Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov saved the world on september 26th, 1983. We almost had a nuclear war, luckily he kept his head… You can read more
and
. The man deserves our thanks…
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Month: September 2007
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Propane prises have risen
In addition to wheat, the cost of propane has gone up as well. It has almost doubled in the past month. Once again, people are blaming “greedy” distributers. I’ll have to do some digging, but I’m willing to bet that it is the same forces at work here as there is in the wheat market. The op-ed in the paper says that the government should subsidize the price of propane, through Ramadan if not indefinitely. The current price is the equivalent of $3.50 a tank. I’m guessing that it is already subsidized. So the problem is either that distributers are colluding and driving the price up artificially, or maybe, just maybe there is enough increased demand during ramadan that the gas is now worth more and this is the actual market clearing price.
Another interesting thought is that the government gave all government employees an extra month’s salary as a bonus for ramadan. If you add money to the money supply, you devalue it, it’s the same thing as inflation. I didn’t think that this would make much of a difference, but many people that have jobs here have them through the government. Maybe there was more money injected into the system than I thought? One other thing that could have happened is that businesses could have raised their prices because they knew that there would be more money circulating in the system. This is a well know macro economic issue, businesses will raise prices as they think their cliental can pay more. We don’t see this too much in the US anymore, but it still takes place in places where the governments announce across the board pay raises. Usually, the government is trying to combat the effects of inflation by paying people more in order to afford things. Of course the combination of adding more money to the supply and the news that there will be more money circulating just drives prices up again. It’s a vicious circle…
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The wrong way to fight corruption…
The Millennium Challenge Corporation has granted the Yemeni government 20.6 million dollars in order to fight corruption. Ummm, that sounds a little dubious. If the government is misusing funds, why would you give them more money? There’s even the promise of more funds in the future. The Yemeni ambassador to the US said, “The decision is a recognition of Yemen’s achievements in the regard, and it is an important step towards preparing Yemen for full membership of the program whereby the country will receive even more support annually.” Wow, talk about bad incentives. Many economists (and political commentators in those countries) blame the dependance on foreign aid on the inability of the country to improve. There is undoubtedly more to this story, the papers here give just the most superficial treatment to stories, but it still sounds worrying to me.
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Drug education
Last night’s stuck song made me remember something that I have always wished would be pursued. Drug education usually amounts to an explanation of the drug (active ingredients, addiction method, etc.) and an admonition to stay away from them. Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign is probably the best example of ridiculous drug education. She tells you what to do, but not why. So when pressure, or desire comes up, there is no defense.
“Berry” and “Loaded” (see here for explanation) are possibly good examples of how drug education should be. If you can actually show kids what happens when you decide to do that, it will have a much greater impact than just telling them. In my mind, the biggest deterrents to drug use are the drug users themselves. I have seen countless clips of famous rock and roll types under the influence of various things, and they are all wretched. The interview of Sid vicious in his bed with Nancy is a classic. He actually falls asleep in the middle of a sentence, lets his cigarette drop out of his mouth and burns her. The Red Hot Chile Pepper’s guitarist gave an interview to a Dutch TV station while he was in the throes of heroin addiction. They ask him why he does heroin, and he replies that he needs some beauty in his life. The sight of this, obviously dying, man saying that he takes the thing that is killing him for beauty’s sake is really tough to watch. He eventually pulled out of it BTW…
The best thing to show kids, and maybe even adults, is a show called “Intervention.” They show it on A&E or maybe the Learning Channel. They follow a drug addict around, show him/her doing drugs and what they have to do each day to get through. This is key, they actually show the needle going into the vein and the resulting track marks. They show how the alcoholic mother has to stop and get a drink all day long, they show the woman selling herself in order to pay for her habit. You also get to see people under the influence, and it’s always sad and terrible. You gotta bring this stuff home if it’s going to have an effect. They then show the intervention by the friends and families. That’s pretty awful. It isn’t enough to show what drugs do to you, you have to see what they do to everyone else. I’ve been told that that is a classic problem with addiction, you are unaware and/or don’t care what kind of effect that you have on others. It’s important to see that before you start down that road. They then show the aftermath of the intervention. On the show, most people agree to go to rehab, but not all do. Some are even given the option of rehab or jail, and they choose jail. Once again, it’s important to see how crazy you can get when in the grips of this stuff. The ones that do accept going to rehab never have an easy time. On the show, most relapse and either have to go back to rehab, or they live with the consequences.
