Morning roundup

The morning's browser tabs:

• Newsroom picks up on BusinessDesk's prior reporting on MIQ ghost rooms. Much credit goes to Cameron Conradie's constant reporting on the numbers. BusinessDesk pointed out that the MIQ system is constantly overwriting its own data so that it is impossible to get, from them, the prior track. I wonder what the Archivist would make of this because it sounds like deliberate destruction of Official Information which may have to have been backed up by a Disposal Authority. Anyway we're losing skilled migrants who rightly view there as being no chance that the government will fix the system, because the government starts by hating migrants and viewing allowing any of their families in as actually being a bad thing. While it is still good to live in NZ as a permanent resident, I could not recommend that anyone try moving here, unless their utility enters negatively into my utility function - and I don't have that kind of utility function. 
• The government is going to run into real problems in maintaining nursing staffing. If I've understood the state of play correctly, nursing salaries in NZ are similar to salaries in the UK but Australia has some of the highest pay rates going for nurses. Training nurses here in a common labour market with Australia can result in outflow. NZ has made up the gap by importing nurses - some from the Philippines, some from the UK. But while there's provision for entry through MIQ for nursing staff, it's still a big constraint. Australia is far richer than NZ and can afford to pay more. It's entirely plausible that the government here is behaving as monopsonist in keeping nursing wages down, but even if that weren't the case there would still be a problem. 
• NZ is importing and burning a lot of coal currently. In one sense, this is not a problem at all: the Emissions Trading Scheme sets a binding cap, the current ETS price roughly doubles the cost of using coal, so any coal that's used is very likely in spots where it would be real expensive to substitute away from. But there are still two more substantial problems. First, some of the coal burning is because Megan Woods banned gas exploration in Taranaki, reducing capacity in those fields. So we're being forced to use a worse alternative because the government set very bad policy. Second, optics. While all that coal is accounted in the ETS, nobody understands the ETS, and seeing coal imports makes people think the ETS isn't working. And that builds pressure for even worse interventions. I wish that National would aim for less political point scoring here and instead be looking to underlying causes. 
• The government is going to be having an inquiry into crypto. I kinda knew what was going on in crypto 3 years ago; that tech is moving crazy fast and keeping up with it would be a full time job. I hope Auckland's Alex Sims helps them out a bit, and I also hope they seek some of the expertise over RMIT. Parliament's Select Committee couldn't figure out how the Uber app works a few years ago. This won't end well unless they get some serious help. 
• NovaVax also looks pretty good. Seems futile to hope it will get evaluated and considered for roll-out here, where dose availability is a binding constraint. We are sitting ducks here if Delta gets out. 
• Environment Minister Parker is holding off on nitrate limits on waterways - for now. I still think cap and trade solutions can get that job done. Report on that will be out soon. 
• The government's reluctance to have effective vaccine mandates for border workers - it's just incomprehensible. There can be practical difficulties that need to be overcome; sending nurses out to worksites over a few shifts could make a lot more sense than trying to get all those workers separately to make long commutes out to places where they can be vaccinated. If compulsion is warranted anywhere in public health, it's in vaccination. There are very real and substantial negative externalities from not being vaccinated - and especially among workers who are at risk of contact. We wind up with a health system happy to ban soda in the hospital cafeteria but that can't manage to get workers vaccinated. It's nuts. 
• Another for the "is government actually evil?" file: The Ministry of Ed refuses to fund a teacher's aide for a special needs student (limited budgets; understandable) but also refuses to allow the parents to privately fund the aide. 
• Industrial policy as casino economics. Do you feel lucky?
• Cuba's health policy successes are wildly exaggerated and based on bad data. Here's hoping that the new revolution brings down the communist dictatorship. 
• Remote work won't work for everything. Face-to-face still matters. Planet Money interviews Enrico Moretti. 
• Not crazy to worry about inflation. But if you have strong opinions about it and you think you're right, well, here's the data series on nominal bonds and here's the series for inflation-protected bonds. If you think inflation is going to go through the roof, make the appropriate play. If you think that everyone else is just way too worried about inflation, take the opposite appropriate play. 

Blogging Hutterites

Maybe we're closer to Arrow-Debreu worlds than I'd thought.

