Economist Vs. Idiot: Look, I Can't Take You Seriously Until You Stop Bleeding All Over The Carpet

The World Last Week

-The Democrats had a big party, and America was invited.

-Huh, did you know that the number of people with health insurance in the US has gone up from 38.4 million to 45.7 million in the last eight years?  I'm not a Bush guy myself, but it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense why, considering the massive ill will directed towards George W, that such a strong increase isn't brought up more often.  It's not like he has a shitload of happy endings to point to.

-I'm leaving the statement above to showcase the irony of a complete misreading that adds to the already high level of churlishness that happens to infect this weeks write-up.  My sincere apologies for such a ridiculously lazy mistake, one that I can only attribute to a desire to put this thing to bed so that I could get back to the business of being too big for my britches.

-Honduras has decided that being an ally with the US is less attractive then joining up with Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Dominica.  Based on the two Nicaraguan women in my office, this is an excellent choice for purely shallow reasons.

-It's still possible to get arrested for being a punk rocker, you just have to be in Cuba and there have to be laws against being "socially dangerous."  On that note, Socially Dangerous sounds like the title to a Heidi Montag album.

-In the bloody boardgame that is the Somalian version of Risk, Kismayu has supposedly been taken over by Somali Islamists, which continues the downward trend that is Somalia's slide towards being a full on charnel house.  By a show of hands, newspaper readers agreed that they would rather have oral sex with Freddy Krueger while spending the summer months at Crystal Lake then go anywhere near Somalia.

-Southwest Airlines, one of the few carriers to turn a profit in the second quarter, has (smartly) decided to cut about 200 flights from it's schedule in hopes of maintaining their position as being one of the few airlines not be run completely by sycophantic mongoloids.

-Quiksilver has decided to get out of the ski equipment business, and they are trying to sell off Rossignol for the price of $148 million.  And before you get all "man, I ain't got no $148 million" you should remember that price is $413 million less then what Quiksilver paid for Rossignol three years ago, long before Rossignol started lacing all of their ski goggles with turpentine and filling their snow pants with quicksand.

Leaders

-It's McCain week, as the Economist follows in the footsteps of all the magazines that had Obama cover stories last week, including themselves.  As they alluded last week, and every week prior, the Economist is a vocal, while not excited, supporter of McCain's presidential bid.  So take that with you when reading these articles, the first of which is this one, an editorial opinion piece on why the McCain who was running for the Republican nomination was preferable to the one who is now running for President.  It is not because that version of McCain from 2007 was younger then the one in 2008, but there may be a future article in that.

-Iraq's prime minister wants to make a 2011 deadline for the withdrawal of American troops official--while this article doesn't deeply into the ramifications for the next American president, it's impossible not to acknowledge what a boon this (if it is agreed upon) would be for Obama.  Allowing the Iraqi government to determine the end of American involvement would allow him a moral reason to renege on his promise of May 2010, a promise that he made (I believe) back when he was arguing that the "surge" would fail.  The surge didn't fail, but he was still stuck with a May 2010 promise based on a bad call.  None of this helps McCain, who is still pushing a tentative withdrawal of 2013.   Either way, it's food for thought, and it won't be resolved until after the inaguration.

-Russia has decided to treat what happened in South Ossetia and Abkhazia as if it's Kosovo all over again, an argument that the Economist doesn't agree with them.  I don't either, but I can see how something as easily sound-biteable as this is going to go over pretty easy with a mas audience.  It's also an easy, though somewhat despicable, way for European countries to back off from their recent criticism, which seems to be what everybody wants to do anyway.

-The Economist has been hinting and fantasizing about a nationalization of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mac for months now, possibly years, and now they've finally threw it out there as a full-on "do this now."  While nationalization of large companies is usually something that a publication like this is opposed to, it would take some pretty heavy logical jumps to argue that what's going on with those two isn't nationalization already, albeit nationalization without taxpayer incentive.  Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are only still breathing because of the work of Treasury department, while the companies respective shareholders and managers aren't bearing the consequence of their miserable performance.  Without nationalization, the Fed is in the position of paying the costs (with taxpayer money) for keeping these two behemoths alive, while they get to continue the same way as before.  If the Treasury would man up and just do it, the bleeding could at least be stemmed.

