I know that it isn’t nice to laugh at the misfortune of others, but you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at this. First the religious right were asked to pray for rain during the Denver Democratic National Convention: Stuart Shepard of Focus on the Family, Read more…
Reich on Palin: while Ms. Palin is perfectly entitled to believe that evolution is a myth, that women should be barred from choosing to have abortions, and that global warming has yet to be proven, these views all run counter to the views of mainstream America.
Incentives for Global Health have published a new report:”The Health Impact Fund: Making New Medicines Accessible for All” The Health Impact Fund, our flagship proposal, is a new way of stimulating research and development of life-saving pharmaceuticals. To provide wide access, medicines need to be affordable-but low prices don’t create Read more…
Via Chris, from Scarlett Lion. This is scarily accurate. CNN’s “Inside Africa” show this week covers three stories: the migration of wildebeest in the Masai Mara, gorillas in northern Congo, and a white man kayaking around Madagascar.
The ever-excellent Chris Dillow asks: 2. The National Gallery of Scotland wants the tax-payer to buy some paintings from the Duke of Sutherland. Why don’t we apply Nice-style cost-benefit analysis here? Would £100m spent on art really produce £100m worth of increases in quality-adjusted life years (by improving the quality Read more…
A friend in a donor agency (thanks CK!) passes on the following: The wisdom of Buzkashi riders, passed on from generation to generation in Afghanistan, says that ‘when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount’. However, in the UN and NGO community Read more…
The World Bank published new estimates of the number of people in poverty yesterday. They are very important and they’ve been universally misreported. The estimates show: the developing world is poorer than we thought; there are 1.4 billion people living in poverty (about one quarter of the developing world), not Read more…
Scott Adams on Economists: If you think it is okay to ignore economists because they are so often wrong, you’re looking at the wrong questions. Economists are generally wrong with complicated models but right about concepts. For example, they know that additional domestic drilling won’t make much of a dent Read more…
This is the entrance to a tiny 13th Century Rock Church in Tigray, called Abuna Yemata Guh. And yes, that’s a narrow ledge you have to walk along, with a 200 metre vertical drop to your left, at the end of a terrifying ascent up the side of a cliff Read more…
Paul Collier savages Prince Charles for advocating medieval peasant farming, and points out that it is not a solution for hunger in Africa. The GM ban has three adverse effects. It has retarded productivity in European agriculture; grain production could be increased by about 15% were the ban lifted. More Read more…