I can’t help but think that his approach would be much more successful, and certainly more humane than the current “war on drugs” that we have right now. Many people feel that throwing these people into prison “for their own good” will somehow help them. They also feel that the best deterrence is the fear of incarceration. I humbly (ha!) suggest that it is not working, it has never worked, and something else needs to be tried. This would be a pretty easy (and cheap) effort, why not give it a try?
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Stuck song-itus
We all get songs stuck in our heads sometimes. If it’s in the middle of the day, and it’s some sort catchy pop tune, it can be a little aggravating, but a little fun too… On the other hand, if it’s at 3AM and the song is dark and disturbing, it’s a real problem. I’ve got “Berry” by Hole stuck in my head. That’s Courtney Love’s band and it’s off their first album “Pretty on the Inside.” You know you’re in for a good time when the first line of the song is, “Do you want to ride my death machine?” Of course it’s the chorus that’s stuck in my head…
And when I die
won’t you
bury me?
Cause baby
I bury you
deep
inside me.
It’s a frightful conflagration of sex, heroin use, violence and hopelessness. At this point in the album, she is feeling the accumulated weight of all of her (and other people’s) decisions and is lashing out. She ends the song with a lament/realiziation about her boyfriend the heroin dealer, “When you fall for the garbage man, you end up in the garbage…” Leaving off the obvious rhyme “can” from the end makes the word “garbage” just hang out there. She forsook cleverness with the rhyme in order to hammer home her opinion of her life and friends. The next song on the album is one of the most terrifying drug songs ever penned IMO. Luckily, that song, “Loaded” is not going through my head…
I’ve always compared that album to Orwell’s book “1984.” You can’t say that you enjoy reading “1984,” but you have to admit that it’s a powerful work. “Pretty on the Inside” is not for the faint of heart, it is one of the most brutal albums I’ve ever heard. It’s almost a concept album, the “main character” is introduced in the first song “When I was a Teenage Whore” and is promptly kicked out of her parents’ house. She goes to live on the street and becomes a literal whore, gets hooked on heroin, and it goes downhill from there. There isn’t a bit of sugarcoating, every song gets darker until at the end you almost hope she dies, then maybe the pain will end. If I picture a friend, high school classmate, or family member in the character’s place, I feel literal pain when listening to this, tears are not uncommon for me. The real power of this is the idea that as painful as this is to listen to, people actually live with these situations and feelings. We just get a peek of that life, that’s the reason to listen to stuff like this, to develop emphathy. The entire album is a monument to self loathing. The character never thinks much of herself, and she can never bring herself to forgive anyone, including herself. The writing is amazing and Courtney puts on one hell of a performance. A little too good as a matter of fact. There is so much pain and bile on this album that you can’t help but wonder if she made any of it up.
The calls to prayer are still going on outside, I need to think of another song, another album, another something. I can’t fall asleep with thoughts like this…
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What’s going on with wheat?
Increases in the price of wheat are really putting the pinch on a lot of people here in Yemen. I just read an article that talks about Jordan feeling the pinch as well. Everyone knows that the price of wheat world wide has gone up, but both of these countries claim that the prices are rising faster than the world wide price. I’ve talked about wheat prices in Yemen here, here, and here. I’m sure that the problems plaguing Jordan are similar to the ones in Yemen. My question is, “Why is the price of wheat going up world wide?” Well, you might throw back at me, either demand has increased or supply has dropped. Yes, yes of course (that did pop into your mind, right?) but I’m wondering about the mechanism. The prices have risen by 30% or so, I can’t imagine that demand has risen that much, that fast. I’m leaning more towards the supply side. The traditional culprit of wheat shortages has always been bad crops due to weather, pestilence, locusts, or something. That could have happened, but I haven’t heard of any widespread problems like that. I have no evidence right now (I’m away from the internet and my friend Google right now) but I am eyeing some government interference as a likely problem. No, I am not a broken record, I just sound that way… The new subsidies for corn ethanol have really screwed up the corn markets, and we may be seeing it’s effects on the wheat market as well. Here’s my theory, the subsidies given to corn growers made corn a much more attractive crop to plant, so more people planted corn instead of wheat. And voila! much less wheat gets produced.
