The Factual Opinion

Economist Versus Idiot: Shorter Edition, Jammed Into Existence

Last weekend's July 4th threw TFO's schedule off the mark, full Economist coverage returns to Wednesday this coming week.

The World Last Week

-The bailout of American troops from Iraq hit a major milestone, with the withdrawal from the cities purported to have reached conclusion. I'd insert a sarcastic remark about how this story got buried by the death of a celebrity, but I actually wasted a good portion of on-the-clock time watching the fucking thing myself, so I'm part of the problem.

-Gay sex in India is no longer served with a ten year prison sentence. C'mere. Let's celebrate. In India. By fucking.

-When North Korea says they have enough plutonium to make nuclear bombs, we all kind of go "yeah right." But when South Korea says that North Korea has enough plutonium to make nuclear bombs, the response is a little different. (Because South Korea is not run by a crazy liar.)

-No one's quite sure why China held off on a country wide plan to install "web-filtering" software on all new computers in the country, but a smart guess would be that the Chinese government's "web-filtering" software is pretty easy to circumvent. Because it is, because it was made by somebody over 40 and boo-hoo, post-40 something people suck at writing code. They can often do more push-ups though. Trade off!

-The prime minister of Croatia resigned, no notice. He just quit. Maybe he's planning on becoming a celebrity pundit type? Oh wait, Croatia. I was thinking of that governor who looks like Lisa Ann.

-There's a lot of news about Russia in this week's issue, but the one piece that burns the most is this: they banned casinos and gambling houses in huge swaths of the country. What are the bored and angry men going to do with their time now? Like, besides alcoholism. 

-Never really sure how one should feel about a US House vote that comes down to 219 versus 212. Those numbers are so close that they smell like pragmatism. Snarl, pragmatism. Snarl. (It was about the cap-and-trade program.)

-A Gallup poll said that drinking numbers haven't increased since the recession began. Another way to look at that is that people haven't started drinking LESS since Obama took office. I don't know how you dealt with George Bush hating black people, but I was wearing a barrel about seven nights a week.

-Hey, they didn't let Sir Allen Stanford out on bail. That's a smart move. Houston (in jail) versus Antigua (in palatial estate with billions). Which would you have picked?

-A German bank wouldn't loan Porsche $2.5 billion dollars. Shit man, where's the violins? Go get me some violins.

-Mozilla dropped the new Firefox, said it's way faster than it used to be. The same week, Netscape Navigator got arrested for trying to sell stolen copper wire to an electrical firm based out of Detroit. Ugly shit, the past.

Leaders

-It's a huge, Russia focused week. The op-ed that opens the magazine serves as both a laying out of the magazine's opinion on Russia/American relations and a sort of expanded table of contents. (If you read it on the website, it's almost a linkblog.) The Economist has beat these drums of complaint before, but considering the nature of Obama's "reset" policy, it's worth the retread of what's between the two countries. Here's some tidbits on the notoriously under reported superpower: Russia's death rate is double that of countries at its comparable developmental level, it remains the world's largest oil and gas producer, has a nuclear arsenal, and is in the midst of an unsettling backslide into the bad old days of corruption and elitist control. The people are exposed to a near toxic level of nationalistic control, their freedoms encroached upon at an alarming rate, and while their economy is beginning to sink, they remain one of the most powerful countries on Earth. Their relationship with America isn't the best, and the last time Barack Obama came to the country, he was detained by border guards for hours, where he and Senator Dick Lugar were treated as criminals. One wants to believe it can't get worse. Hopefully, by the time you're reading this, that will prove true.

-The Economist doesn't like to dive into America's ugly past interfering in South American elections, so it's not surprising that they don't make a bigger deal out of Barack Obama speaking out against the illegal coup that took Honduran President Manuel Zelaya out of office. To their credit, it isn't a HUGE deal, it's totally possible that America would've condemned it anyway. And although Obama's criticism for the coup is unlikely to change anything about it, it speaks to the better relationship the US know has with South America. Manuel Zelaya was no reliable friend to the US. In the 70's, maybe even later, the accusations that the US had something to do with his ousting would have been fast and furious, and they would probably have been right. For now, Honduras is dealing with Honduras. That's a good thing.