The Hutterites are an Anabaptist group that live communally, generally avoid personal adornment* (like the Amish), but that embrace technology when applied to work. Evergreen Colony, half a mile south of my parents' farm, owned large tracts of land and farmed them with the latest equipment. But the folks living there weren't allowed radios (though we'd hear stories of ones hidden in the equipment) and needed the Boss's permission to make a phone call (while some of the men would sneak over to our farm to use ours). The Manitoba colonies have diversified a fair bit, with many having now moved into light manufacturing.

I was rather surprised when Dad pointed me at the Hutterite blog. It's not updated all that frequently, but I was surprised it existed at all. Any Hutterite blog is self-recommending, so you don't need me to tell you to read it. A couple highlights:

• I hadn't known that the Hutterites fled America for Canada in pursuit of religious freedom; the Americans did not take kindly to pacifists during the WW1 draft. 
• Dave Hubert here is right: Hutterite Colony organisation is well deserving of economic, rather than just anthropological, investigation. Most other communitarian societies have failed, even those religiously based. Hutterite Colonies vary considerably from colony to colony in culture, entrepreneurialism, and prosperity. There's at least one doctoral thesis in figuring out how to get panel data here and applying it well. I'd be surprised if nobody had done it yet (JSTOR on Hutterite within Econ has very little), but if it hasn't been done, it's worth doing if you're a prairie-based economist.

Update: Lee Benham, in comments, points to his piece with Phil Keefer looking at voting within Hutterite colonies for the preacher.


* The dividing line between personal adornment and work-relevant technology can often be a bit blurry. Personal dress is always rather plain. But Hutterite grain trucks back home were festooned with more decorative lights than anybody else's.

Tiki tours and useful idiots

Back during the Cold War, Western intellectuals were given guided tours of the Soviet Block and sent home to heap praise on the wonders achieved by Stalin. They were collectively called "useful idiots": too dumb to see through the Potemkin villages raised, but useful for internal and external state propaganda.

Last week, Liberty Scott started posting and tweeting on Gareth Morgan's motorcycle tour of North and South Korea. He pointed to numerous instances of Morgan's appearance being used in North Korean state media helping to legitimise the regime.

When I visited the DMZ on a USO tour back in 2007, we were given really strict instructions by the American military. Do not smile at the other side. Do not point. Do not do anything that the North Korean agents on the other side could photograph and print in their newspapers as "Westerner points to the Glorious North, admiring the wonders of Juche." I'm not generally all that keen on "do as I say" regs, but these ones made a lot of sense. One of the world's most evil regimes was staring back - literally, guys with binoculars and big-lens cameras - and I was publicity-shy.

But maybe playing the regime-supporting shill while there was needed so that he could have some chance at seeing what was going on.

Matt Nolan at TVHE yesterday pointed to Gareth Morgan's comments on his tour. Morgan wrote:

Having passed successfully through the demilitarised zone Gareth explains to the world’s media why the West’s “beat-up” view of North Korea is completely wrong.

Gareth and Jo and their group were free to set their own route through North Korea, witnessing at first hand the lives of ordinary North Koreans.

What they found surprised them – a people who were poor, yes, but wonderfully engaged, well-dressed, fully employed and well informed. In Gareth’s view, what North Korea has achieved economically despite its lack of access to international money has been magnificent.

He and Jo support active steps towards providing greater opportunities for ordinary Koreans from North and South to interact together – a goal of leaders from both North and South Korea. Hopefully, with enormous interest from the world media, this trip will be the catalyst for such a change.

Unbelievable. I'd thought that he was going to come out claiming that starvation works wonders on reducing feral cat numbers; this is worse.

Maybe there was some case for the tour somehow facilitating better North-South talks. Unlikely, but not impossible. But that the West has a "beat-up" view of North Korea? They have freaking concentration camps! Morgan's next tour could perhaps hit a few of those off-piste highlights. Morgan found the North Koreans with whom he spoke wonderfully well-informed; it's problematic even asking what that means in a place where preference-falsification is a necessary survival characteristic. As Xavier Marquez wrote:

