Closer Look carefully. What do you see? Happy New Year.
posted by ubaid - Friday, December 31, 2004 at 7:52 PM -
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Not Stingy The United States announced today a tenfold increase in aid for tsunami relief over it's initally announced package of $35 million reports the Washington Post. Hopefully, most of the money will actually materialise and, more importantly, most of it will go toward relief work rather than line the pockets of the go-betweens.
posted by ubaid - at 1:55 PM -
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Edge Life on the Edge - El Matador Beach, Malibu, December 30, 2004 Pic with better resolution available here.
posted by ubaid - Thursday, December 30, 2004 at 9:19 PM -
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Stingy? An editorial in the NYTimes points out some interesting figures, reproduced here in full, my emphasis
President Bush finally roused himself yesterday from his vacation in Crawford, Tex., to telephone his sympathy to the leaders of India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia, and to speak publicly about the devastation of Sunday's tsunamis in Asia. He also hurried to put as much distance as possible between himself and America's initial measly aid offer of $15 million, and he took issue with an earlier statement by the United Nations' emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, who had called the overall aid efforts by rich Western nations "stingy." "The person who made that statement was very misguided and ill informed," the president said.
We beg to differ. Mr. Egeland was right on target. We hope Secretary of State Colin Powell was privately embarrassed when, two days into a catastrophic disaster that hit 12 of the world's poorer countries and will cost billions of dollars to meliorate, he held a press conference to say that America, the world's richest nation, would contribute $15 million. That's less than half of what Republicans plan to spend on the Bush inaugural festivities.
The American aid figure for the current disaster is now $35 million, and we applaud Mr. Bush's turnaround. But $35 million remains a miserly drop in the bucket, and is in keeping with the pitiful amount of the United States budget that we allocate for nonmilitary foreign aid. According to a poll, most Americans believe the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent.
Bush administration officials help create that perception gap. Fuming at the charge of stinginess, Mr. Powell pointed to disaster relief and said the United States "has given more aid in the last four years than any other nation or combination of nations in the world." But for development aid, America gave $16.2 billion in 2003; the European Union gave $37.1 billion. In 2002, those numbers were $13.2 billion for America, and $29.9 billion for Europe.
Making things worse, we often pledge more money than we actually deliver. Victims of the earthquake in Bam, Iran, a year ago are still living in tents because aid, including ours, has not materialized in the amounts pledged. And back in 2002, Mr. Bush announced his Millennium Challenge account to give African countries development assistance of up to $5 billion a year, but the account has yet to disperse a single dollar.
Mr. Bush said yesterday that the $35 million we've now pledged "is only the beginning" of the United States' recovery effort. Let's hope that is true, and that this time, our actions will match our promises.
A Beautiful Story Every picture should be a beautiful story. Santa Monica, December 29, 2004
posted by ubaid - Wednesday, December 29, 2004 at 11:12 PM -
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Ubercool For all you searchaholics out there, Google now suggests.
I think this feature is ubercool, and if you don't find it ubercool, you either haven't really taken Google Search out for a test drive yet or you have been working too hard and not googling enough for fun and profit. Via The Unofficial Google Weblog.
posted by ubaid - Tuesday, December 14, 2004 at 10:27 AM -
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Foreign Policy and Science Education Thomas Friedman weighs in on the palpable erosion of interest in the engineering and mathematics fields amongst American students and its expected implications in the next twenty years,
If President Bush is looking for a legacy, I have just the one for him - a national science project that would be our generation's moon shot: a crash science initiative for alternative energy and conservation to make America energy-independent in 10 years. Imagine if every American kid, in every school, were galvanized around such a vision. Ah, you say, nice idea, Friedman, but what does it have to do with your subject - foreign policy?
Everything! You give me an America that is energy-independent and I will give you sharply reduced oil revenues for the worst governments in the world. I will give you political reform from Moscow to Riyadh to Tehran. Yes, deprive these regimes of the huge oil windfalls on which they depend and you will force them to reform by having to tap their people instead of oil wells. These regimes won't change when we tell them they should. They will change only when they tell themselves they must.