Letters

-Hilary Potts in London?  You're not funny.  Not in the slightest.  I'd like to douse you with tar, and then cover you with banana flavored Runts.

Advertisement?

Before the United States section of the magazine opens, there's an odd one-page ad that simply says "Lenin.  Stalin.  Putin.  Give in?"  The ad is for the sosgeorgia website.  I mention this only because this is the first time since this whole weekly ingestion of the Economist project began, including the prior months when these write-ups weren't published, that I've seen anyone take out a full-pager like this.  While some companies have used large advertisements to deliver message stuff, they were still within the boundary of straight-up consumer product--this is different, more similar to when politicians buy out a page in the Times or Post, or when celebrities buy out a page in Variety.  Odder still, to me at least, is that the site is a sort of Huffington Post type clearing house run by a guy named Mark Rein-Hagen, who a small subset of people might know as the guy who created a role-playing game called Vampire: The Masquerade and founded the RPG company called White Wolf.  What he's doing living in Tbilisa and running a website, a website that has the cash to pay for a full-pager in the Economist, I don't know.  I just found it unusual enough to mention, and it wouldn't have come up in the links.  (Footnote to all this: if you're interested in checking out the site, do so at the link above--however, the website consistently mentions that it is under denial of service attacks.  At the time of this writing/publishing, it is working fine.)  For those of you who wonder why I even pay attention to the advertisements, it should also be noted that the Economist doesn't offer the sort of seriously discounted subscription offers so commonly available in the US or UK, and they rely on the purchase price of the magazine far more then the majority of consumer-based publications, making them a bit more selective about the type of advertisements they run, meaning they can be, and in my opinion often are, advertisements that often agree with their personal political bent.

United States

-Here's the full on three page article that rounds up John McCain.  For what it is--a quietly supportive article that focuses on what The Economist likes about McCain--it's not that bad.  It, like most of their Obama articles, is informative while occasionally succumbing to opinionated swagger.  The most interesting things I found in it were two things: back when George W. Bush said that he "looked into Putin's eyes and saw his soul," McCain said he looked into his eyes and saw "a K, a G, and a B."  That's pretty apt, all things considered.  The other was the point made near the end, that when the President is supported by a majority Congress and majority Senate, as a Barack Obama presidency would be, the results are rarely very good for the country as a whole.  It's not something that had crossed my mind before--which is, besides trying to entertain whoever it is that reads this column, is probably the major point of doing these odd run-throughs in the first place.  Well, and also for sarcastic quotes like this--when asked about the 12% of voters who do trust Congress "quite a lot" or "a great deal," McCain referred to them as "paid staffers and blood relatives." 

-In case you're curious, the best line at the Democratic National Convention was the one that was censored by Barack Obama's team from Dennis Kucinich's speech.  The line was, or would have been, that Republicans are "asking for another four years--in a just world, they'd get ten to twenty."  Although this article lacks coverage for Obama's speech, which happened after the magazine went to press, it's a decent enough look at the racuous, and suprisingly entertaining, DNC in all its glory.  (Including a couple of jabs at Bill Clinton for his lazy support of the candidate who took his wife out of the equation.)

-The New Jersey Pest Management Association had a cockroach race representing the coming election.  The McCain roach apparently had "gentler eyes" and won the race.  He went to sleep after crossing the finish line.  (Look, I know it's not news, or important.  But the sleep thing--that's sort of funny, right?)

-In the "I hate you, somebody" portion of these write-ups, here's a new name, or an old name under new fire, to put next to Robert Mugabe:  FEMA, who provided 120,000 trailers for those people displaced by Hurricane Katrina, and kept people in them after discovering that the trailers contained dangerously high levels of formaldehyde.  Yes, it's Gulf Stream who built the trailers.  But it's FEMA's fucking job to make sure that, when they provide a home for someone with no home at all, that the home doesn't poison the people inside it.  George Bush may not care about black people, but I can guarantee you one further:  FEMA doesn't care about people, period.

