Day: January 8, 2002

Winnipeg Shops Ban Children in Order to Retain Smoking

Winnipeg thought it had a way to reduce smoking in public shops — it passed a regulation that went in effect January 1 that prohibited smoking in stores and shops that were frequented by children. The people who approved this law probably did not anticipate the reaction of some businesses — several doughnut shops, restaurants and delicatessens responded by prohibiting anyone under the age of 18 from entering their businesses.

Of course the usual suspects are outraged, with Winnipeg immigration lawyer David Matas telling The Globe and Mail that, “Children are a vulnerable minority. But you can’t discriminate against them because you want to make money.” Apparently, then, bars which serve alcohol, and, as a consequence, ban children, would also be discriminating against a “vulnerable minority” simply to make money.

Source:

Doughnut shop bans children to allow customers to smoke. Krista Foss, The Globe and Mail, January 5, 2002.

Some of My Favorite Weblogs

I’ve been very distracted the past couple months (I can hear my wife yelling in the background, “the last few months? Try at least since the late 1980s”), and keep forgetting to highlight some of the excellent weblogs that I’ve added to my “must read every morning” list. So, without further ado,

  • Instapundit.Com — I’m not going to say about InstaPundit, since I’m jealous of all the traffic Glenn Reynolds receives as well as humbled by the fact that he writes even more than I do.
  • Fredrik K.R. Norman — Norman has what I think is easily the best site design I’ve seen for a weblog, and I visit it several times a day to catch up on his eclectic postings.
  • More Than Zero — Wow. Another site I’ve started checking several times a day. A lot of nice gems like The Unflappable Pursues the Unutterable
  • The Daily Grail — This site suffers from the pseudo-science angle, but they dig up a lot of fascinating links to legitimate news stories.
  • Catallaxy Files — an excellent, and regularly updated weblog from an Australian economist and “wannabe pundit.” Think Hayek on speed (that’s a good thing).

Did Werner Heisenberg Sabotage the Nazi Atomic Weapons Program?

A few months ago I ran across a story on some news site about the discovery of documents that might clear up the controversy over Werner Heisenberg’s role in Nazi Germany’s atomic weapons program. Now the documents have been analyzed, and they do not offer much in the way of vindication for Heisenberg.

There has long been speculation — exemplified in Michael Frayn’s play “Copenhagen” — that since the Nazi atomic weapons program failed, a likely explanation is that Heisenberg either actively sabotaged the program or perhaps did not help as much as he could have. In Frayn’s play, there is a scene depicting a 1941 meeting between Niels Bohr and Heisenberg in Nazi-occupied Denmark. In the play, and in several historical accounts of the meeting, Heisenberg expresses doubts about the morality of helping the Nazis build an atomic bomb, and hints that he would be willing to sabotage efforts at building the bomb provided that the Allies do not build an atomic weapon either.

According to the Associated Press, however, those depictions of the meeting are not accurate. In a letter that Bohr wrote — but never sent — describing the meeting, he describes Heisenberg saying that the war might won by one side or another with atomic weapons, but expressed no qualms, moral or otherwise, about developing atomic weapons for Adolf Hitler.

This letter, along with 10 other documents written or dictated by Bohr before his death in 1962, are scheduled to be placed on the web site of the Neils Bohr Institute in February.

Source:

Secrets of the Nazi A-bomb effort. Associated Press, January 7, 2002.

The Return of the Hardware Curse

Last night my server was down for a few hours for an upgraded — ordered a new motherboard and processor, with the idea being to upgrade the processor from a 750mhz to a 1.4ghz Athlon, and then next month bump the memory up to 1.5 gig (oh, and a throw in a 15K SCSI drive too, just for the heck of it).

But the hardware curse struck again. Over the past few years, every time I’ve decided to go ahead with an upgrade to the hardware, one or another of the parts ends up coming in nonfunctional. Doesn’t seem to matter who the parts are ordered from, something is almost guaranteed not to work.

In this case it looks like the motherboard is probably defective and will have to be returned.

On the other hand, other than that yesterday was a pretty fine day for me, so I’m just taking it in stride.