-Regarding the European Union's current pursuit of financial reform: "Europe's ability to distract itself from the substantive issues far outweighs its capacity to resolve them." and "The real chance of meaningful reform to the financial system lies elsewhere." It's important to remember that the Economist actually believes in the European Union. This is how they're talking about the current financial reforms that the EU is bringing to the table. Nothing hurts like the criticism of a pal.

-Although there's a good bit to argue with in this op/ed regarding the relationship between elite private schools that serve as feeders for the top colleges in the world, the conclusion--that government run schools have serious problems--seems inescapable. Education reform--will you ever not be a pain in the ass?

Letters

-David Killam takes one for the grammar squadron, writing in to point out that the Economist forgot to include a verb in the run-on sentence that opened a previous article. He's right, of course. But you'll need a conviction for child molestation on your record before I'll start criticizing run-on sentences. I love me some run-on sentences. 

United States

-Although the Al Franken "won by a nose" story doesn't bring much to the table that you aren't already aware of, it does include a quote from President Obama's congratulatory statement. After welcoming the dude, Obama said that he couldn't wait to work with Franken on "lowering health-care costs and investing in the kind of clean energy jobs and industries that will help America lead in the 21st century." That's how you do it right, boys and girls: smile, shake hands and say "Here's what you'll be doing for me, radio bitch."

-You don't have to go far to find an article that boils down to "how you gonna pay for this stuff, Alfie", where Alfie is Obama, and "stuff" means health care, new energy technology, financial regulation, infrastructure investment, pies, moon, sky. And by "don't have to go far", I mean, like. Right here. Here's one.

-One of the weirdest parts of the various stimulus programs has been how little of the money in those massive buckets has been spent--this article only focuses on the "green energy" portion, but it's a good take on the subject, and a bit preferable to the histrionic fire squirting out of that Reason website. Getting specific about the problems with energy spending helps to point to the larger problem of having a shitload of money for industries almost completely unprepared to accept it. Nice.

-A Supreme Court decision came down on the New Haven firefighters case, and it gets a full article. In case you live on the moon, you already know why--it's a case that Sonia Sotomayor was involved in prior to her nomination to join the Court. At this point, there isn't much to add, other than that the case is over, and the Court disagreed with Sotomayor.

-If you take the federal governments unemployment money, you have to take the federal governments new rules regarding it. So a few states have refused, thinking that the money won't last as long as the Fed claims it will, and they'll be stuck with rules they didn't create. It's like a whole new Civil War, except it's about math. And the Economist calls the article "mo money, mo problems".

-Historic Event, News Nerds! Lexington is fucking done man, she/he is DONE. 13 years of writing these columns, 13 years of living in the US, and homeboy/girl is on his/her way back to the belly of the UK beast, this cat is FINITO, and this is his goodbye. I won't spoil it, except to say that he compares himself to Alexis de Tocqueville. Sort of.

The Americas

-Ecuador's plan is to sell bonds based off the impact of carbon emissions if they were to exploit the estimated 846 million barrels of oil in the ITT area of the Yasuni national park. In other words, you pay them, they won't take out the oil out of that area (oil is extracted from another site nearby, and will soon be extracted from a second one as well.) They'll leave it--and the native tribes living nearby--alone. If the government reneges on its promises in the future and does start drilling in the ITT area, they'll pay the bondholders back, "with interest".

Takers?

-The story that the Economist has been predicting for at least a year is finally here, with the Kirchners getting a swift teeth kick to the referendum they had claimed as their own. If you trust the Economist implicitly, you saw this story coming. If you don't, you probably did anyway: so did everybody else. (Except the Kirchners.)

Asia

-Biggest Muslim-majority democratic election on the way. We're in the Asia section, so I'm betting you know this one....no? It's okay, it always slips my mind too. Here's a hint: the woman who didn't win (although she used to have the job) has the first name "Megawati". That's a great name. Here's her Facebook page, by the way. Don't consider this an endorsement or anything, i'm not near educated enough to have a horse in the race. I just think her Facebook page is funny.

