-Gary Locke is number three in the "who wants to be commerce secretary" sweepstakes. Hey, I don't know why you'd want that job in the first place. No matter what happens with the economy, good or bad, there's no way that a good portion of the country isn't going to hate you on a nonstop basis starting as soon as you take the gig.
-Jesus, this Mexican thing doesn't stop: some police chief was told by drug gangs that he had to retire. If he didn't, they'd kill one of his police officers every 48 hours. He retired.
-Want to go to Tibet during March? Fuck you, you're not allowed. No refunds either. Them's the new March rules.
-The Tamil Tigers, who are supposed to be on their last legs, had enough spice left to attack Colombo with a couple of "light aircraft", both of which were shot down. Doesn't "light aircraft" sometimes mean shit like gliders? How serious is this story?
-That Australian writer in Thailand who got locked up for writing a mean novel that he published himself was granted a royal pardon. That disappoints me, because I'm willing to sacrifice free speech if it means people who write fan-fiction will go to jail.
-Did you know Latvia's prime minister quit? He did. Did you know that prime ministers could do that? Quit? I would've thought they had contracts or something.
-Some guy in Turky's parliament started addressing the chamber in the Kurdish langauge, which is totally not legal in Turkey, and they had to cut the live television feed. I wonder what this means for replays of American Idol. Isn't Paula Abdul speaking Kurdish most of the time?
-When not escaping charges of bribery through being a sleazy dude, Silvio Berlusconi is trying to figure out new ways in which to build nuclear power plants in Italy. Out of sand? That's what I heard.
-Hey, the Dow Jones wasn't doing well! It was doing really bad! You can ignore it but it is real! Banks are being nationalized! Your children will starve! You have failed! America is at war with itself! I'm going to be a feral ghoul.
-Denmark took over another bank, their third since last year. That's cool, I guess.
-Saab, still owned by GM, filed for bankruptcy after its last hope--the Swedish government--decided it was as interested in their cars as the global marketplace. (Not much!)
-Hearst is probably going to sell or close the San Francisco Chronicle. That's the paper featured in Zodiac, right? Robert Downey Jr. made it look respectable, but any place that would hire a person even vaguely like Jake Gylanhall can eat a dick. A dick called failure.
-Peter Chernin quit as COO and president of NewsCorp? Shit, how am I finding out about that now, from the Economist? That's actually something I should have heard about earlier. I'm disappointed in you, me!
Leaders
-This is one of those "you may not like it, but tough" articles that the Economist throws out on occasion. Not much in the way of alternative argument, which will probably show up mostly online and in the next couple of letters columns, it's a hard born polemic about why Western Europe has to take on the responsbility of helping the faltering Eastern European economies it's been dangling EU membership too for the past few years. Without ignoring the basic truth that most west Europeans don't particularly want to help their eastern brothers, the Economist puts it like this: too fucking bad. After years of loaning the east money for construction and consumption, both of which filled the coffers of west European's manufactures and banks, the meltdown has started. That doesn't mean that the Economist has proposed some kind of universal response--no, they split the east into three groups, and each has their own remedy. It's an extensive little piece, this one, but no bullshit: it's a one-sided one, and there's some clear political arguments to be made against it. Have fun!
-Usually the Economist does one full-page leader and the rest get a half-page or so. Not this time. The majority of this leader article is about how America--specifically Obama, Tim Geithner and Ben Bernake--need to stop kidding around and admit that nationalization looks pretty likely for some of America's worser off banks. Considering that this issue of Economist was published the day after the government's stake in Citigroup hit 40%, it's kind of ridiculous for those guys to keep pretending that nationalization is a faraway fantasy. (Especially since every single other major economic power is nationalizing like a mother.) The magazine does dig on the budget though.
-This is another week where leaders end up doubling up later in the magazine as feature articles. First up for the double dip is this piece, which is about how some businesses are refusing to issue annual financial targets. The Economist thinks this is a bad idea, as it gives scared managers the opportunity to excuse themselves from having to do some serious examination of how they plan to survive the current state of global finance. It calls back to a great column from last week's issue about how few people--like, the people who should know--truly comprehend the state of their respective economy right now. Later on, the subject of forecasts is giving a more objective state of the union. Intel seems to be focusing their energy on short term goals and forecasts, a model the Economist seems to approve of. Taken together with the opinion piece, you can see exactly how they feel: anything is better than nothing at all.