-Lexington is on serious detail this week, giving over his opinion column to Joe Biden.  Because it's the thing most people remember about Biden, if they remember him at all, Lex starts off by bringing up the classic weirdness of Delaware's lucky son--when he torpedoed a run for the Presidency in 1988 by plagiarizing a speech belonging to Neil Kinnock, the leader of the British Labour Party.  (He even included the hysterically untrue portions about his coal-mining ancestry and claiming that he was the first Biden to go to college.)  It's a great anecdote, but it's also such a weird ass thing to do that it doesn't really reflect much on whether or not Biden will make a good vice-president.  It just means--well, that he's an odd bastard.  Lexington doesn't seem to think much of him either, but points out that Biden might work to help bring more legitimacy to a Democratic ticket lacking in foreign policy experience.  That's Biden's strongest quality, and one that made him, for all his goofball oddities, an intelligent enough choice for a candidate who doesn't seem to be making bad ones that often.

The Americas

-Jamaica kicked the hell out of Cuba in picking up gold medals, making it the best Olympic performer in the Carribean.  Part of that might be due to Cuban Angel Matos kicking the head of the referee in a tae-kwon do match after he was disqualified for taking too long to get medical attention.  Fidel popped his head out of wherever it is he spends his time to imply the whole thing was an imperialist plot.

-Peruvian protests by the indigenous tribespeople of the Amazon jungle helped to stem the destructive methods of oil exploration that the president was pushing through the government.  The oil companies have surprisingly taken it in stride, working as hard as is currently possible to come up with less invasive methods for getting the oil and gas, most of which are methods that seem pretty similar to the milkshake portion of There Will Be Blood.

Asia

-Here's a short one that will get expanded, I'm sure, when more information is available:  Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the opposition in Myanmar, and a name you should learn if you like to talk shit about the Burmese military junta (and who doesn't?) is probably in the middle of a hunger strike, while living in detention, and recently refused to meet with a United Nations envoy when he entered the country.  The leader of the Burmese junta also refused to meet with him at well, but that's not that surprising--what's he going to say?  "I like to kill my own people and rape my own country into the ground.  Is the United Nations cool with that yet?"

-In America, a pregnant teenager and a child with downs syndrome are considered active, useful fodder for a political discussion, as is making remarks about giving your wife Respek Knuckles.  But over in Malaysia, a guy can be accused and arrested for having anal sex despite all the evidence seeming to be completely manufactured by the incumbent powers that be, and the people in Malaysia respond by saying that it won't affect their vote in the slightest.  I never thought I'd say it, but geez.  Americans should be a lot more like Malaysians.  (Except for that whole "outlawing anal sex" thing.)

-The Economist only briefly touched upon the accusations that an American airstrike had killed 90 civilians, 60 of whom were children, in Afghanistan last week--it's expanded upon here, now that the United Nations own investigation has pretty much said that it's probably accurate.  (America is still saying "Nuh-UH!")  As this article grimly acknowledges, there doesn't look to be any change a-coming for the behavior of the American special-forces, so this may not be the last time something like this happens.  Afghanistan knows that, and has gone about fixing what they can on their end and fired two senior Afghan army commanders, both of whom were implicated in passing along the faulty intelligence that painted the civilian area (a local man's wake) as a threat.  While there's some inkling given in the article that the potential for nefarious purposes behind the faulty intelligence existed, the end result is still this:  American bombs, American planes, American troops.  60 dead kids.

-China ends it's Olympic run, you got it, go for it.  Remember how China came up with those three Beijing parks where protesters would be allowed to gather and demonstrate?  All of the 77 (or more) applications to protest were turned down.  Two of the protesters, 70 year old women who wanted to complain about the "inadequate compensation" they received when they lost their home to stadium construction were sentenced to a year each in a labor camp.  (The sentence "was suspended as long as they behave well.")  Dude!  China is so WEIRD.

-For those of you wondering why Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan & Tajikistan haven't been popping up in the news to vocalize who they're supporting in the whole Russia/Georgia debacle, it's not a reflection on lazy media--it's because the five breakaway countries are hoping that everything will work out and that they won't have to take sides.  That always works, if you're Switzerland, but rarely when you're the buffer zone between Russia and (respectively) Iran, Afghanistan and China.  Or when, like Kyrgyzstan, you have Russian and American military bases.  Or, and here's the one to remember next year (which is my totally uneducated and flip guess on when Russia is going to get hungry for more black gold), an oil-rich country like Kazakhstan with the large foreign investment in an independent Georgia.  Good luck on that whole neutrality thing.

