Spotted at Catallarchy: The New York Times’ James Brooke has a curious slant on the North Korean famine.
About 70 percent of North Korea’s population lives in cities, where the collapse of a state food distribution system and partial free market reforms have forced them to buy food at market prices.
Also in the NYT: Gravity “major contributor” to WTC deaths on 9/11.
Blog Irish follows up my post a few weeks ago about Ireland’s problem of widespread fidelphilia by drawing our attention to the Limerick Leader. It seems a certain gullible hack, Brendan Halligan is quite happy to parrot the propaganda of the Carribbean communist utopia provided to him by Cuba’s charge d’affaires Teresita Trujillo - “vivacious” apparently - and suggests that Ireland might follow the lead of Cuba which possesses
“probably the best health service in the world. And it’s free.”
Instead of the myths peddled by Castro’s regime, perhaps Mr Halligan might like to read about the reality of the Cuban health “miracle”:
Lack of chlorinated water, poor nutrition, deteriorating housing, and generally unsanitary conditions have increased the number of cases of infectious diseases, especially in concentrated urban areas like Havana.
According to the Pan American Health Organization, the Cuban Government currently devotes a smaller percentage of its budget for health care than such regional countries as Jamaica, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic
More here:
The Orthopedic Hospital “Frank País”. Although this hospital is open to both Cubans and foreigners, enormous differences exist between the quality of care offered to each. The foreigners are assigned the highest priority, followed by government functionaries and their families, followed by athletes with good records of performance, then dancers, and lastly, ordinary Cuban patients…Foreign patients are often pressured to have unnecessary operations and treatments to increase the hospital’s earnings.
Miracle or Mirage?
Mark Humphrys publishes his email exchange with “The Irish Peace Society” a Pro-Castro, Pro-Hezbollah group which, you might be unsurprised to learn, isn’t all that interested in Peace.
Dick wonders whether John and I are drawing the right conclusions about Cuba and - mentioning Franco-era Spain, Turkey, Kenya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China, even the democratic Republic of Congo! - suggests that:
if we’re going to boycott Cuba, we might as well be consistent and boycott half the rest of the world as well.
The first thing I’d like to say is that my original point was a much narrower one: The extent to which Castro’s Cuba is not just passively tolerated but actively lauded - You will find considerably fewer people in Ireland enthusing about Mao’s cultural revolution than celebrate Fidel and Che’s revolucion - additionally, that Fidelphilia is not the sole preserve of the left, as evinced by the PD’s missive.
As for the notion of “boycotting”, it is worth remembering the purpose of such a practice. Those who “boycotted” Captain Boycott didn’t do it to make themselves feel better, they didn’t do it because they didn’t want to be “tainted” by any association with him. They did it, to achieve concrete results. Thus, a boycott of apartheid-era South Africa may have had the side-effect of making some smug people feel morally superior but it also served a more noble purpose: pressure on the SA government to change.
In evaluating whether to boycott a country, one good way of avoiding Dick’s conundrum - which recalls Dr King’s “paralysis of analysis” - is to select an appropriate candidate based on the likely effect of the boycott on that country’s regime. A boycott of China, however morally satisfying, is a waste of time. Saudi Arabia may benefit from selling oil to the west but we also benefit from buying that oil. It would be very difficult to effect a ban on Saudi Arabian oil. It would be quite easy for a rogue country to repackage Saudi Oil to sell on. Despite the famed incuriosity of our holidaymakers, often blissfully unaware that the Canaries or the Balearics are not on the Spanish mainland on their third or fourth visits to those islands, it would be a very brave travel company which would repackage a Cuban holiday and claim it was in Spain.
There are two major features about Cuba which elevate it above other boycott candidates. First, it is a communist state, this means that a boycott of trade hurts the regime to a much greater extent than would be the case for a less economically-interventionist country. Secondly, its size and vulnerability means a boycott has a greater chance of success.
Any lingering doubts I had about the extent to which Ireland, just as the rest of Europe, languishes under a Fidelphile Fugue were extinguished this morning with correspondence from the Progressive Democrats, the nearest thing we have to a free-market classic liberal political party.
I am not a member of any Irish political party and have little enthusiasm for any of them. This hasn’t stopped Fine Gael, The PDs, even Northern Ireland’s SDLP from regularly requesting donations. What surprised me today, however, was not the invitation from the PDs to enter their annual prize draw, but the third prize offered: an all-expenses paid trip to Cuba, no doubt helping to replenish Castro’s diminishing coffers with badly needed hard currency. I can understand Sinn Fein or, maybe, the Labour party coming up with this, but the PDs?
As he lived, so did he die:
This was not a bourgeois stroke, with certain parts of the brain receiving nearly all the oxygen while others were forced to do without. No, this was a triumphant, proletarian stroke of the people, a truly Marxist-Leninist brain hemorrhage in which the cerebrum, cerebellum and medulla oblongata were all deprived of precisely equal amounts of oxygen