International law is coolest when it is pondering how to handle cyborg beetle assassination-bots.
-Susan
I think I shall use this technology to become a supervillain. Henceforth, you shall refer to me as the Insectoid Assassin.
Reply
Category Archives: Everything Else
I bet if you said to the protesters “Hey, let’s go protest the G-77!” they’d probably yell back “Yeahhh!!”
I have no truck with G-20 protesters. They have less coherency than a Paulian Tea Party and dumber catchphrases than Saturday morning cartoons. Seriously, “No borders, no banks”? Wait, are you claiming that if we don’t have borders, we won’t have banks? Or that you don’t want either borders or banks? Or that G-20 countries are somehow a bigger fan of borders than any other nation? And let’s not even get into “We all live in a fascist bully state” sung to the tune of Yellow Submarine.
But I do kind of love this little film clip of a bunch of protesters getting a canister of what press reports claim to be pepper spray thrown at them.
It’s hard to tell from the footage if throwing the pepper spray was actually justified; elsewhere, there are reports that protesters were throwing trashcans at cops and breaking police car windows, so it’s unclear. And I’m more than willing to believe there were encounters with the protesters where the police were unnecessarily aggressive.
But look at the protesters. They’re laughing. They get freaked out for a moment, then laugh and whip out cell phones, while cheering like it’s smoke from Fourth of July fireworks. Probably amazed at their coolness — damn, to be honest, if I’d been at a protest that got gassed, I’d probably feel like a bad ass too. But you just know they all went home after that to write a twitter post about it.
And in some ways, even more than their ill-planned protest signed or questionable clothing choices, that’s the biggest obstacle to their protest being taken seriously. That we live somewhere they can protest, and police presence isn’t a danger to them but instead makes for a cool story for the dorm room later.
C’mon, protesters, try a little harder, please. If you’re using the police action at the G-20 protest today as proof that ‘we all live in a fascist bully state,’ it’s no wonder your whole cause is DOA.
-Susan
I have a hard time trying to imagine two more random countries getting into a catfight than Libya and Switzerland.
After hearing about the amazing Libyan resolution before the United Nation calling for the dissolution of Switzerland (because “it’s a world mafia and not a state”), I started noticing a lot more random, petty incidences Swiss-hatin’ by Libya. And while writing the last post, I came across an article on how complying with Libyan requests intended to further a boycott against Switzerland would not violate export laws.
What the heck could Libya have against the neutral-as-beige Swiss? It was bizarre enough to be worth looking up, and coincidentally, just a couple hours ago there was new Libya-Switzerland drama unfolding, as Libya announced it has essentially kidnapped and detained two Swiss citizens:
For more than a year, Switzerland has known that two of its businessmen have been prevented from leaving Libya. But they are now being held “for their own security” because there is a “threat that Switzerland might free them militarily,” the Swiss Foreign Ministry quoted a Libyan letter as saying.
It turns out it all stems back to a 2008 incident:
Police were called to the five-star Hotel President Wilson on July 15 after two hotel employees, from Tunisia and Morocco, accused Hannibal Qaddafi, 32, and his expectant wife, Aline, of beating them with a belt and a coat hanger.
Qaddafi spent two days in custody, while his pregnant wife was under police supervision in a clinic in Geneva. They were released on $490,000 bail two days later and left Geneva.
Qaddafi, who is a skilled grudge-holder, is now waging a one-nation campaign against Switzerland. Meanwhile, an arbitration panel is being established to examine the circumstances surrounding Hannibal’s arrest.
And the Swiss incident wasn’t Hannibal Qaddafi’s first time acting like a punk while in Europe. “In 2004 he was arrested in Paris for driving along the Champs Elysées at 140 km per hour. The following year, also in Paris, he was convicted and fined for assaulting his then girlfriend, a Lebanese model.” At least he hasn’t charged into Italy on elephant-back yet?
-Susan
Shocking News Break: Saudi Arabia Still Doesn’t Like Israel
The Export Administration Regulations (“EAR”) prohibit U.S. persons from cooperating in any boycotts of foreign states that the U.S. does not support. The primary purpose of these regs is to attack the Arab League’s boycott of Israel.
