popular logistics

Aida Edemariam, in The Guardian, interviews Joseph Stiglitz about his new book, written with Linda Bilmes, The Three-Trillion-Dollar War.

This is a post-Katrina take on why the system didn’t work - so it’s not new - but no less relevant - from a blog, Marginal Revolution, which we’ve only recently discovered.

Link to post here.

Subtopia reports on effective Red Cross/Red Crescent efforts to provide shelter to earthquake victims in Indonesia. Subtopia’s account is based on this report from Reliefweb:

“As part of the International Federation’s early recovery programme, more than 4,000 bamboo shelters have already been completed in the areas of Gantiwarno and Dlingo, and the programme is expanding into other districts, where up to 6,000 of the homes are expected to soon be built.”
After consulting survivors and enabling them to take direct responsibility for the distribution of funds and reconstruction materials, the program has resulted in a coordinated community activism to help survivors build shelters themselves out of local materials. [emphasis supplied]

And the shelters cost about $150 USD each.

We didn’t say current GOP President.

Eisenhower’s Chance for Peace Speech

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Address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower “The Chance for Peace” delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16,1953. A CROSS OF IRON…Seeking some concrete way to dramatize the futility of the Cold War, President Eisenhower hit upon the idea of comparing peaceful expenditures with the expenditures both the United States and the Soviet Union were making for armaments. Then he capped the comparison with a brilliant allusion to William Jennings Bryan’s famous phrase “a cross of gold”.

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In this spring of 1953 the free world weighs one question above all others: the chance for a just peace for all peoples.