Middle East and Africa

-Look, here's something to smile about:  an article that starts off by saying "It was a humiliating week for Robert Mugabe."  He get booed and heckled, for the first time in 28 years!  Morgan Tsvangirai refused to sign the current deal on the table!  Everybody is openly hating on him!  (Okay, wait, let's fix that last part.  Everybody in Zimbabwe that he doesn't have completely control over, like the Senate and most of the dudes with guns, is openly hating on him, and they're doing it in Zimbabwe, not just in Brooklyn based blogs.)  Progress, and this time:  not in baby steps.

-In other good news out of Africa, Angola is holding it's first election in 16 years.  They've been independent from Portugal since 1975, but their only previous election was in 1992.  That one resulted in a ten year civil war that produced all of those horrifying types of violence that people use as an excuse to not read about African politics, because they seem to think--ok, you know what?  No pussy-footing around.  If you're main reason for avoiding news stories is because you find them unsettling, or gross, or scary, then you're sort of a useless human being.  If you only read a couple every year, and then spit out nonsense about how "it's all the same" because you don't feel like learning more then two or three names in a continent you've never been to and are unlikely to visit, you really should get your head shoved into a vat of water and held there until you're mom gives me like ten dollars.  It's one thing to not read the news because you just don't care, at all, about anything--that kind of abject cynicism I can totally get behind.  But if you cherry-pick news stories that agree to your taste level, you're the worst kind of trash.  It's kind of like not caring at all about anything in the world except for Presidential elections every four years and then emailing people some dumbass forward written by a 22 year old intern.  You want to debate politics and global issues?  Page me when you've got a fucking brain that understands complexity.

-In what should, and would, be a bigger news story if it wasn't for elections and blood-hungry Russians, Libya is coming closer to a full restoration of diplomatic ties, non-existent since 1980.  Condoleeza Rice is there now, the first time a senior American diplomat has visited since 1953.  While these are issues that will (I checked) be expanded upon in later issues of The Economist, the remainder of the article is about Seif al-Islam, the Western thinking son of Muammar Qaddafi who recently claimed he's no longer interested in politics.  He's a striking guy, one who seems to be a little too good to be true, and one who is probably too much, too soon for a country still struggling to catch up with the pace of a global politik no longer willing to turn a blind eye to extremist tendencies.  Still, like the Mugabe story above--progress is something, especially when it comes from a country that has been written off by many for years.

Europe

-After a brutal loss of ten soldiers in Afghanistan, the worst single attack death toll since a bombing in Beirut over twenty years ago, Nicolas Sarkozy is bringing the issue of extra troops in that battlefield to a parliamentary vote.  Despite it being almost as unpopular as Lily Allen among people often stereotyped as having absolutely no desire to do anything but smoke and have sex with other men's wives, it will probably pass simply because French people keep forgetting that they have to vote in leaders they agree with if they want the whole "democracy" thing to work.

-Here's an odd article that will sort of blow your mind if you're A) not a nerd or B) over the age of 14--the Germans are board-game CRAZY.  They play some hardcore board games, and they make some hardcore board games, and this is totally grown-ups.  One of them is called Puerto Rico, and it's all aobut pretending to be a 16th century colonist in the Caribbean.  I understand = nothing.

-Italy has some serious problems getting people to use their sick days at work for days when they are sick, and the government is going to start cracking down.  The solution?  Well, it's the same one for when you kept thinking the Chemistry teacher didn't notice that you told him you were going to the bathroom and then never coming back until the bell rang:  call the parents to get a doctor's note.  A doctor's note!  Even more awesome?  It's working!  Absenteeism is down 37% from last year, which adds fuel to my personal belief system that it is always a plus to treat your subordinates like they are idiot children.  (Especially interns.  God, how I hate interns.  It's a pure, white-hot hate, much like the sun.)

-Charlemagne deals with the the issue of why the European Union is performing so uselessly in the competition called "Intimade Russia into not invading tiny countries."  Put bluntly, it's that no matter how many times that the EU gets together to make some kind of statement, it's completely undercut by all the side deals cut between Russia and EU members for oil and gas.  Put more broadly--well, I'm not going to plagiarize Charlemagne.  That would be totally in conflict with the fifth noble truth, "Don't be a cockplant and link to the source of what you're plagiarizing."