The hell of it is that if it weren’t for another subsidy (or more correctly, price control) we could make better ethanol cheaper from sugar. The problem is that the sugar lobby has managed to keep the price of sugar artificially high for the last 30 years or so. I do believe that only two families control all of the sugar production in the US… The government has kept the price of sugar at about twice what it should be for the last 30 years, in other words, we have been forced to pay twice as much for sugar and it has gone directly into the pockets of a couple of families. “That’s not a big deal, I hardly buy any sugar at all,” actually, you buy quite a bit, mostly in the foods that you buy. Sugar is used in many, many prepared foods, and all of them cost more because of the price controls. Now, not only is our food more expensive, but the price control is making us pursue a worse alternative for ethanol. Aren’t subsidies and price controls great?
If anyone has any information and/or links about my wheat scarcity due to corn subsidies theory, I’d love to see them, maybe especially if I’m wrong…
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Yemen’s nuclear power..
OK, I’ve got a little more info about the proposed nuclear power plants to be built here in Yemen. Apparently it is a company called “Powered” based in Houston, Texas that is doing the construction and also arranging the financing of the 5(!) nuclear power plants. A member of the Yemeni government talked with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and according to the paper (Yemen Times), the only worry raised was how to dispose of the nuclear waste. Huh? Granted, that’s a serious problem, but first I would worry about the government’s ability to run and maintain the plants (Chernobyl anyone?) not to mention securing the things. Greenpeace of all things is the only organization that I have heard to raise the issues of political stability as being a problem with uranium in Yemen. It isn’t just Yemen’s stability, but the entire area’s that has some people worried. Now I just wish that someone that people can take seriously would raise these issues…
I’m still confused why they want nuclear plants here. I assume that they would be the most expensive to build. And even if they can provide electricity at lower costs, getting uranium to Yemen will always be a dicy proposition. Things can change, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if within the next 10 years people will refuse to make that kind of shipment to this part of the world at all. Yemen has decent natural gas supplies, why not build more power plants based on that? They just started one in Marib based on LNG last month. In addition, they are in the heart of one of the most oil rich areas of the world, surely some sort of deal could be worked out with one of their friendly neighbors. They don’t even need the “light sweet” crude for this, they could use the worse qualities with no problem… Yemen says that it has plans for the extra power, including desalinization plants. I don’t know why any type of power would be better than any other…
In any case, I find this rather alarming. The first plant is supposed to go online in 2012, is everyone just going to let it happen?
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Women in parliament
One of the English language papers recently had a really frustrating article in it. The headline was “President proposes 15% of seats in parliament be given to women.” Unfortunately, the article only gives 2 or 3 sentences about that headline, the rest of the article is about how the opposition refused to talk with the president. I had heard some rumblings about setting a quota for women in parliament before, but I had never heard the president backing it before.
Women in politics here is a rather strange subject. Women can vote and hold any office. As a matter of fact, there were several woman candidates for president during the last election. They hardly got any votes, but still, they ran. Their election posters were hilarious, there they were (I assume) in full nikab, it could have been any woman under there… I don’t think that there are any women in parliament currently, plenty have run for it though. Yemen’s history has a couple of queens (the Queen of Sheba being the most famous) and Pakistan has elected a female president in the not so distant past, so a female political leader isn’t unheard of here…
I am against quotas in general, I think that they set up incentive problems and tend to warp the general quality of whatever population that is subject to the quota. I do think that on strictly utilitarian grounds, a short term quota for women in government could be argued for. Many people here (although certainly not all) think that there are some serious issues that pertain to women that are getting scant notice from the government. Things like FGM (female genital mutilation), childhood marriages, and the staggering amount of illiteracy in women don’t seem to be getting the attention that they deserve. If women controlled 15% of parliament, they could really shake things up, regardless of their party affiliation. In parliamentary procedures, coalitions are everything. A 15% block will wield significant power.
