Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Weekend's Here

    Well another week is gone! (for us at least) I think we’re going to hang around here this weekend, go to a museum or two and explore Jakarta some more. Hopefully we will be able to take some more pictures to be posted on Monday.
    The people at the Freedom Institute found some work for me to do today so I’ve been entering Journal titles and authors into the computer for a few hours. It’s nice to be useful. And I’ve now told Tom that he’s not ever allowed to use the word “toward” in a title (as in “Toward a Better Transatlantic Relationship”). Ever. Everyone uses it and it just ends up sounding cheesy (in my opinion).
    A quick anecdote. I left on my own yesterday and was not having luck flagging down a taxi. A man passed me on the street and said hi, and had noticed my failed attempts. He walked up a little further, and just as I successfully caught a driver’s eye, he, not noticing, started waving at the taxi and pointing to me. I thought it was very nice of him to help me. Conclusion- all Indonesian men are not lecherous and rude. Yeah! (jm)

    I, on the other hand, am brain-dead from too much thinking about political economy. Mundell-Fleming Conditions. Stolper-Samuelsson Theorem. Fixed exchange rates, floating exchange rates, pegged exchange rates, currency boards. M0, M1, M2. Liquidity. Liquidity squeezes. Interest rates. Exchange rates. Real exchange rates. Real effective exchange rates (what?).

    On the other hand, go Sox. For your internet viewing pleasure, I give you the Boston Sports Guy. If you’re an Angels fan, my condolensces, and don’t bother. (tp)

  • Vice Presidential Debates

    We watched a bit of the vice-presidential debates. It remains the case that John Edwards looks almost old enough to legally drink, and that Vice President Cheney looks like he might explode at any moment. We were most unimpressed by the evasiveness displayed by both candidates. However, actual policy seems to take second fiddle in this election to how people deliver their policy. Which, of course, is disheartening.

    What we find most interesting is the recent report that from weapons inspectors (ours this time) that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That seems to have gone over most people’s heads here, given that they believed that already anyway. Here’s an issue: going after Iraq because it was the “most probable nexus” of terror and WsMD (says the grammar nazi) presumes that you actually thought that Iraq was sponsoring terror as well as having WsMD. OK, I’ll admit that I was fooled, I thought that Iraq probably had loads of chemical and biological weapons too, just like the rest of you. However, I never believed that Iraq was any international Islamic jihadist terror threat. Ever ever ever. And despite the statements of College Republicans at the Yale Daily News that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” I’m going to need a tad bit more evidence than a platitude from Pierson College, fourth floor. Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfie, Condie, you were dead wrong.

    There is a more unsettling possibility. Instead of the White House failing to think logically about the fact that secular militantly dictators do not get along with millenialist religious fanatics, maybe the White House didn’t really believe there was a difference. Maybe they thought that all Muslims really are terrorists. I’ve been giving this White House the benefit of the doubt about this. Who knows if I’m dead wrong too?