Fallows' article on China's temporary bust is a must-read. A taste:
In Beijing, in Shanghai, in Shenzhen, and elsewhere, I’ve recently visited companies that are trying to use the disruption of this moment to enter wholly new markets and do what so few Chinese firms have yet done: make high-tech, high-value products that bring high rewards. In a country as big and chaotic as China, you can find illustrations of any “trend” you want. But in only a few weeks of asking, I found indications of companies that were growing rather than shrinking, and of corporate leaders who were pouring in money based on their belief that now, when competitors are at their weakest and talent and assets could be snapped up cheap, is the time to prepare for their next big advance.
Beginning in 1910 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii used color
photography to document the Russian Empire. He made black-and-white
exposures with red, green and blue filters, then combined those images
in the laboratory to create a color image.
I think the financial crisis has helped expose a powerful bias in human decision-making, which is our abhorrence of uncertainty. We hate not knowing, and this often leads us to neglect relevant information that might undermine the certainty of our conclusions.
Many Americans seem to view the Muslim world as the new Soviet Union, as a relatively monolithic and uniformly hostile bloc of nations. This point of view seems to me oddly detached from reality. Turkey is a NATO ally, and Washington has designated Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait and Pakistan as non-NATO allies. Other governments of Muslim-majority countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen have offered the U.S. intelligence, security, and/or military cooperation of a high order. Aside from Europe, there is probably no other culture area on the globe where the United States has as many formal and informal allies. The only countries the United States has relatively severe differences with among nearly fifty Muslim-majority states are Syria, Iran, and the Sudan, and that sort of thing changes over time.
As we’ve mentioned before, one of the most unfortunate (but also most scientifically interesting) consequences of overfishing is that it can cause fish to shrink. Smaller fish are better able to slip through the holes in fish nets and therefore survive to pass on their genes rather than ending up as fish sticks. As a result, heavily-harvested fish populations—especially in places that have minimum net mesh size requirements designed to let a certain fraction of fish escape—tend to evolve toward smaller average body sizes. This is bad for both fishermen and fish eaters, given that larger fish tend to have more usable meat and fetch better prices.
He touts a new paper claiming that such shrinkage might be more reversible than previously thought.
Viceland has a series of photographs from Detroit's abandoned public schools. There's something oddly chilling about them - a whiff of cultural and social death. This one's caption:
The floor of this school’s front office is littered with several decades’ worth of student records and report cards.
I'm an American in my early 20s, the ink on my Ivy League diploma not yet dry, plunging into my first job. I'm writing to say that I am doing just fine in the recession. My company is hiring, the economy is still growing at an impressive clip, and the hope and optimism that tomorrow will be even better than today is palpable.
I can say this because I didn't follow my fellow college grads to Wall Street in search of money that was so abundant and so certain that it seemed too good to be true (as it turned out to be). While my friends went to Manhattan; I went to Mumbai, opting for a management trainee program at an Indian conglomerate that is looking for Americans to bring fresh ideas into the company.
The particulars of my own mid-life crisis notwithstanding, I'm not alone in losing faith in many institutions. Nate Silver looks at the latest devastating data.
Reihan has a challenging post on an AmCon essay on the paleo-libertarian from South Carolina:
He also deviates from the Republican line on foreign policy. In
Congress, he opposed Clinton's intervention in Kosovo. And he was one
of only two Republicans to vote against the 1998 resolution to make
regime change in Iraq the official policy of the United States. He says
that it was a "protest vote" in which he tried to reassert the
legislature's war-declaring powers. When asked about the invasion of
Iraq, he extends his critique beyond the constitutional niceties. "I
don't believe in preemptive war," he says flatly. "For us to hold the
moral high ground in the world, our default position must be defensive."
I just read your post on "Aid to Egypt" and I'm having trouble understanding a few things:
1) What is the rationale for measuring the appropriateness of military support to a foreign ally on a per capita basis? Do more populous nations need more protection than less populous ones?
2) In what sense is Egypt a military ally of the United States, other than its relatively warm relationship to Israel? To what US military operations do they contribute troops or material? What other US foreign policy aim do they further? If the “Israel lobby” has a distortive effect on US foreign policy (a point I neither concede nor deny), isn't Egypt a beneficiary of that?
I have to confess my bias — while I am often skeptical of Israel’s government and its policies, discussions of the “Israel lobby” often leave me wondering why there are so many measures and standards that seem to come into play solely for the purpose of critiquing Israel. Or did I miss the heated debate on The Daily Dish about why the U.S. provides military aid to Colombia, but not similarly populous Tanzania?
1) The per capita thing isn't that salient, but it does illustrate just how massive a commitment the US does have militarily to Israel, something that must indeed complicate diplomatic outreach to Israel's enemies, if the US is trying to appear as an honest and neutral broker in the region. Much of the spending, it bears noting, is restricted to purchases from US military companies - essentially folding Israel's defense into the American arms industry. If we think the Arabs and Persians are unaware of this, we are deluding ourselves.