Britain

-So the British had a whole lot of immigrants coming in, but now they've got a whole lot of immigrants heading out--happily, it's not because of some kind of hardcore xenophobic purging, like the ones that the Spooks writers whip out everytime they've got to fill the void between reminding me that they killed Danny.  Depressingly, it's because the British economy is figuring out new ways to be an economy that makes people want to throw themselves down the stairs like they're reenacting that scene from The Untouchables, except the goal isn't to save a baby but is to crack open their skull on the steps so that they don't have to live through another British recession.

-In a follow up to the story that is people in Britain having a terrible economy that's digging at the floor of terrible to see what kind of horrible they can find underneath, everybody is making enough babies that they are now predicted to be the largest EU country, population wise, by 2060.  I find this odd, because I remember that when I lost my job oh-so-many years ago because they got tired of me sleeping on the clock, I had about as much sexual desire as you would if I locked you in a room with that uncle you pretend doesn't exist.

-Here's an article about why Britain doesn't look like it has a non-white political leader coming in the near future.  It's sort of cheap bullshit about demographics and so on.  I'm not offended by it, I doubt too many would be, but it certainly isn't up to snuff alongside the normal stuff you find in the British section of the mag.  Read it, if you dare.

-Bagehot writes about British taxation, and while it's a subject that's certainly important enough for the dude to focus a column on, I'm surprised that he didn't want to spend more time focusing on Gordon Brown's tepid response to the Russian conflict.  That's right, for the first time ever--the Economist Versus Idiot would've liked to read more about Gordon Brown.  And look!  My shit smells like a fairy picnic.

International (God I Have No Patience For You This Week)

-Big article about a medical study here, but it's the throwaway article that irked me this week--an article about a plan unveiled in Norway to establish a code of conduct for holy religious sites that all governments can agree on.  Now, does the article say who came up with the plan?  No, it just mentions a non-profit spokesperson and lists "partners" that are Muslim, Jewish and Christian.  (Sunni's?  Catholics?  Reform Jews?  Southern Baptists?  Unitarians?  Old Hollywood Video employees?)  Does it say anything about why the plan exists, or who is going to enforce it?  No, not unless you count an overall attitude of "because it's a good thing."  Here's the thing:  it's a good thing to think, and say, a lot of things.  But without a connection to the reality of a situation, where a guerrilla army can hide it's nerve gas in an elementary school, or where a church can house a serial pedophile in it's basement, the attitude that "because it's a good thing" is patently meaningless.  More so, it's ignorant and naive.  While I'd certainly reassess my attitude towards the project when and if somebody writes a far better article explaining exactly what it is, this piece of uselessness is indicative of two problems:  the first being that good intentions based in nothing but rhetoric are designed to make the individuals proclaiming them feel good, nothing more, and that the Economist really needs to reassess the purpose of what is always the worst portion of the magazine.

Business

-An odd company called Tata that makes the cheapest car on Earth, which has the same name as a type of iPod, is struggling against the Communist Party of India that is still governing the state of West Bengal, despite Communism being sort of biz-oring with a slice of "get real."  For whatever reason, the Communist party welcomed Tata into town in a bid to switch from farming to industry without making sure that all the farmers would be good with that, and a whole bunch of protests have succeeded in making it pretty impossible to build the cars.  (Because, as it turns out, farmers farm often because, hey!  They like farming!)  Of course, if this were the Communist Party that runs China or used to run the Soviet Union, the next part of this story would be all gross and depressing and involve a lot of violence, but because this is India, and these cats are about as Communist as most grad students who've read The People's History, things are going sort of Woodstock-y instead. 

-South Korea's steelmaking POSCO company continues to prove everybody wrong, dating back to 1968, when the World Bank said South Korea couldn't support a company that is now the world's fourth largest.  Moving into the next area of becoming a truly massive beast of steelmaking, they're going to be bidding on the third biggest shipbuilder in the world.  I don't really have much to throw into this, except that, like most white guys who do too many ab workouts, I really like the idea of steelmaking and shipbuilding.  They just sound like really testosterone-y type ways to make a living.