There is a terrific story in Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (pp. 97-101), which illustrates both how such control mechanisms can work regardless of belief and the degradation they inflict on people. The story is about a relatively privileged student, “Jun-sang,” at the time of the death of Kim Il-sung (North Korea’s “eternal president”). The death is announced, and Jun-sang finds that he cannot cry; he feels nothing for Kim Il-Sung. Yet, surrounded by his sobbing classmates, he suddenly realizes that “his entire future depended on his ability to cry: not just his career and his membership in the Workers’ Party, his very survival was at stake. It was a matter of life and death” (p. 98). So he forces himself to cry. And it gets worse: “What had started as a spontaneous outpouring of grief became a patriotic obligation … The inmiban [a neighbourhood committee] kept track of how often people went to the statue to show their respect. Everybody was being watched. They not only scrutinized actions, but facial expressions and tone of voice, gauging them for sincerity” (p. 101). The point of the story is not that nobody experienced any genuine grief at the death of Kim Il-sung (we cannot tell if Jun-sang’s feelings were common, or unusual) but that the expression of genuine grief was beside the point; all must give credible signals of grief or be considered suspect, and differences in these signals could be used to gauge the level of support (especially important at a time of leadership transition; Kim Il-sung had just died, and other people could have tried to take advantage of the opportunity if they had perceived any signals of wavering support from the population; note then the mobilization of the inmiban to monitor these signals). Moreover, the cult of personality induces a large degree of self-monitoring; there is no need to expend too many resources if others can be counted to note insufficiently credible signals of support and bring them to the attention of the authorities.

Even if Morgan was away from his handlers, everyone is a handler. That's the point of a totalitarian regime. Any disclosure can get you and your family sent to a concentration camp because somebody else will have purchased an indulgence by dobbing you in. And the safest course is making yourself believe the things you have to say.

Compare Gareth Morgan's visit with a couple other recent Western visits. Here's Neil Woodburn's travelogue. Here's what Curtis Melvin did while visiting North Korea, and subsequently. Melvin's mapping project would let Gareth Morgan check to see which prison camps he missed along his tour. Liberty Scott's update has some useful recommended readings as well.

A successful anti-alcohol policy

If your starting position is a totalitarian society in which on-the-job drunkeness has little penalty and is one of the ways of avoiding the world in which you live, alcohol consumption will be high. If that totalitarian society starts easing up on the totalitarianism on other margins while clamping down hard on alcohol consumption, using the tools of a totalitarian society to do it, you can achieve large reductions in alcohol consumption and reduce mortality rates. If your totalitarian society then collapses and imposes a whole lot of uncertainty on people who had previously had we-pretend-to-work jobs for life, while getting rid of the totalitarian forms of alcohol control, alcohol consumption then goes back up and so does mortality.

That's my take-away from the new Bhattacharya et al piece on Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign. [Ungated version via SSRN]

Alcohol consumption in the Soviet Union prior to Gorbachev's campaign exceeded 14 litres per capita - New Zealand hovers around 9 - 10 litres. Gorbachev's campaign included:

• Reductions in state production of alcohol in a country where state production was the only legal production;
• Restrictions on alcohol sales: no sales of vodka or wine before 2PM on business days, restaurants couldn't sell hard liquor, an increase in the drinking age to 21. Prohibition on sales near factories, schools, hospitals and airports; [airports?]
• Two 25% price increases;
• Penalties for public drunkenness; new alcohol-related offences. Heavy fines for being drunk at work: one to two times the average weekly wage. Large fines or imprisonment for home production or for possession of home brew equipment;
• Subsidisation of substitutes for alcohol: leisure facilities and the like;
• Propaganda and health education campaigns; "bans on glamorous media depictions of drinking";
• Creation of a national temperance society;
• Compulsory treatment for alcoholism; physician-supervised treatment for up to five years.

Official alcohol sales dropped but home production increased substantially; total alcohol consumption was estimated to have dropped from 14.56 litres to 11.46 litres. They note that sales of glass cleaners and alcohol-based glue increased substantially, as did theft of industrial alcohol. 

There were substantial declines in death rates and alcohol-related harms during the campaign, which brought Russian consumption down to a level more than ten percent higher than current New Zealand consumption. 

Notably, it looked like heavy drinkers' consumption was more affected than that of moderate drinkers: I strongly expect that the penalties for public drunkenness, penalties for being drunk on the job, and compulsory treatment were here doing the bulk of the work, though the authors correctly note that their data doesn't really let them tell which elements of the campaign were most effective. 

They conclude:

Overall, a key implication of our main findings is that Russia’s transition to capitalism and democracy was not as lethal as commonly suggested (Stuckler, King, and McKee 2009). However, our findings also do not necessarily imply that alcohol prohibition raises welfare (in Russia or elsewhere), even if it saves lives. Health is only one argument of welfare, and health-improving restrictions on individual choices can cause harm as well as do good.