-So, why can't you go to Tibet in March? (You can't, I don't care who you know rich boy.) Because the 50th anniversary of the moment when the Dalai Lama fled into exile with 100,000 followers behind him is coming, and because China is doing everything in its power--which is extensive--to make sure they dodge a repeat of last year's protests. The opinion piece points to the recent world developments regarding Tibet--most of which can be summed up by saying that few people care enough to do anything about it--but it's the longer piece that has the red meat you're craving. Simply put, the area is blacked out to the media, blacked out to Tibetans, and some local Chinese officials in the area are even wondering if the Communist party is making the right choices with all the secrecy. It would be really, really extreme to imply that something horrible is going to happen there. At the same time? You'd never find out if something did.
-Out of all the special features the Economist has recently done, this week's focus on the state of garbage is a fascinating one--don't let this same-old, same-old opinion piece keep you from checking it out. Whether it's the simple, direct explanation of why San Francisco can't compete with rural India in recycing, or the extensive explanation of how the much-loathed and widely misunderstand incinerator developments are actually a pretty great spot of hope, they really pulled off a feat with this one. Check it out if you've got the time.
United States
-Obama is going to cut the deficit from $1.75 trillion to $533 billion by the end of his first term. Or at least, that's the plan--for that to work, he has to let the Bush tax cuts fro the top 2% of Americans expire in 2010, he has to reverse some corporate tax-cuts, and he's got to cut down on the tax cuts for large charitable gifts. (And that's it! Okay, no.) Will it work? Who knows, the economy has to turn around first. America has to get out of some of it's war costs. There's all kinds of things that have to happen, and while the Economist ends this long, number-heavy article with a vote of confidence...man, it's not like smooth sailing is coming.
-Washington DC has a population of roughly 600,000 but they have no voice in Congress. They want that to change. Something about taxation without representation, which sounds familiar. Probably has something to do with World War 2. Never watched that movie.
-Weird one here, I can see myself getting this wrong. As I'm understanding it, public universities in Texas and California are legally forbidden from using race as a factor in the admissions process, which makes affirmative action programs pretty much impossible. To get around it, Texas guaranteed the top 10% of any high school's graduating class admissions to any state university--that way, schools that were predominately non-white could still have access to college. Okay. And California has a (probably ridiculous) point system policy that gives students credit for "overcoming life challenges" as well as academic criteria. Now that's going to change: California is basically taking on the Texas system, albeit changing the percentage to 9%, whereas Texas is going to change there's into something resembling...well, nothing really. A clusterfuck? It sounds workable in theory, but also way fucking weird. Still, neither policies seem to be successfully keeping up with the changing proportion of minorities in either state, so yeah: do something.
-If you live somewhere in California where the population contains an above-agerage proportion of people aged 65 and older, you are living somewhere that is successfully avoiding the worser blows of the California economy, which is somewhere between "Shitty" and "Fucking A, I'm Gonna Eat A Tin Can." So yeah, but don't move there. You'll fuck it up.
-Here's an article that probably should get filed in "weird and unlikely to happen a lot," but is so goddamn infuriating and awful that it sort of cries out for some hate.
Step 1: Cut a hole in the box.
No, sorry.
Step 1: Start a private-sector prison company.
Step 2: Bribe some judges to allow the building of a private-sector prison.
Step 3: Bribe some judges to close the local county-founded prison.
Step 4: Pay those judges, repeatedly, for every juvenile they send to one of the juvenile detention centers you built alongside your private-sector prison. (like 15 year-old Hilary Transue, who got three months for making up a fake Myspace page dogging on the assistant principal.)
Pennsylvania: you elected these judges. What's the deal?
-Should the Purple Heart to be awarded to post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers? The Economist doesn't really take a stand here, but considering that they give more attention to the 'yes' side of the debate, I think you can read between the lines. Or maybe you can't, I don't know. I hope you can, but I also admittedly don't think that much about you personally, because it gets me so wet I can't concentrate.