-New York is now following the non-smoking thing up with the put-calories-on-the-menu thing, which just means that...what?  We're all supposed to feel guilty?  Look, fat people know what they eat makes them fat.  Skinny people know they're blessed with a good metabolism that let's them eat unhealthy shit.  I think this is some trick to teach dumb people math.

Finance and Economics

-The drama quotient is jacked high for this article about why over 100 commercial banks may fold over the next year, and unlike a lot of these type of articles over the last few months, there's very little in the way of "how to prevent" this type recommendations.  While the Economist has put out some recommendations that are a little bit too pie-in-the-sky over the last few months, notably the one where they fantasized a world where the EU and the US cared enough about Myanmar to force aid past the Burmese militia, the basic lack of any advice here makes this article even more doom-ridden then it already reads.  Which, considering how melodramatic the multiple Shakespeare references get, is a pretty tough feat.

-Buttonwood writes another column on why the credit crunch has lasted so long, leading me to believe he or she has these things in a word document that just updates the company names before he sticks on a new opening paragraph.  Still not an easy read, but hey--this is the sort of a stuff a dipshit like me needs to read multiple times to understand anyway.

-The World Bank recalculates the way it determines poverty, again, and this time the result is a difference of around half a billion people more people living under $1.25 a day. Sort of an interesting method of recalculation, especially because the technical term for poverty is people living in circumstances far worse then what most people already consider unlivable in the first place. 

Science and Technology

-They've got dogs in Britain that are trained to sniff out bladder cancer, prostate cancer and skin cancer.  They smell people with cancer.  This is for real-type-jangles, not for make-fun-type-bangles.  Rock out, you sniffer dogs, for as long as you can.  Because soon, we're going to replace you with robots.

-In the wonderful world of odd jobs in science that I'll never understand the aspiration to have, a couple of German scientists have studied enough satellite images, some (or most, it's not clear) of which have come from using Google Earth to find evidence that cows usually point north-south when they aren't sitting down.  The main reason they couldn't lock down whether the cows are facing north or south specifically is because Google Earth doesn't produce images of a high enough resolution to determine which side of the cow was the head.  The sarcastic response to this that you create in your own mind is far better than anything I could produce.

-The first couple of sentences are one of those sentences where the Economist reminds the reader that they have zero respect for creationists, which is sort of brilliant, but also a bit safe.  I doubt a lot of creationists read the Economist, and for those that do, I can't imagine too many take the time to keep up with articles about the evolutionary state of dung beetles.  To take it one step further, do they want to read about how the inverse relationship between the sizes of a dung beetles horn and penis?  Because that's what this article is about:  the fact, now proven, that dung beetles either grow a big horn and have a small cock, or they have a large cock and a little horn.  Again--no snark required.  Just awesome information to have.

Books and Arts

-The Economist sort of redeems it's awful movie taste by acknowledging that Lions for Lambs was a terrible movie that no one liked and then throws redemption away by theorizing that a movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow about an American soldier who works in Iraq disarming bombs has the potential to be a blockbuster.  Now, I'm the first to tell you that Bigelow can catch the worlds attention with her directorial work--Point Break being the best movie about homoerotic surfers robbing banks in the history of cinema--but I'm also going to be the first to point out that Bigelow also directed Strange Days and K:19 The Widowmaker.  Never bet on Kathryn Bigelow.  She only strikes gold when she's got Gary Busey on her side.

-I've never heard of Andrew Bacevich, and I think I might be able to guess why from reading this review of his latest book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, which the Economist compares to the prophet Jeremiah multiple times.  Bacevich has a strong and probably obnoxious voice, and seems to be both hardcore leftist and hardcore rightwinger.  That strikes me as being a bit too complex to fit in.  I'm tempted to research him a bit more before saying that I'm going to buy his book and read it, but I'm also tempted by those terrible compilations of Tupac Shakur b-sides that get released every Christmas.  So what do I know?

-You know, I don't have any real complaint with the Economist reviewing opera, since it's probably one of the three or four times in my life I'll read a review of opera, but considering that David Cronenberg is getting ready to open an opera version of his take on The Fly, why not at least throw me a little bone here?  "Roger, having embraced some of the shepherd's passionate spirit, emerges as a man transformed."  Whatever.  I just want to see the part where Jeff Goldblum arm-wrestles a dude into a broken forearm.