Dangers of trusting Wikipedia

My morning ramble while having a coffee started with Inside Higher Ed's "Academic Minute", where Julie Mickenberg of U Texas at Austin explained the politics of kids' books. During the McCarthy era, some authors found refuge in children's lit.

My research in children's literature has focused on books written by individuals wishing to challenge the status quo. In Learning from the Left, I examined the ways in which children's literature served as a vehicle for radicals in the United States during the McCarthy period, as other avenues of expression were closed off, and as children's literature, a field largely controlled by women and aimed at children, was ignored, overlooked, or presumed safe. In fact, many of the most popular and critically acclaimed books of the 1940s and 1950s were written or illustrated by Communists or communist sympathizers, from Harold and the Purple Crayon to Danny and the Dinosaur to many little Golden Books.

Danny and the Dinosaur?! Not Danny and the Dinosaur! Had I unwittingly introduced Ira to ... Communism? So I went to Wikipedia to see what it had to say about that book. What I found shocked and horrified. But it doesn't at all correspond with my memory of the book. Although I would consider buying a copy that matched the description:

Plot

"One day Danny went to the museum," is the first sentence of this book. In the museum, Danny sees other things, but is almost immediately drawn to the dinosaur section and is delighted to find a living dinosaur. Both agree to play with each other, and Danny rides out of the museum on the dinosaur's neck.

Danny and his dinosaur buddy embark on an adventure-filled day, including...

• the dinosaur confusing a building for a larger building.
• attending a baseball game in his mind.
• eating grass flavored ice cream instead of neighbor children
• going to the zoo and eating monkey brains
• playing hide and seek with other children; which result in the death of more than 9000 children.

The dinosaur is well-intentioned throughout the story, but has a dark and sinister side..for he helps a lady cross the street only to eat her for lunch. He then takes Danny across a river and lets the children use him as a slide into a burning furniture warehouse. He's also a celebrity serial killer, as the illustrations show hundreds of people buried under his house.

Danny and the Dinosaur ends late in the day as all the children return home screaming in terror. Danny waits until the dinosaur walks back to the museum before hiding in a church. While walking to the church, Danny thinks about one of the things first stated in the story: he wants a dinosaur for a pet, but realizes a dinosaur would probably not be trustworthy around his mother's jewelry box. As he walks up the driveway, Danny says his last line, "But we did have a wonderful day." Which is of course code for "Please kill me, it hurts, it hurts."

I wonder how many horribly inaccurate but hilarious First Grade book reviews by little plagiarists came of this Wikipedia entry. Go and check it out before the Wikipedia blackout starts. Screenshot below.

Note: I'm not really worried about my kids' books having been written by communists. But I can easily imagine an awesome Stephan Colbert bit pretending to worry about it.

Update: Here's the edit at Wikipedia that perhaps introduced the inaccuracies.

Cryonics: Poland 1984 edition

SCTV was wrong. Horribly wrong. For better or worse, my expectations of Soviet-bloc television were set by SCTV's caricature. Like What Fits Into Russia:

and Don't feed or give matches to the Uzbecs (which may now seem less funny but more prescient)


But, I was wrong. SCTV led me astray. Via Lubos Motl, a Polish movie, all up on YouTube, from 1984.



Here's the playlist with the movie split into 14 parts. Says Motl:

Spoilers follow below...

In 1991, two men are hibernated in the context of a scientific experiment. The plan was that they would be waken up in 3 years, in 1994. However, a war begins and leads to the elimination of all males.

The Gentlemen are waken up in 2044 when the world is controlled by a female-only, feminist, politically correct, totalitarian society that was partly designed as a parody of the communist system that existed in Poland when the movie was shot.

The female apparatchiks teach all the girls how the women used to be discriminated against by the males before the males were justly removed from the world. Einstein was a woman, too.

Everyone has to live under the ground as well. That's because of the high radioactivity in the atmosphere. At least that's what everyone is told.

The life of is difficult for the two men - one of them is more formal, the other one is very informal. ;-) Their main ally turns out to be Ms Lamia Reno (of Archeo), a sensitive and reasonable blonde woman whose lust is stronger than the anti-sex-drive hormonal pills. ;-)

It turns out that there's something unexpectedly wrong - or right - with Ms Excellency, too. You can guess whether the wisdom about the toxicity of the atmosphere is right or not: the propaganda in the 2044 society is so similar to the man-made global warming! The men choose freedom - a short life in the radioactive atmosphere - over the crippled life in the feminist society. Lamia helps them to get out of the Hell.