-Let's be broad and surface-y and say that Lexington's entire column this week is one of those that pushes a little too far for my taste, since it makes the (true) observation that the recent Democrat success has stacked the Washington power structure with Californian's like Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, George Miller, Jane Harman...the list goes even longer. The concern is the abandonment of the South, but this whole thing just struck me as buying a little too deeply into the classic bullshit story that America's Republicans are a bunch of down-home peach-eating rednecks while the Democrats are a bunch of elitisit rich kids. I'm not a full on Jeremiah Wright type who thinks you pretty much can't make the circle of power without leaving lots of bodies (as well as integrity) by the wayside, but that's a hell of a lot more likely than this tired, bullshit analogy. Politicians may not all be liars. But they sure as hell aren't the fucking Justice League either.
Letters
-Joe Rosen, from Lincoln, Massachusetts thinks that politicians should have to audition their pet projects on live television, so that the American public can vote for where their tax dollars go, American Idol style. (Yes, he uses American Idol as his example of working democracy.) I'm not really sure that I need to explain why I think Joe Rosen is a fucking moron, but let me waste some more energy typing out why. It's because you already do something like that, Joe Rosen. It's called Voting For These Politicians In The First Fucking Place. Maybe we'll we're at it, we can install a machine in your house that will eat your shit for you, but you won't have to walk to the pre-installed toilet. For starters, you can try shoving a feral anteater up your rectum.
The Americas
-Here's the plan to save Brazil's rain forests: regularize the land titles to 80% of the private land holdings in Brazilian Amazonia over the period of the next three years. If the people living there own it, maybe they'll want to stay on it instead of moving onto another forest they don't own after they've cleared the one they're on now. The Economist doesn't really think it's going to work, although they try pretty hard to be objective about it, but when they end the article by saying "skeptics willl take a bit more convincing", it's pretty obvious where they stand. Rain forests and Tibet this week--it's like old home week for 90's causes. One wishes all those Pearl Jam fans had actually accomplished something, beyond clearing the way for Creed and Stain'd.
-250 years ago, the Brits kicked the French out of Quebec. (I'm sure that this history needs more explication, because that sounds pretty much like one of those "Civil War? About slavery" kind of responses.) Either way, Quebec and a lot of Quebcois spent the last few months pushing really hard not to have a big reenactment of the battle. They succeeded in shutting it down. Honestly, I realize this is a big deal to some people, and while I don't want to dismiss their feelings, I can't really take battle reenactments seriously and I don't comprehend how anyone else can either. If I wanted to watch people run around pretending to be soldiers, I'd go to a fucking elementary school that still has recess.
-Columbia's domestic-intelligence agency has been busted for spying on all kinds of people without warrants, some of them high-level government types. America has to step in and have a talk, because all that spying equipment they're using to do it is supposed to be for the war on drugs/terrorism/whatever America says, not private blackmail houses. Again: yeah, this is serious stuff, but what do you think is going to happen when you give spies fancy spy shit? You don't think they're going to use it for spying? Do you eat soup with a book?
Asia
-Here's a weird one--after all the Tibet stuff mentioned above, the Economist publishes an interview, kind of, alongside an update about the state of organized crime in Japan. Which is called the yakuza, but you already knew that, because anybody who spends anytime on blogs also remembers that Jack Lemmon episode of the Simpsons where Marge and the Mafia start a war with the Yakuza. It's a cool article, but it's also one of those articles you want to forget about the same way you wish you'd never read anything about John Gotti's degenerate scumbag son, because it'll fuck you up when you watch The Godfather.
-Although the world ignored M.I.A.'s politics and pretty much turned a relatively supportive eye to what they can see of Sri Lanka's campaign to officially terminate the Tamil Tigers, a 60 year old man lit himself on fire in protest last week. (Kerosene and a box of matches.) He's not the only one to commit suicide in protest of the war--he's the fifth this year so far. I realize I come across as pretty severe in the last month with the Sri Lankan stuff, but good god, how is what's going on there not a bigger story? People are dying over there every single day, and a lot of them are just random civilians caught in the cross-fire!