-There's not enough really great articles about museum curators, and I mean that sincerely, because museum curators are some of the most intelligent people in the world to read about, listen to, or bump into while stealing cigarette butts from homeless men.  (True story!)  Nicholas Penny is one of those ones who deserves more ink.  He's the director of London's National Gallery, and his plans for the permanent collection is one that might irk some, but it certainly doesn't come from a place of thoughtlessness.  Interesting fellow, interesting stuff.

Obituary: Jack Weil

-While I didn't know anything about Jack Weil until reading this obituary, I do happen to have a hand-me-down Rockamount shirt that is one of the most comfortable pieces of clothing that I own, and the day it stops surviving the wash will probably be long after I've been shot in the face by my wife, who has sworn to take me down the next time I try to make her re-watch Predator.  And hey, it's okay to treat Weil's death a bit lightly--he passed away at 107 and was still heading into his store and shaking hands with everyone who walked through the door weeks before he passed away.  Let's re-examine that for a second:  107 years old, and still going into his storefront.  No matter how many times I re-read this obituary, and I've re-read it quite a few times, I can't wrap my mind around that.  Also, and this is for the Chavez fans:  he referred to Sam Walton as a "hillbilly son of a bitch" and never allowed his famous Western shirts (with the snap-fasteners instead of buttons) to sell in Wal Mart.  This guy was something else.

-Economist Versus Idiot is a trademark property belonging to a loose confederate of states, based out of the notion that, since there's an opportunity for high-income, under-educated individuals to take the piss out of a weekly news magazine on an internet blog hosted by Typepad, that opportunity should be exploited in the fullest.  After all, there's very little that separates us from the knife wielding drunken maniacs who control the majority of New Zealand, but those differences should be celebrated as often as possible.  Also, cake.

Next week--yes, it's the pitbull lady.  Newsflash!  The Economist really doesn't like her.

Comments

[Goggles]

Frequently there is no pain, and the bleeding stops on its own. http://store.eyecare24.com/catalog-goggle.html

[Jason Michelitch]

Um, Tucker, that is 45.7 million people WITHOUT health insurance in 2007, as opposed to 38.4 million from eight years ago.

[Kenny]

I'm totally head over heels in love with this weekly article. Best thing on the web. I'm a guy who doesn't know more than 2 or 3 names of people in African continents, but it's not from cherry-picking stories, it's because I haven't tried keeping up before your weekly articles piqued my interest. So, hey, you made an idiot like me want to learn some new stuff.

And I do completely understand the desire to want to have cool science jobs where you look on Google Earth for pictures of cows. That's just awesome! And someone hands out PHDs like candy for that sort of thing!

[Tucker Stone]

Jesus, was I drunk? I totally inverted the meaning of that one. That's a pretty big fuck-up.

[Tucker Stone]

I'm leaving that spam, because that's kind of the best spam I could imagine. I haven't checked to see what it is the company is selling, but "the bleeding stops on it's own" is a genius piece of advert copy.

And Kenny: thanks!

[Matthew J. Brady]

That was an excellent rant about the kind of news people read. Well done.

[Noah]

You're. Reviewing. The. Economist. Holy crap that's funny.

[Noah]

Incidentally, I don't think it's entirely clear who the Economist is going to endorse. I actually suspect they'd endorse Obama at this point. The Palin pick is not especially popular among people who have heard of Africa...or the Middle East...or Asia...or....

[Tucker Stone]

Yeah, here's a spoiler for tomorrow's Econ-review--they really, really, really hate the Sarah Palin pick. They hit her with a couple of the major complaints, but they hold their anger mostly for McCain. One article even carries the sub-heading: "The woman from nowhere: John McCain's choice of running-mate raises serious questions about his judgment."

The thing with them is that they're so despondent about the state of global finance that they'll pretty much support whichever candidate is most supportive of global trade, which is McCain for now. Besides that, they're pretty unnerved by the idea of a Democratic President supported by a Democrat House & Senate, especially with the Dem's on track to have a filibuster proof majority. For now, I'm thinking they'll spend the next couple of weeks to figure out how to support McCain, but it's certainly up in the air with Palin in the mix.

In retrospect, I don't remember them having much love for Cheney either. They really loved it when he shot that dude.