dismiss the biology. But to put too much weight to it is also incredibly wrong-headed, given the fact that had people actually had different kinds of opportunities, and different opportunities for socialization, there is good evidence to indicate in fact that it would have had different outcomes. I cite by way of research the [unintelligible] project in North Carolina, which essentially shows that, where every indicator with regard to mother's education, socioeconomic status, et cetera, would have left a kid in a particular place educationally, that, essentially, they are seeing totally different outcomes with regard to performance, being referred to special education, et cetera, so I think that there is some evidence on that particular side. The other issue is this whole question about objective versus subjective. I think that it is very difficult to have anything that is basically objective, and the work of [unintelligible] I think point out that in a case where you are actually trying to-this case from the Swedish Medical Council, where they were trying to identify very high-powered research opportunities for, I guess it was post-docs by that point, that indicated that essentially that it ended up with larger numbers of men than women. Two of the women who were basically in the affected group were able to utilize the transparency rules that were in place in Sweden, get access to the data, get access to the issues, and in fact, discovered that it was not as objective as everyone claimed, and that in fact, different standards were actually being used for the women as well as for the men, including the men's presence in sort of a central network, the kinds of journals that they had to publish in to be considered at the same level, so I think that there are pieces of research that begin to actually relate to this-yes, there is the need to look more carefully at a lot of these areas. I would-in addition looking at this whole question of the quality of marginal hires-I would also like to look at the quality of class one hires, in terms of seeing who disappoints, and what it was that they happened to be looking at and making judgments on, and then what the people could not deliver. So I think that there is a real great need on both sides to begin to talk about whether or not we can predict. I hate to use a sports metaphor, but I will. This is drawn basically from an example from Claude Steele, where he says, he starts by using free throws as a way of actually determining, who should-you've got to field a basketball team, and you clearly want the people who make ten out of ten, and you say, "Well, I may not want the people who make zero out of ten," but what about the people who make four out of ten. If you use that as the measure, Shaq will be left on the sidelines.
LHS: I understand. I think you're obviously right that there's no absolute objectivity, and you're-there's no question about that. My own instincts actually are that you could go wrong in a number of respects fetishizing objectivity for exactly the reasons that you suggest. There is a very simple and straightforward methodology that was used many years ago in the case of baseball. Somebody wrote a very powerful article about baseball, probably in the seventies, in which they basically said, "Look, it is true that if you look at people's salaries, and you control for their batting averages and their fielding averages and whatnot, whites and blacks are in the same salary once you control. It is also true that there are no black .240 hitters in the major leagues, that the only blacks who are in the major leagues are people who bat over .300-I'm exaggerating-and that is exactly what you'd predict on a model of discrimination, that because there's a natural bias against. And there's an absolute and clear prediction. The prediction is that if there's a discriminated-against group, that if you measure subsequent performance, their subsequent performance will be stronger than that of the non-discriminated-against group. And that's a simple prediction of a theory of discrimination. And it's a testable prediction of a theory of discrimination, and it would be a revolution, and it would be an enormously powerful finding in this field, to demonstrate, and I suspect there are contexts in which that can be demonstrated, but there's a straightforward methodology, it seems to me, for testing exactly that idea. I'm going to run out of time. But, let me take-if people ask very short questions, I will give very short answers.
It is important to point out, this reader believes the ideas presented by Larry Summers were designed solely for provoking critical thinking and then dialogue. The Q&A portion of the speech was fulfilling this, however based on the subsequent attacks by faculty and the media it brought an end to intelligent discussion.
When discussing the “Xie and Shauman paper”, Larry Summers invokes hard hitting questions and then proposes possible theories.
It is interesting to mention, while listening to the radio the last two weeks I was hearing radio commercials sponsored by the Girl Scouts. The first few times I heard these commercials I overlooked or more precisely did not overhear a related theme as to what Larry Summers had been proposing. Paraphrased, the Girl Scout commercial stated, “... by the 8th grade, girls lose interest in science...”
For argument sake and in defense of Mr Summers, this simple radio broadcast speaks volumes of the dialogue Mr Summers was attempting to begin and I feel the legitimacy of his ideas. For the question is still unanswered. Why are there fewer women than men in the top science positions?
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Bolivia Bungles Oil
Bolivian President, Evo Morales may be portrayed in this New York Times article as a "liberator". At least this is what the caption declares. However it would be interesting to know what all the folks on the street in front of him think. What does the average Bolivian feel is appropriate regarding their oil reserves. Keep the reserves open to (liberlization) foreign investment and development or nationalize (government control) the oil industry?
It is easy for the poor to look for a government fix. This is true for poor in any country including the US. Those who have either fell on hard times, or have learned to be helpless and hopeless may dream about either winning the lottery or receiving a check in the mail from their government. This may be exactly what the Bolivian people asked for en-masse.
A decision to nationalize an industry is the first step in wrecking an economy. Communist USSR did just this with every part of their economy. This contributed to some of the worst poverty the world has seen. The proletarians of Marxist ideals were hundreds of millions of peasant farmers and factory workers + millions of slave laborers. This system does not work. It breeds poverty. While a ruling class of elite beaucrats make all the decisions and live in wealth.
If I could send 1 million history books to Bolivian elementary and high schools, maybe we could save the country in 20 more years.
Bolivia may be doomed to go the same road as Hugo Chavez and his Argentina. A tanking economy and fleeing investors. These countries cannot make it on their own, or even just trading among themselves only.
It is easy for the poor to look for a government fix. This is true for poor in any country including the US. Those who have either fell on hard times, or have learned to be helpless and hopeless may dream about either winning the lottery or receiving a check in the mail from their government. This may be exactly what the Bolivian people asked for en-masse.
A decision to nationalize an industry is the first step in wrecking an economy. Communist USSR did just this with every part of their economy. This contributed to some of the worst poverty the world has seen. The proletarians of Marxist ideals were hundreds of millions of peasant farmers and factory workers + millions of slave laborers. This system does not work. It breeds poverty. While a ruling class of elite beaucrats make all the decisions and live in wealth.
If I could send 1 million history books to Bolivian elementary and high schools, maybe we could save the country in 20 more years.
Bolivia may be doomed to go the same road as Hugo Chavez and his Argentina. A tanking economy and fleeing investors. These countries cannot make it on their own, or even just trading among themselves only.
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