There are a bunch of practical issues to be dealt with. How you can have an election AND quotas is a bit beyond me, what if not enough people want women in there to meet the quotas? You can imagine how much this would warp party politics. If this is left in place for too long, it may actually limit women’s power in the parliament. If people feel that there is a quota, they may come to the feeling that 15% is the correct number and not vote additional women in. Or even more likely, the parliament will use the quota as a de-facto limit as a way of keeping the old order in power. In any case, it sure will be interesting to see what happens, the idea of a quota seems to have popularity across party lines so it may actually come to pass. I wonder what kind of an impact it’ll have here…
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More on religions and "tolerance"
My last post on religious tolerance had a couple of comments that amounted to, “But Christians are jerks too!” There’s no question that all religions tend to breed intolerance, but I do think that it’s important to keep things in perspective. Randy said that the attitude that I ascribed to Christians as letting people make their own decisions and facing the consequences was “magnanimous” and wondered where those Christians were. Well, you’re probably surrounded by them every day, even in Ithaca. The US is overwhelmingly a Christian nation. People are, in general, pretty reasonable and in day to day interactions questions about divinity and belief just don’t come up that often. Of course the exceptions really stand out. We’ve all had some nutjob trying to cram literature down our throat all in the hope of “saving” us.
It’s basically the same way over here. The vast majority of people leave you alone and some may ask if you are a muslim. I’ve never had a really bad reaction to the news that I am a Christian. I’ve faced some incredulity. One guy asked how I could possibly believe in that, I couldn’t help but think that I take that question much more seriously from agnostics and atheists, Muslims’ beliefs are just as wacky as mine… I have gotten some literature given to me. It was, without exception, dreadful. The stuff I get in the States is pretty bad, but these make an effort to seem in depth and scholarly. It really backfires, if I had any leanings towards Islam, those pamphlets would have driven me away…
Anyway, my experiences here go a long ways towards the “people are people all over the world,” theory, but they don’t prove it. There are some huge differences of course, and my last post on religious freedom was meant to highlight one of them. No serious follower of any religion is happy when people stop believing in it, or turn to something that is considered evil, or just wrong. I have yet to make any casual acquaintances that consider me a “serious” Christian, so maybe I’m exempt:-) My last post on the subject was trying to highlight the difference between any Christians that I can think of and muslims in this part of the world when it comes to apostasy. If a Christian makes a declaration of not believing anymore, or changes to another sect or religion entirely, there may be some personal contact (and family) issues, but nothing that can’t be dealt with. Here (in Yemen, KSA, and probably places like Afghanistan), if someone makes the statement that they are no longer a muslim and/or converts to another religion, people expect that person to be killed.
Islam is practiced differently in many different places, but here, apostasy is a capital crime. It’s funny, in the US both atheists and Christians feel that they are “under attack” from all angles. Each side thinks that the other side is “winning.” Neither really knows what it is like to be “under attack” for religious beliefs. No one in the US fears for their life because of what they believe or what they say about it. People here that become disillusioned with Islam and become atheists or people that convert (I assume that if there’s any conversion going on at all, it is to Christianity) have to stay quiet and keep it hidden from friends and family. It wouldn’t surprise me if they had to keep pretending to be a good muslim, it’s funny what the threat of death can do to a person.
You can say what you want about Christian hypocrites and their intolerance, Lord knows there’s plenty of them around, but they don’t kill people for religion’s sake any more. The US’s report about religious freedom in Yemen was right to criticize Yemen on the inability to convert. Certainly, not all muslims share that opinion, maybe not even all here, but enough do to make conversion a decidedly dangerous proposition. Compared to this part of the world, I do call Christians “magnanimous” and yes, tolerant…
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Books going pretty fast
Well, I’ve finished two of the three books I brought with me from Greece. I’ve already read 1000+ pages in the last 3 days, it doesn’t look like they’ll last me until I go home. I’ll start rooting around, asking if any of the students have any books that they don’t want to take with them when they leave. I’m also surprised how much I’ve been enjoying reading fiction again. I do think that after this next novel, I’ll go back to some more nonfiction but I’ll try to intersperse more fiction along the way…