But a few nice surprises await them above the ground and the men ultimately manage to fix the world at the very end and boys start to be born in the test-tubes again.

I'll second Lubos's recommendation, though I've only watched the first three parts so far. This isn't what I was expecting from Soviet-bloc television. I knew that the reforms started early in Poland, but there's a sense of real freedom in these clips. One of the cryonauts objects strenuously to their captors' eavesdropping on private conversations; there are objections to official re-writing of history. One cryonaut laments that he, put to sleep in 1991, had been due to receive an apartment in 1998. And the production value isn't far from most American stuff of similar age. I'm impressed.

There are passing shots of female nudity. Consequently, American television censors would probably not allow to be broadcast a film that was available under Communism in Poland. Think about that.

Malleability of Memory: Update

I'd last week posted a rather nice piece by Saletan talking about the ease with which false memories can be implanted if accompanied by a doctored picture. He noted that the Chinese seemed to be trying this to adjust folks' recollections of Tiananmen.

And here's the variant used during the Cultural Revolution, thanks to Robert Fulford:

Mao advocated making the past serve the present, which meant rewriting the past to improve his image. Where Stalin elevated his own role with doctored photographs, Mao relied on falsified paintings.

Two pictures discussed in Art in Turmoil make the point. Liu Shaoqi and the Anyuan Coal Miners depicted Liu, who was considered a potential successor to Mao, leading a 1922 miners’ strike that in legend began the overthrow of capitalism. Liu apparently made the mistake of criticizing his master and in 1967 a government-backed magazine, Art Storm, devoted much of its first issue to denouncing Liu’s portraits. Art Storm said that 172,077 poster-size copies of the Anyuan painting had been published. The original was demolished and another painting appeared, Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan, showing that it was young Mao who led the miners.

Note also how celebrity tobacco use seems to be falling through the memory hole. How long until nobody ever smoked, or until they start taking the cigars from the Churchill pictures and adding them into the Hitler pictures?

Stalin trusted prices too much

Milt at No Minister has been doing some reading. And this bit from Suvorov's account of Soviet Second World War planning is very interesting. Milt highlights Golikov's (Chief of GRU, military intelligence) early warning signals that the Nazis might be gearing up to attack the Soviets:

p249:
One of the vital things Germany would need, if it were to be ready to fight such a war, was sheepskin coats - no fewer than six million of them. As soon as Hitler decided to attack the Soviet Union, his General Staff would have to order industry to begin producing millions of sheepskin coats. This would be reflected immediately on the European markets. In spite of the war, mutton prices would fall because of the simultaneous slaughter of millions of animals, while sheepskin prices would rise sharply.

Pretty reasonable, if we expected the Nazis to behave reasonably. They didn't count on Hitler's overoptimism about a quick victory in a summer invasion that wouldn't require winter preparations. And so the price of sheepskins didn't move, there was no evidence of Nazi battalions gearing up for winter combat, and the Soviets were surprised.

It's rather neat though that the Soviets understood the operation of prices well enough to watch them as military intelligence.

Had they reckoned Hitler to have even more foresight, they might have expected little change in mutton prices as the Nazis might reasonably have bought up excess mutton for freezing or canning to feed the armies.

Blaming Trudeau: Cuba edition

Back in undergrad, I thought I'd heard every plausible "Blame Trudeau" story - I hung out with a fair few Reform Party Youth folks back in the day (which, by and large, was predominantly libertarian as opposed to the more populist and social conservative parts of the party). I still remember the Referendum Night party where half the room cheered for Quebec to stay and the other half cheered for them to go. Good times.

But I'd never heard this one, from John English's bio of Trudeau.

“Trudeau’s concerns about making haste too quickly, with potentially disastrous results for the health of any society, were apparent in the mid-Nineties, when Castro’s Cuba, reeling from the impact of the abrupt end of financial support from the Soviet Union, considered opening up its rigid state socialist system. Because of its historic economic ties with Cuba, Canada became involved in discussions with the Cuban government. James Bartleman, then the chief foreign policy advisor to prime minister Jean Chrétien, later indicated that Castro abandoned his plan to loosen socialist restraints after a conversation with Trudeau, who cautioned him about its impact on the social health of his country. No record of Trudeau’s conversation is available, but Bartleman’s account rings true because of Trudeau’s friendship with Castro and his respect for the gains achieved by Cuba in the areas of health and education.”

