Archive for June, 2008
In Memory of William Odom, An Appreciation
I was saddened to learn over the weekend that Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, USA (Ret.) — a military assistant to President Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, head of the National Security Agency under President Reagan, and an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq – had passed away from an apparent heart attack. He was 75 years old. His obituary reveals the extent of this man’s service to his country, and hints at his intellect and independence that I had grown to admire.
I did not know Gen. Odom very well, but I valued his wisdom and insight. Whenever I encountered him at meetings or informal receptions around town, I would gravitate toward him. He graciously shared his deep knowledge of defense and foreign policy issues, accumulated over many years in the military and in Washington. He was a terrific storyteller, and always generous with his time.
In recent years, especially, I respected his enormous courage in resisting mainstream opinion with respect to Iraq. He was one of a very few individuals who spoke out against the invasion before it occurred. After Saddam’s government fell, Gen. Odom made a strong case for why an expeditious military withdrawal from the country would serve U.S. interests, while a long-term occupation would undermine them. He made such arguments well before they were politically popular. (Read or listen to his comments at a Cato policy forum last year).
I have a strong suspicion that his outspokenness did not sit him in good stead with many of his one-time friends and benefactors, but he never seemed to care. Indeed, I sensed that he took some pleasure in it. For Bill Odom, being loyal to the truth was more important than being loyal to particular persons or groups.
In that respect, at least, Gen. Odom was a rare breed in Washington. He will be sorely missed.
Only in France, Part II
Not surprisingly, the French are leading an effort to impose EU-wide regulations on executive compensation, as reported by the UK-based Independent:
France, which takes over the presidency of the EU on 1 July, will ask finance ministers to consider a European directive to curb disproportionate bonuses or golden handshakes to company bosses. …The French finance minister, Christine Lagarde, said companies must put their own house in order or face a rash of national, or EU, legislation to clamp down on “excesses”. French officials said Paris felt that, without such an EU-wide curb, large companies or highly paid executives would evade national curbs by exercising their right to move from one EU country to another. …President Nicolas Sarkozy has already spoken out against large “golden parachutes” to failed business leaders. Although often presented in Britain and the US as a kind of French Mrs Thatcher, he has called for the “moralisation of capitalism”, something closer to the late President Charles de Gaulle’s statist and social approach to business.
But give them some credit. French politicians are clever enough to realize that imposing bad policy on French companies would cause firms to migrate to less-oppressive jurisdictions. That is why they want anti-market rules to be imposed across the continent (much as they support tax harmonization so that all nations have bad tax law and France is not disproportionately impacted).
In an ideal world, French politicians would avoid new taxes and regulation and instead would investigate whether existing government policies – such as anti-takeover restrictions – were insulating corporate management from investor oversight. But that would mean reducing the power and influence of government, so that option is not part of the discussion.
Zeal
Andrew McCarthy: “If we are detaining such a terrorist, it is because we already know he is a terrorist.”
Is Climate Change the World’s Most Important Problem?
A 2005 review article in Nature on the health impacts of climate change provided an estimate of 166,000 deaths as the annual global death toll “attributable” to climate change. This estimate, based on global vital statistics for the year 2000, was derived from a study sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO) that even the study’s authors acknowledge may not “accord with the canons of empirical science” (see here). Let’s, nevertheless, accept this flawed estimate as gospel, for the sake of argument.
Where would this rank climate change in the list of global threats to mortality?
In the year 2000, there were a total of 55.8 million deaths worldwide. Thus, climate change may be responsible for less than 0.3% of all deaths globally (based on data for the year 2000). In fact, it would place climate change no higher than 13th among mortality risk factors related to food, nutrition and environment, as shown in the following table taken from pages 355-356 of the book, The Improving State of the World.
[Notably, all extreme weather events (whether due to climate change or the normally abnormal climatic variability) contribute all of 0.03% of global deaths on average. See Table 2, here.]
Specifically, climate change is easily outranked by threats such as hunger, malnutrition and other nutrition-related problems, lack of access to safe water and sanitation, indoor air pollution, malaria, urban air pollution.
With respect biodiversity and ecosystems, today the greatest threat is what it always has been — the conversion of land and water habitat to human uses, i.e., agriculture, forestry, and human habitation and infrastructure. See,e.g., here.
Climate change, contrary to claims, is clearly not the most important environmental, let alone public health, problem facing the world today.
But is it possible that in the foreseeable future, the impact of climate change on public health could outweigh that of other factors?
I’ll get to this question in subsequent blogs over the next couple of weeks, but for those who can’t wait, the answer can be found here.
Only in France
At first, I thought this story must be a joke, but it apparently is true that France wants to regulate and subsidize country dancing. No further comment is necessary:
…country and western has become so big in France that the country’s bureaucrats have decided to bring the craze under state control. The French administration has moved to create an official country dancing diploma as part of a drive to regulate the fad. Authorised instructors who have been on publicly funded training courses will be put in charge of line dancing lessons and balls. …In a peculiarly Gallic approach to the phenomenon, French civil servants say line dancing should be submitted to the same rules as sports such as football and rugby. This means imposing training courses for line dancing teachers and a state-approved diploma for anyone who wants to give lessons or run clubs. Amateur instructors will have to take 200 hours of training under the new rules. Professionals will get 600 hours, including such subjects as line dancing techniques, “the mechanics of the human body” and the English (or at least Texan) language. They will also learn how to teach line dancing to the elderly. The cost of the courses, about €2,000 (£1,570) for the professionals and €500 for the amateurs, will be largely met by taxpayers. Mr Chauveau said the regulations highlighted the French state’s obsessive desire to organise all public activity.
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