-This is another week where leaders end up doubling up later in the magazine as feature articles. First up for the double dip is this piece, which is about how some businesses are refusing to issue annual financial targets. The Economist thinks this is a bad idea, as it gives scared managers the opportunity to excuse themselves from having to do some serious examination of how they plan to survive the current state of global finance. It calls back to a great column from last week's issue about how few people--like, the people who should know--truly comprehend the state of their respective economy right now. Later on, the subject of forecasts is giving a more objective state of the union. Intel seems to be focusing their energy on short term goals and forecasts, a model the Economist seems to approve of. Taken together with the opinion piece, you can see exactly how they feel: anything is better than nothing at all.
-So, why can't you go to Tibet in March? (You can't, I don't care who you know rich boy.) Because the 50th anniversary of the moment when the Dalai Lama fled into exile with 100,000 followers behind him is coming, and because China is doing everything in its power--which is extensive--to make sure they dodge a repeat of last year's protests. The opinion piece points to the recent world developments regarding Tibet--most of which can be summed up by saying that few people care enough to do anything about it--but it's the longer piece that has the red meat you're craving. Simply put, the area is blacked out to the media, blacked out to Tibetans, and some local Chinese officials in the area are even wondering if the Communist party is making the right choices with all the secrecy. It would be really, really extreme to imply that something horrible is going to happen there. At the same time? You'd never find out if something did.
-Out of all the special features the Economist has recently done, this week's focus on the state of garbage is a fascinating one--don't let this same-old, same-old opinion piece keep you from checking it out. Whether it's the simple, direct explanation of why San Francisco can't compete with rural India in recycing, or the extensive explanation of how the much-loathed and widely misunderstand incinerator developments are actually a pretty great spot of hope, they really pulled off a feat with this one. Check it out if you've got the time.
United States
-Obama is going to cut the deficit from $1.75 trillion to $533 billion by the end of his first term. Or at least, that's the plan--for that to work, he has to let the Bush tax cuts fro the top 2% of Americans expire in 2010, he has to reverse some corporate tax-cuts, and he's got to cut down on the tax cuts for large charitable gifts. (And that's it! Okay, no.) Will it work? Who knows, the economy has to turn around first. America has to get out of some of it's war costs. There's all kinds of things that have to happen, and while the Economist ends this long, number-heavy article with a vote of confidence...man, it's not like smooth sailing is coming.
-Washington DC has a population of roughly 600,000 but they have no voice in Congress. They want that to change. Something about taxation without representation, which sounds familiar. Probably has something to do with World War 2. Never watched that movie.
-Weird one here, I can see myself getting this wrong. As I'm understanding it, public universities in Texas and California are legally forbidden from using race as a factor in the admissions process, which makes affirmative action programs pretty much impossible. To get around it, Texas guaranteed the top 10% of any high school's graduating class admissions to any state university--that way, schools that were predominately non-white could still have access to college. Okay. And California has a (probably ridiculous) point system policy that gives students credit for "overcoming life challenges" as well as academic criteria. Now that's going to change: California is basically taking on the Texas system, albeit changing the percentage to 9%, whereas Texas is going to change there's into something resembling...well, nothing really. A clusterfuck? It sounds workable in theory, but also way fucking weird. Still, neither policies seem to be successfully keeping up with the changing proportion of minorities in either state, so yeah: do something.
-If you live somewhere in California where the population contains an above-agerage proportion of people aged 65 and older, you are living somewhere that is successfully avoiding the worser blows of the California economy, which is somewhere between "Shitty" and "Fucking A, I'm Gonna Eat A Tin Can." So yeah, but don't move there. You'll fuck it up.
-Here's an article that probably should get filed in "weird and unlikely to happen a lot," but is so goddamn infuriating and awful that it sort of cries out for some hate.
Step 1: Cut a hole in the box.
No, sorry.
Step 1: Start a private-sector prison company.
Step 2: Bribe some judges to allow the building of a private-sector prison.
Step 3: Bribe some judges to close the local county-founded prison.
Step 4: Pay those judges, repeatedly, for every juvenile they send to one of the juvenile detention centers you built alongside your private-sector prison. (like 15 year-old Hilary Transue, who got three months for making up a fake Myspace page dogging on the assistant principal.)