Is the World Health Organization Part of the Problem?

Brian Doherty has an excellent, scathing attack on the World Health Organization for the January 2002 issue of Reason which argues that the organization is a bureaucratic nightmare more interested in self-preservation than actually doing something about improving health in the developing world.

Doherty writes that when the WHO was founded after World War II it had a substantive impact on health, especially in the developing world. WHO played a major role in tackling a number of infectious diseases, culminating with its role in the eradication of small pox in 1977.

But after the victory over small pox, WHO started turning away from focusing on infectious disease in the developing world to most First World concerns. First under Director General Hiroshi Nakajima and then Gro Harlem Brundtland, WHO began to turn away from infectious disease. Doherty writes,

In a world still fighting infectious disease, Brundtland’s WHO has issued statements, studies, and reports on such topics as blood clots in people who sit still on airplanes too long, helping people remain active while aging, the hazards of using cell phones while driving, the importance of debt relief for poor countries, how tobacco is “a major obstacle to children’s rights,” and rates of alcohol abuse among European teens.

Doherty is especially troubled by the recent WHO analysis of world health problems which relied on a measurement called the disability adjusted life year. The idea behind the DALY is that someone suffering from a severe illness or disability is living a lower quality of life than someone who is not. But WHO’s attempt to quantify produced bizarre results whereby, for example, WHO claims that 16 percent of the years lost to disability in sub-Saharan Africa come from mental illness. Any organization that thinks mental illness is one of the major health problems facing that region, however, is crazy.

Doherty’s article finishes with a stark reminder of just how ineffective WHO is and how misguided its focus on things like years lost to disability are,

Nothing condemn’s WHO’s current agenda more than some of its own pronouncements. In a 1999 press release, WHO declared that six illnesses accounted for 90 percent of all infectious disease deaths among people under 44 years: malaria tuberculosis, measles, diarrheal diseases, acute respiratory infections (including pneumonia), and AIDS. The same press release declared that “the tools to prevent deaths from each of these six diseases now cost under $20 per person at risk, and in most cases under $0.35. Yet these diseases still caused over 11 million deaths in 1998.”

. . . we have WHO declaring that 11 million deaths — 90 percent of all infectious disease deaths for people under 44 years — could have been easily prevented with an expenditure of, at its lowest, $3.9 million, and at its highest, $220 million. That is, anywhere from 0.4 percent to 20 percent of WHO’s budget for one year.

What does WHO spend its money on instead? Doherty cites an analysis of WHO’s 1994-95 budget that found WHO spent as much on its meetings and its executive board as it did on immunizations, tuberculosis and diarrheal diseases combined. Seventy percent of its budget went to administrative overhead and its Geneva headquarters.

Source:

WHO Cares? The World Health Organization cares more about its own life than the lives of the poor. Brian Doherty, Reason, January 2002.

UN Official — African Nations Still a Long Way from Meeting Development Targets

United Nations Economic Commission for Africa executive secretary K. Y. Amoako recently traveled to Great Britain to tell Tony Blair and others what is obvious to anyone who can read a newspaper — Africa is going nowhere fast.

At the United Nation’s millennium conference in 2000, numerous goals were set for the development of Africa over the first part of this century. Progress in achieving those goals is lackluster at best. Only one country is on track to meet infant mortality targets. Only six are on track to combat poverty. And so on.

The problem with that was at the heart of Amoako’s speech is the same old deadly chicken and egg problem in Africa. On the one hand, Amoako points out that Africans want and need good governance. But at the same time, the abject poverty and other problems create a vicious cycle of bad governance, civil wars, and related problems. Even relatively well-off countries such as South Africa and Zimbabwe have recently shown that bucking the trend in Africa is extremely difficult to do.

Similarly, Amoako calls for an increase in aid to such countries, but many donor countries are rightly weary of repeating the horrible mistakes of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s where aid to developing countries in Africa as often reinforced bad governance as it did reward good governance.

And nobody knows if, much less where, this insanity will end.

Sources:

Africa: Call to Reverse Slide in Aid. December 20, 2001.

UN issues bleak African warning. David Loyn, The BBC, December 18, 2001.