Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Forbes Small Business magazine of Feb. 2006 describes the fate of Boston Billows, the makers of a praised nursing pillow. Their product, filled with plastic beads, was making dents in the sales of larger, established producers. So, in 2004, an anonymous competitor "tipped" the Consumer Products Safety Commission to the danger (to their profits?) of Boston Billows' product. Although it had never been involved in any injuries or deaths, it bore enough similarity to some mattress that had been banned years before that the CPSC ordered a recall. Today, the company is on the verge of closing. The article also mentioned that how the CPSC, "understaffed" and lacking knowledge, often relies on the large producers in a market to draw up the safety rules. The small players can't afford to pay an employee to sit around devising regulations, and -- surprise! -- the regulations get drawn up to favor the big guys.

Joel Stein has a great article on this. (Thanks to Rachael for alerting me to it.) I've thought long and hard myself about what I'd say if I were in a public forum and someone tried to corner me on this. (Because of course to just say "no" and move on would be bad.) The best I've got so far is to say, "Not all of them, do you?" and then get the person to deny support for torturers, etc. (Oh, for you purists out there, I do support some of the troops--so my suggested answer isn't completely duplicitous. E.g. purely medical personnel, or translators, etc. OK, my response is still pretty duplicitous...)

Remember when the Iraqi interim PM chided Bush for calling the resisters in Iraq terrorists? (I can't find the article, it must have been too long ago.) Well, Bush changed his vocab, started saying "insurgents." So think about this: Bush is fighting a War on Terror. If all the violence coming from Iraqis isn't terrorism, what are we doing over there?

Be the first to find all eighteen errors (and we're talking logical, not grammatical or spelling you cheaters!) in Carl Milsted's "The Need to be Anarchists." Here's a few to get you started: (1) Even if one agrees that the proper punishment for a thief is to pay double, it does not follow that "theft is morally acceptable if all victims are paid back double." (Try changing the crime to murder if you're not sure.) (2) Now, suppose the majority assesses a tax on everyone to spread the burden of supporting the new defense system. This is theft of the minority. However, suppose that the economies of scale are such that this tax is less than half of what people would have had to pay for defense on their own. Now we have theft with adequate compensation. Putting aside the problem about "adequate compensation," this overlooks the existence of pacifists in the community. It also makes the strange assumption that the Pentagon is a cost saver....

Praise from "the people's economist." Less-than-praise from the people's biologist (I guess).

So on NPR yesterday they mentioned a (proposed?) Congressional inquiry into the Abramoff garbage, and speculated that Congress was going to crack down on donations by lobbyists. So let me get this straight: Congress steals a bunch of our money at gunpoint. Some groups want to have less of their money stolen, or they want a piece of the action, and so they hire lobbyists to give bribes and other goodies to the politicians. To deal with the public's outrage over this, Congress decides to use men (and women) with guns to punish people who give them bribes in ways other than the prescribed manner.

It could get you arrested in France .