Pennsylvania: you elected these judges. What's the deal?
-Should the Purple Heart to be awarded to post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers? The Economist doesn't really take a stand here, but considering that they give more attention to the 'yes' side of the debate, I think you can read between the lines. Or maybe you can't, I don't know. I hope you can, but I also admittedly don't think that much about you personally, because it gets me so wet I can't concentrate.
-Let's be broad and surface-y and say that Lexington's entire column this week is one of those that pushes a little too far for my taste, since it makes the (true) observation that the recent Democrat success has stacked the Washington power structure with Californian's like Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, George Miller, Jane Harman...the list goes even longer. The concern is the abandonment of the South, but this whole thing just struck me as buying a little too deeply into the classic bullshit story that America's Republicans are a bunch of down-home peach-eating rednecks while the Democrats are a bunch of elitisit rich kids. I'm not a full on Jeremiah Wright type who thinks you pretty much can't make the circle of power without leaving lots of bodies (as well as integrity) by the wayside, but that's a hell of a lot more likely than this tired, bullshit analogy. Politicians may not all be liars. But they sure as hell aren't the fucking Justice League either.
Letters
-Joe Rosen, from Lincoln, Massachusetts thinks that politicians should have to audition their pet projects on live television, so that the American public can vote for where their tax dollars go, American Idol style. (Yes, he uses American Idol as his example of working democracy.) I'm not really sure that I need to explain why I think Joe Rosen is a fucking moron, but let me waste some more energy typing out why. It's because you already do something like that, Joe Rosen. It's called Voting For These Politicians In The First Fucking Place. Maybe we'll we're at it, we can install a machine in your house that will eat your shit for you, but you won't have to walk to the pre-installed toilet. For starters, you can try shoving a feral anteater up your rectum.
The Americas
-Here's the plan to save Brazil's rain forests: regularize the land titles to 80% of the private land holdings in Brazilian Amazonia over the period of the next three years. If the people living there own it, maybe they'll want to stay on it instead of moving onto another forest they don't own after they've cleared the one they're on now. The Economist doesn't really think it's going to work, although they try pretty hard to be objective about it, but when they end the article by saying "skeptics willl take a bit more convincing", it's pretty obvious where they stand. Rain forests and Tibet this week--it's like old home week for 90's causes. One wishes all those Pearl Jam fans had actually accomplished something, beyond clearing the way for Creed and Stain'd.
-250 years ago, the Brits kicked the French out of Quebec. (I'm sure that this history needs more explication, because that sounds pretty much like one of those "Civil War? About slavery" kind of responses.) Either way, Quebec and a lot of Quebcois spent the last few months pushing really hard not to have a big reenactment of the battle. They succeeded in shutting it down. Honestly, I realize this is a big deal to some people, and while I don't want to dismiss their feelings, I can't really take battle reenactments seriously and I don't comprehend how anyone else can either. If I wanted to watch people run around pretending to be soldiers, I'd go to a fucking elementary school that still has recess.
-Columbia's domestic-intelligence agency has been busted for spying on all kinds of people without warrants, some of them high-level government types. America has to step in and have a talk, because all that spying equipment they're using to do it is supposed to be for the war on drugs/terrorism/whatever America says, not private blackmail houses. Again: yeah, this is serious stuff, but what do you think is going to happen when you give spies fancy spy shit? You don't think they're going to use it for spying? Do you eat soup with a book?
Asia
-Here's a weird one--after all the Tibet stuff mentioned above, the Economist publishes an interview, kind of, alongside an update about the state of organized crime in Japan. Which is called the yakuza, but you already knew that, because anybody who spends anytime on blogs also remembers that Jack Lemmon episode of the Simpsons where Marge and the Mafia start a war with the Yakuza. It's a cool article, but it's also one of those articles you want to forget about the same way you wish you'd never read anything about John Gotti's degenerate scumbag son, because it'll fuck you up when you watch The Godfather.