An arresting part of a dialogue between Karen Armstrong and Bill Moyers:
KAREN ARMSTRONG: I used, you know, to be a really spiteful human being.
BILL MOYERS: No.
KAREN ARMSTRONG: I learned a vicious form of rhetoric from my religious
superiors, and also, from my teachers at Oxford. You know? And people
used to say to me, "I would really hate to be your enemy," because I
have this very sharp tongue that I knew how to use it. And I get in
first before someone put me down, that kind of thing.
I found that, in my studies I had to practice, what I found called in a
footnote, the "science of compassion." There was a phrase coined by
great Islamist, Louis Massignon. Science, not in the sense of physics
or chemistry, but in the sense of knowledge, scientia, the Latin word
for knowledge.
And Latin--the knowledge acquired by compassion. Feeling with the
other. Putting yourself in the position of the other. And this footnote
said that a religious historian, like myself, must not approach the
spiritualities of the past from the vantage point of post enlightenment
rationalism. You mustn't look on this in a superior way and look at the
author of "The Cloud of Unknowing," a 14th century text as, poor soul,
you know. And you had to recreate in a scholarly fashion, all the
circumstances which had resulted in this spirituality or this teaching
and not leave it, or certainly not write about it, until you can
imagine yourself putting yourself in that position. Imagine yourself
feeling the same. So when I wrote about Muhammad, for example, I had to
put myself in the position of a man living in the hell of seventh
century Arabia, who sincerely believed he had been touched by God.
And unless I did that, I would miss Muhammad. I had to put clever
Karen, edgy Oxford educated Karen on the back burner. And go out of
myself and enter into the mind of the other. And I found, much to my
astonishment, it started changing me.
...at what point do those who accept the science of climate change but argue that extensive action is too costly, based on the findings of the IPCC and related work by economists, revise their outlook? We are falling steadily behind where we should be in addressing these issues, and we may soon find ourselves utterly without hope.
Michael Copeland compares ebook readers. One way publications may make money in the future:
Under one scenario publishers would license their content to an e-reader seller, such as Plastic Logic or Amazon, or to a wireless provider like AT&T (T, Fortune 500) or Verizon Wireless (VZ, Fortune 500). These companies would sell and manage the wireless e-readers and offer customers bundles of content the way a cable company does. You could buy subscriptions to individual magazines and newspapers or bundles of content on entertainment, sports, or business - or both.
In a bad economy, it's often the good environmental practices—using energy-efficient light bulbs, insulating homes, driving less, eating less meat—that end up prevailing, in part because they save people money. But that's actually not true of recycling, which, for better or worse, is intimately tied to the health of international markets—and the willingness of countries like China to buy our recycled materials. Right now, demand for those materials has shriveled up, which has been a huge blow to recycling plants. "We were in the red by December," says John Haas, the recycling coordinator of Ocean County, New Jersey—and it's the same story throughout North America.
And asks an important question:
Is recycling wholly dependent on the reckless consumerism that is, in turn, responsible for many of our environmental problems today? Do, say, paper recycling and other eco-traditions here in the United States depend entirely on China's continued breakneck growth?
The Economist is hosting a debate over Dani Rodrik's claim that global financial regulation is "neither feasible, nor prudent, nor desirable." Here's Rodrik:
If we have learnt anything from the crisis it is that financial regulation and supervision need to be tightened and their scope broadened. It seems only a small step to the idea that we need much stronger global regulation as well: a global college of regulators, say; a binding code of international conduct; or even an international financial regulator.
Yet the logic of global financial regulation is flawed. The world economy will be far more stable and prosperous with a thin veneer of international co-operation superimposed on strong national regulations than with attempts to construct a bold global regulatory and supervisory framework. The risk we run is that pursuing an ambitious goal will detract us from something that is more desirable and more easily attained.
Nick Summers interviews Thomas Dart, the sheriff in Cook County Illinois who has refused to perform any more foreclosure evictions:
Until you’re physically out there, you can’t really get the magnitude of what you’re actually up to. It sounds like it’s an antiseptic process, and it’s anything but that. In the majority of the homes I was going into, there were always little kids around—I mean, really young kids, and we’re taking them and putting them out on the street. A lot of them were seniors, and a lot of them had issues with dementia. Once again—we’re taking them out to the street … Most of these neighborhoods are not good neighborhoods. Once [their belongings are] out on the street, we leave. While they’re off looking for transportation, the few things they own are being stolen.
Fed chairmen generally don’t grant on-the-record interviews, aiming to avoid settings that could confuse or unsettle markets. Of course, Mr. Bernanke delivers speeches regularly (with audience questions often carried on live TV) and testifies frequently before Congress. Last month, he took questions from reporters for the first time in a public setting in an appearance at the National Press Club. In addition, over the years select quotes from interviews with Mr. Bernanke (that were otherwise off-the-record) have occasionally appeared in news outlets.