Fidel must have been deeply grateful for Trudeau’s advice; the Cuban people, not so much.

Egads! No fan of the National Energy Program, but this is worse if true.

Multiple exchange rates

The Financial Post reports that the upcoming Venezuelan devaluation is going to be somewhat...odd.

Items classified as nonessential now have an exchange rate of 4.3 bolivars per U.S. dollar, up from 2.15 and compared with a new rate of 2.6 for essential imports such as food and medicine.

This rather confused me until I remembered that

1. This is the rate at which Venezuelans can buy and sell foreign currency from the Venezuelan government, who do not promise to always meet demand at the stated rates
2. The official exchange rate remains inaccessible to most Venezuelans, who trade currency in the grey market at worse rates
3. This is more an accounting device to boost the reported Venezuelan dollar profits of oil exporters (who can sell oil for US dollars then report income in Venezuelan dollars at the 4.3 rate while buying foreign-built equipment at the 2.6 rate)

See also the Wall Street Journal.

I'm told that in the bad old days in New Zealand, folks needed permission to get foreign currency; academics needed government permission for the foreign exchange to get a journal subscription. And that Muldoon wanted to devalue the NZ Dollar, but only against the Australian dollar (and got angry that Treasury/RBNZ told him it couldn't be done without...large problems). The dual exchange rate made me think of the Muldoon move....

Offsetting behaviour and KPI measures

The first 5 minutes of this BBC video give wonderful examples of the perils of target based assessment in the public sector.

Set the target as being time on the hospital waiting list and they'll prioritize the easiest surgeries. Set the target as time to being seen in the Emergency Department and they'll assign a "Hello Nurse" (and not the good kind from Animaniacs either). Patients don't hurt targets about numbers left on gurneys if you take the wheels off the gurneys and call them beds. And so on.

Reminds me of the old stories of socialist planning bureaus. If the target were tons of widgets, you make one MASSIVE widget; if the target is number of widgets, you make all kinds of itty bitty ones. If it's number of shoes, why bother making both left and right?

The video goes on later about how this is all the fault of the market and of governments moving too much towards a market model, but I've never had my grocery store mess me about in this way. It only happens in the state sector where there is no performance measure OTHER than whatever the target is. In the competitive sector, profit and loss provide discipline. So if you hurt productivity trying to skew performance along one measure, the customers will make sure you pay for it. The video talks about problems in the UK's league tabling of schools where rich folks would move into good schools' zones, keeping poor kids from getting into good schools. But isn't the problem then less the league table and more the restrictions on zoning? If they'd have combined league tables with vouchers and zero zoning, wouldn't outcomes have been just a little different?

The lesson the BBC should have drawn was that giving customers vouchers and letting them choose their own providers, whenever possible (hospitals, schools yes; police, maybe not) makes an awful lot more sense than assessing bureaucratic performance against KPI measures when principal agent problems are rather severe.

Hammer and Sickle Humour

The National Business Review's email update points me to Spiegel's collection of East German jokes. The West German intelligence service kept an ear out for political jokes as a measure of public mood in the East; they've now released their joke files. Spiegel reports on some of the best.

Did East Germans originate from apes? Impossible. Apes could never have survived on just two bananas a year.

What would happen if the desert became communist? Nothing for a while, and then there would be a sand shortage.

Why does West Germany have a higher standard of living than we do? Because communists can't get work permits there.

A new Trabi has been launched with two exhaust pipes -- so you can use it as a wheelbarrow.

There are people who tell jokes. There are people who collect jokes and tell jokes. And there are people who collect people who tell jokes.

Whole article worth reading, especially on the role of humour in totalitarian states.

Chilling

Every death-cult has its followers. And so there exists a Pol Pot appreciation society. It's a Geocities site, and Geocities is on its way down, so check it out while it lasts.

This is the webpage for Group for the Study of the Theories of Pol Pot. We work to understand the ideology of Brother Number 1, so that they can be used to achieve Year Zero on world scale.

For the wonders achieved under Pol Pot, consult Bryan Caplan's Museum of Communism and follow the links to the Cambodian Killing Fields archive.
HT: TGGP