-Although the world ignored M.I.A.'s politics and pretty much turned a relatively supportive eye to what they can see of Sri Lanka's campaign to officially terminate the Tamil Tigers, a 60 year old man lit himself on fire in protest last week. (Kerosene and a box of matches.) He's not the only one to commit suicide in protest of the war--he's the fifth this year so far. I realize I come across as pretty severe in the last month with the Sri Lankan stuff, but good god, how is what's going on there not a bigger story? People are dying over there every single day, and a lot of them are just random civilians caught in the cross-fire!
Middle East and Africa
-Did you know Somalia elected a new president? I kind of assumed they'd officially given up on that sort of thing, since it's basically a pageant to find out who won't be in charge of anything. The article that describes the job he's got, and the reasons why he'll be incapable of doing it, is a pretty depressing one. The power in Somalia is dispersed amongst a bunch of gangs and warlords, and Sharif Ahmed doesn't have a budget, a real power structure, and god knows who actually voted. Interestingly enough, he's not a total psychopath type. There's another follow-up article on Somalia too, one that's worth rememebing anytime you read any articles about Somalia. It's all about how almost no reporter, including the ones responsible for both of the Economist pieces, are actually in Somalia getting any on-the-ground information. Reporters, like Red Cross workers and anybody else who goes to Somalia, are killed and attacked so often that it's no longer a viable option for any but the most crazy.
Europe
It's another big protest week, with 100,00 people out in the streets of Dublin, holding signs that go for the jugular "Sack This Government"--well, that's pretty blunt. Most of them were public-sector workers angry over a 7% pay cut. Over in Guadeloupe, a French Caribbean island, the protests were a bit more hardcore--violence, looting and fires. It's part of a strike over people's shitty pay and job cuts, and they've got some more "action" prepared for March 19th. Some poll--I'd assume of Caribbean citizens, although the article doesn't specify--resulted in a majority belief that the unrest and violonce "could spread to mainland France." An old presidential candidate exhorted the citizens to "remember the French Revolution", which seems...I don't know, sounds kind of irresponsible, right? Either way, somebody should make the case for these cats a little better--like, in another article. I'm still kind of confused. Spoon-feed me, corporate news conglomerates!
-Nothing like a story about spies, the most interesting job I believe you can have. First up, Estonia is keeping everything public as they throw one of their officials in jail after finding out he's been a Russian spy for years. How'd they catch him? Bad tradecraft. Like...this isn't a movie. This isn't a John le Carre novel, or a comic book by Greg Rucka. This is real deal cloak and dagger, and some dude just got nailed for crappy tradecraft. Nice!
Obituary: Christopher Nolan
-If you haven't heard of Christopher Nolan--I hadn't--he was an Irish poet and writer. He wrote by strapping a stick to his forehead and picking out one letter at a time on a typewriter, after taking a medication that would steadle his neck muscles. This was the committment he--and his mother, who spent years holding his head steady--had to make for writing, after he was deprived of oxygen for two hours when he was born, leaving him a lifelong cripple. Personally, I always thought the term "cripple" was a bit offensive, but in this case, I'm following Nolan's lead. He spent his life and writing proudly calling himself one. After seeing the samples of his writing copied into this obituary, which carries a tinge of one of my own favorites, I can do nothing less than respect his wishes. He died a few weeks ago at the age of 43. His words, from what I can see? They won't.
In case you haven't noticed, there's an abrupt ending to this week's Economist Versus Idiot as well as a curious lack of imagery. Why? Well, unlike previous late or nonexistent editions, it is not due to bad scheduling choices or personal problems--this time, it's purely technical. Due to their length and link requirements, these pieces aren't composed within the typepad interface, and the computer that contains the original has experienced a case of that agonizingly infuriating nfr.dll virus, which brings lots of friends and effectively makes impotent just about everything on the old PC that houses most of this sites writing. (Late Thursday night, it shut down the keyboard and mouse.) What you see here is what was already transferred over. Apologies, but there was really no alternative beyond re-writing the entire thing from memory, and that would have pushed the publication date even further. This doesn't affect the other pieces on the site, if that matters to you.
Oh hey, Luzerne County, PA... I went to college two blocks away from the county courthouse. The Harlow Cuadra gay porn murder trial is also going down at the moment, so things are hoppin'...
Posted by: Jog | 2009.03.08 at 01:03