The Jerusalem Post recently came out with an article showing that, despite these antiboycott provisions, attempts by Saudi Arabia to gain compliance from American businesses with it boycott activities are on the rise.
A review of US Commerce Department data conducted by the Post found that the number of boycott-related and restrictive trade-practice requests received by American companies from Saudi Arabia has increased in each of the past two years, rising from 42 in 2006 to 65 in 2007 to 74 in 2008, signifying a jump of more than 76 percent.
In addition to being a violation of domestic U.S. law by American businesses, this is also pretty clearly a violation of Saudi Arabia’s commitments to the WTO:
In November 2005, the desert kingdom pledged to abandon the boycott after Washington conditioned Saudi Arabia’s entry into the World Trade Organization on such a move. A month later, on December 11, Saudi Arabia was granted WTO membership.
The WTO, which aims to promote free trade, prohibits members from engaging in discriminatory practices such as boycotts or embargoes.
It looks like the Jerusalem Post article might be spurring Congressional action:
[Democrat and Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Howard] Berman declared that he would take action on the issue.
“I intend to pursue this matter with the administration,” he said.
Across the aisle, Congressman Mike Pence of Indiana, who chairs the House Republican Conference, also criticized Riyadh for its duplicity.“Saudi Arabia’s disregard of its 2005 pledge to end the boycott against Israel is unacceptable,” Pence told the Post.
“Congress and the administration must hold Saudi Arabia accountable. The United States cannot stand by and continue to witness this mistreatment towards the peace-loving people of Israel,” he said.
Over at International Trade Law News, there’s a graph up showing boycott activity among Arab League nations in 2008. Saudi Arabia ranked fifth among boycott requests, while Jordan remained alone in having no reported boycott activity.
-Susan
The Saga of the Arctic Sea Continues
The Arctic Sea has gone missing again, though this time under Russian control and presumably heading for Russian port. Spain never let the ship into Las Palmas due to the presence of military personnel on board.
Meanwhile, although 11 of the 15 Russian crew members were eventually released, the remaining 4 are still on board the Arctic Sea — and according to their wives, being held captive there:
Captain Sergei Zaretsky and three crew members have not been allowed off the Arctic Sea more than a month after a Russian warship seized the vessel from eight suspected pirates.
Their wives appealed to the International Red Cross and the governments of Spain, Malta, Finland and Russia to intervene, saying that the men were in poor health two months after the Arctic Sea was supposedly boarded by an armed gang in the Baltic Sea.
I can’t figure out exactly what sort of help the crews’ wives are asking for, but at any rate they are very unlikely to receive it.
Back in Russia, the lawyers for the hijackers are now portraying this as some sort of National Lampoon’s Russian Spring Break. The hijackers — ecologists, in reality — got their boat swamped, and the Arctic Sea just happened to be passing by. The crew of the Arctic Sea offered them a lift, and they all then sailed down to Cape Verde, cavorting in the sun and playing in their pool. The poor ecologists had no idea the ship was missing or even that they were now off the coast of Africa, except that it was getting “warmer,” so they assumed they’d sailed south. Alleged hijacker Dmitry Bartenev, on crew-pirate relations:
“The crew were very friendly. When they realised we were Russians, they took us to the saloon bar and cracked open a bottle of vodka. There was a lot of booze on the Arctic Sea: whisky and strong alcohol of all kinds.”
-Susan
Update on the State Secrets Privilege
Over on Volokh, there’s a much better forecast on what the actual results will be of the DOJ’s policy change regarding the state secrets privilege.
By voluntarily checking its own assertion of the privilege, the Administration may have slowed the momentum by these other two branches to establish greater restrictions on executive use of the privilege. For those, like myself, who are concerned about the privilege’s abuse in the hands of any executive, the new policy is a mixed blessing. Yes, I am happy to see the Administration voluntarily establish constraints on its use of the privilege, but I am hesitant to leave the privilege completely to the executive’s discretion. Ironically, then, the very policy shift that limits the privilege today may be the one that prevents courts and Congress from limiting abuse of the privilege in the future.
This seems very right to me. I do think the ultimate effect will be just this, that the Executive branch gave up a little ground today in order to fortify its position for tomorrow — and ultimately, it will retain a state secrets privilege of greater scope than it would if have had it not been publicly seen to retreat a few steps now.