After weeks of near silence, it's good to see America's top economic officials describing what's ailing the economy and how they plan to fix it.
That's the line we occasionally get from those opposed to civil equality for gay couples. And then we get the truth from Gary Bauer:
If Mr. Obama extended benefits to same-sex partners of federal workers,
he would “provoke a furious grass-roots reaction, reinvigorate the
conservative coalition and undermine his efforts to portray himself as
a moderate on social issues.”
So the moderate position on gay couples is no rights at all? If you want to know why Bauer has lost every real battle in this fight, those ugly, callous words will give you a clue.
"Fortunately, it occurred to a few key Republicans and several Democrats that [Freeman] was a very odd choice for the job. The Republicans were mostly Christians, the Democrats were mostly Jewish, and it's a shame this is important but Mr. Freeman's friends on the left are trying to make this a religious issue," - Wes Pruden, Washington Times.
In response to my question here, here's an article about aid to Egypt, the other huge recipient of American tax-payers' dollars after Israel. Money quote:
The annual aid to Egypt will be cut to $1.5 billion this year, down from $1.7 billion in 2008, America in Arabic reported.
However, the report said cutbacks in foreign aid to Cairo would not be subtracted from the money allocated for defense, which amounts to $1.3 billion.
Over ten years, that would be $13 billion in military aid, or much less than half the $30 billion pledged to Israel which is getting an increase. Israel's population is around 7 million and Egypt's around 79 million. So per capita, Israel gets close to twenty times the military aid given to Egypt. I know of no other ally that gets even a fraction of that kind of military aid. AIPAC is not a phantasm.
Maybe a real debate is beginning to break out. Here's a bracing piece from Brendan O'Neill on how the West sometimes imbues Israel with more civilizational significance than any country should be burdened with. Money quote:
There are major differences in the way Americans view
Israel—most are generally favorable—and the way Europeans view
Israel—many are increasingly hostile to the Jewish state. Yet what
unites pro-Israel thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic is a view of
Israel as a representative of everything progressive and decent.
Sometime later this year we will have a massive global conference aimed at simultaneously resolving the banking crises in the major developed countries. The goal will be a political negotiation of the value of the toxic assets, and a clearing of the books.
If the conference succeeds, then it will be possible to fix the financial system relatively easily. But if it fails, then things get dicey.
I know that a sturgeon is some kind of fish but I didn't know it's
also slang for the unfortunate turning down of the corners of the lips
to signify disdain, chagrin, or pensiveness. Here's a page full of
pictures of people with sturgeon faces.
I'm an author of European historical romances. I've been published for
more than ten years now and write for a major New York publisher. While
publishing companies are taking pay freezes and handing out lay-offs as
much as the next company, and while it's true that book sales across
the board are down, including those of other genre fiction, the romance
imprint of my particular company is making money (if only a little), as
are those of other
companies.
A Times column used to carry huge influence, and on occasion it still can, but it can also dull the sharpest blades, and as Kristol showed, it can be very hard on a sub-mediocre effort. Douthat will bring youth, intelligence, and an important conservative point of view. My one piece of unsolicited advice: talk regularly to people who don’t read blogs (like this one).
There is a presumption that liberal, tolerant people should have
certain views on abortion, stem cell research, and other matters and I
am happy to see Douthat breaking the mold. I view the current alignment of stances on social policy as more of a sociological regularity ("look at how rotten are the people on the other side") then an intellectual necessity.
...learning about the brain can help constrain our theories. We haven't decoded the cortex or solved human nature - we're not even close - but we can begin to narrow the space of possible theories. We know, for instance, that the rational agent model of Homo Economicus isn't particularly accurate, at least from the perspective of the brain, and that the deliberative prefrontal cortex is often out-shouted by emotional brain areas like the nucleus accumbens, insula, etc. This supports, of course, lots of observational studies that demonstrate that people rarely rely on explicit calculations of utility (or explicit calculations of anything, really) when making decisions. The anatomical details, in other words, can help settle the argument.
"We have a guy who ran a ponzi scheme that stole billions of dollars from people to fund God knows what. Granted the American people elected him President, but compare what Barack Obama is doing to what Bernie Madoff did and I fail to see a substantial difference beyond Obama having a “mandate” from voters and Madoff not having one.
Both Madoff and Obama have put people out of work. Both Madoff and Obama have destroyed the financial health of lots of people. Both Madoff’s and Obama’s schemes have convoluted accounting schemes designed to obfuscate the criminal mismanagement of other people’s money. The difference is that Madoff did it to powerful billionaires who are now millionaires. Obama did it to the rest of us," - Erick Erickson, Redstate.
March 8, 2009 - March 14, 2009
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