-Susan
Acronym Evolution
Via language log, the internet has claimed another victim — the Wisconsin Tourism Federation. Compare the old and new logos below.
It’s really a pity that the Southern Tenant Farmers Union no longer exists. Otherwise we’d get more great lines like the one from this book, “Communist efforts to capture the STFU,” or this one, “Without the STFU, these people may not have dared to exercise these rights of citizenship.”
-Susan
Quick Hits
• Can the greater embrace of free market principles in the United States as opposed to Europe be traced back to differences between the philosophies of the English enlightenment and the Continental enlightenment?
• It’s better to beg forgiveness than offer money: “You might think that if the apology is costless then customers would ignore it as nothing but cheap talk – which is what it is. But this research shows apologies really do influence customers’ behaviour – surprisingly, much more so than a cash sweetener.” However, I doubt these results would carry over to businesses outside of the eBay sales that this study followed. On eBay, most transactions involve no human interaction at all, but rather merely clicking a series of buttons. When things go wrong, receiving an apology from a real live person can do a lot to make you feel as if you weren’t deliberately ripped off by a computer scam, but rather were the victim of a common human screw up.
And saying sorry apparently doesn’t have any sort of magical effect if you happen to be a doctor: “Apologizing for a medical error in full and accepting responsibility may boost patients’ perceptions of physicians but may not stop them from suing[.]”
• Meet the Asgarda: a tribe of Amazons in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine.
• The rent-seeking behaviors of law schools and law professors: Law schools are notorious for their attempts to climb up the US News rankings by gaming the system — “Aside from hiring their own graduates to up the employment level, they all employ squads of people whose jobs are to create social costs (of course, most lawyers do the same thing), produce huge glossy magazines that go straight to the trash, weasel around with who is a first year student as opposed to a transfer student or a part time student, [and] select students with an eye to increasing one rating or another.”
This sort of rent seeking behavior occurs in all industries, but there’s something even more disquieting about it when all that effort is wasted pursuing the nebulous goals of legal academia. “Very little of [law school rent seeking] seems designed to produce new wealth. If fact, think of the actual welfare-producing activities that could be undertaken with the same levels of energy — smaller classes, more sections of needed courses, possibly even research into areas that are risky in terms of self promotion but could pay off big if something new or insightful were discovered or said. But this is the part that puzzles me. Whether the thief in Tullock’s case or monopolist in Posner’s, the prize is clear. What is the prize for law professors? Are these social costs expended to acquire rents that really do not exist or are only imagined? What are the rents law professors seek?”
-Susan
It’s Just A Flesh Wound
Why do we rely so much on doctors? A good friend of mine is currently in med school up here in D.C. (hi there, Travis), and we frequently get into fights enthusiastic discussions about whether or not the U.S. health care system could be improved by expanding the practice areas of health care providers who are not MDs. My view: Of course we should. It doesn’t take seven years of schooling to diagnose simple ailments or put in stitches. His view: Having procedures be performed by non-doctors will result in subpar quality of care and therefore is not ultimately more efficient.
And to some extent we’re obviously both right. Non-doctors — such as nurse practitioners and physicians’ assistants — are cheaper to train and are more than adequate for most common health complaints that turn up in primary care. But in some patients, health problems that appear on the surface to be routine will in fact turn out to be more complicated issues, and having a doctor involved from the start would result in a better outcome. But I still think that for a lot primary care and urgent care situations — and particularly for the uninsured — being forced to see a doctor when a nurse would do just as adequately is a waste of resources. And while a good majority of doctors appear to be against the idea of allowing greater involvement by NP’s, I do wonder how much of this is due to a protectionist sentiment at play.
There is empirical evidence supporting the idea that the quality of care provided by both nurses and doctors is equivalent. Studies have found that “[i]n an ambulatory care situation in which patients were randomly assigned to either nurse practitioners or physicians, and where nurse practitioners had the same authority, responsibilities, productivity and administrative requirements, and patient population as primary care physicians, patients’ outcomes were comparable”, as well as that “[p]atients are more satisfied with care from a nurse practitioner than from a doctor, with no difference in health outcomes”. I’d caution that this doesn’t necessarily translate to cheaper in all cases; some studies find that even though patients experience increased satisfaction with their results when they receive care from mid-levels, they might not gain an additional benefit in the form of reduced costs, as “Even though using nurses may save salary costs, nurses may order more tests and use other services which may decrease the cost savings of using nurses instead of doctors.”
But even if mid-level health-care providers offered slightly lower quality of care, why are they banned from providing it all together? For those who are confident they have only a minor health issue, why not let them choose to pay less and go see a nurse rather than a doctor? It’s both a little paternalistic and a little suggestive of anti-competitive business practices for doctors to continue to lobby the government to set a floor on the supply of health care services in this way.
Still, even if we allow non-MDs to oversee more patients with routine problems or in need of only primary care services, this may do little to counteract the growing shortage of primary care physicians:
Mid-level [practitioners] are not immune to the vast incentives favoring practicing in a specialty environment. As Val Jones reported, when nurses were asked why more are not entering generalist practice, the reply was blunt: “We’re not suckers.”
Already, 42 percent of mid-level providers practice in specialty fields, and I fully expect this number to rise if the primary care environment continues to deteriorate, especially when contrasted to the salary and lifestyle offered to specialists.
Suggestions that we fill the primary care practitioner shortage with foreign medical graduates are equally lacking — many foreign doctors act as general practitioners in rural areas to fulfill visa requirements, and then switch to more lucrative positions as specialists in urban areas.
One small step towards increasing the number of GP’s might be a
re-branding effort:
By the way, I hate the term primary care. It makes it sound cheap. It makes it sound dumb. It makes it sound so superficial. What we do as internists, pediatricians and family medicine doctors is far more than the connotation of primary screening and evaluation. We manage many complicated patients with mulitorgan failure. And many doctors in rural America do it all alone. With no help at all. Some of the best doctors in the world are rural primary care physicians who must treat highly complex medical issues by themselves. Not because they want to but because they have to.
The name primary care has got to go. Perception is 4/5th of the equation.
Another blogger used the word comprehensive care once. I think that is perfect. And I use it often in my blogging.
-Susan
“You will thank me for not having to travel for 20 hours to this place.”
So everyone knows by now that Colonel Qaddafi had a train wreck of speech before the General Assembly (“everyone” includes, disturbingly enough, Stormfront — a google search earlier on ‘Qaddafi’s speech’ had them in the top ten returns!), but while reading about Qaddafi’s ramblings, I learned some other nifty facts about UN Assembly procedure I thought I’d share here:
1) By tradition dating to the 4th GA, Brazil is always the first country to speak. The second speaker is the host country. After that, it’s first come first serve, with a 15 minute time limit.
2) Despite the 15 minute limit, Qaddafi Ranty McRantypants went off for an hour and a half. Then again, who would shut him up? Under UN procedure, speakers are supposed to be cut off by the President of the General Assembly. “Though originally largely a ceremonial position, the president of the General Assembly does have considerable say during the annual session, ruling on matters of procedure, time limitations for speakers, and making decisions on extending, curtailing or adjourning debates.” So who’s the current president? Dr. Ali Abdussalam Treki, a Libyan Diplomat. Maybe that’s why Qaddafi chose now to make his first speech before the GA in his 40 years as the leader of Libya.
(Then again– Obama went on for 38 minutes. So Qaddafi’s hardly alone in going overtime.)
3) Heads of state trump heads of government, at least in UN speech order. (Princes lose to both.) Although PM Gordon Brown did go ahead of President Jintao, this year, so it’s not strictly followed.
4) Much like failed plans for introducing prayer into U.S. public schools, under Rule 62 of the GA Rules of Procedure, at the beginning of plenary General Assembly meetings, “the President shall invite the representatives to observe one minute of silence dedicated to prayer or meditation.”
5) There are five regional groupings of UN members: Asian Group, African Group, GRULAC (Latin America + Caribbean), Eastern European Group, and WEOG (the Western states). Q: Which two member nations of the UN do not belong to any regional group? A: Kiribati and the United States.
The best quote of all, however, comes from a New York Times article. On whether or not Qaddafi’s diatribe was all that unusual, compared to past General Assembly meetings:
“I don’t think anybody has ever done a real study of General Assembly speeches because nobody listens to them,” said Stephen Schlesinger, a historian of the body.
-Susan
The View From LL2 