-While those stories about universal ID cards almost always lend themselves to Orwellian comparisons--in the case of the UK's aborted project, they are pretty apt--the case made for the one in India is pretty strong. There are roughly 100 million "invisible" people in the country, and the proposed card could help them receive the government benefits that are currently denied them. Nanden Nilekani--one of the smartest men in the country--has taken the reins.

-Wanna go to a Thai prison? Move there, start blogging about the royal family. It doesn't need to be true, it doesn't need to be reporting, it just needs to be mean. Repeat until incarcerated.

Middle East and Africa

-While Ahmadinejad has officially won Iran's election, and the protests in the street are now going to be policed as heavily as anything else the Iranian clerics don't like, the black mark on the region and its unelected rulers is a bad one. Up until June, the world could extend a token respect for Iran's middling democracy. It now appears that the curtain has been pulled on that comfortable lie.

-AIDS in Africa isn't a story that ever goes away, although reporting about it certainly does. This piece on the Sudan--an area where 27.5% of the country's imams (a trusted authority to the population) believe that mosquitoes can transmit the virus--tries to focus on the brighter spot of an active AIDS-support group, but it can't fight the numbers. They're terrifying.

-One the world's most frightening places got worse last week, with beheadings in Somalia apparently topping out at 6, all at the hands of militant fanatics. The victims were accused of collaboration with the only government Somalia has left. The small African peacekeeping force was incapable of protecting them. The world, it seems, has made its choice. Somalia will be left to burn to a cinder, and the people within it will be left to rape, murder, and extermination.

China, never an enemy of Robert Mugabe, has decided to place some stock in Morgan Tsvangirai as well. The stock is $950 million in loans, an amount vastly beyond the $500 million he was able to find throughout his recent tour of the Western world. Nice job, rest of the world.

Europe

-They actually arrest people for hip-hop lyrics in France? That's kinda stormtrooper-y. Well, don't let that little factoid stop you from reading about how France is beating the world with hip-hop, a judgment the Economist makes based off a couple of "world championships" in turntable and breakdancing competitions. Does Ghostface or the RZA judge these world championships? Because if neither of those dudes are involved, the trophies are suspect.

-Another year, another fight between the European Union and Russia/Ukraine over gas prices. This one is playing out differently--because as the Economist points out, "timing is everything." Pretty easy to say "no thanks" to high gas prices when it's summer. We'll see you in the winter, when this one gets rolling again.

-In Kosovo, it's really easy to be a journalist. You just have to repeat whatever the government says. If you want to make things hard on yourself, try "reporting" or "criticizing" the government. That's an express train to all kinds of problems.

-Charlemagne tried to write a column this week, but his hands kept getting blocked by the thighs of Sweden, because his mouth was buried in their short and curlies. Like, Sweden is pretty great for a lot of people, like Swedes, I totally agree, but how hard is it to be great when your taxes are that high? You can give everybody health care and a fucking mansion on Swedish taxes.

International

-These blog posts usually go pretty hard on the international section, and I'd argue that it's deserved--it's the most inconsistent part of the magazine, and it's an obvious dump ground for failed leader pieces. This week is different though--one article, a numbers-heavy theoretical examination of the current state of food supplies following what was called "the food crisis" of 2007-09. It's not a horror show of statistics, there's a lot of solid thought in it, and it's as good as any article in the magazine. Probably better.

Business

-The article is subtitled "Customers are working for companies free of charge, and they like it." The argument is that when you choose to use a computer to place an order, or talk to a robot when you call customer service, you're handling the work that some human being could be doing while on staff. Which is true, I guess. I just wonder how many people "like it."

-Ikea has been trying to make the whole Russia thing work for a long time. Now? They've suspended their investment in the country due to corruption. That's right kids: Ikea just gave up. I don't know why I find that surprising--as far as I can remember, there aren't any Ikea commercials based around "we don't give up" philosophies--but I did. So there.

Finance and Economics

-This brief acknowledgment of the 150 year sentence dropped on Madoff doesn't contain any new information. But I was watching that Enron doc from a few years ago, the one that opens with Tom Waits--man, I hope they do one of those on Bernie. That was a good flick.

Science and Technology

-The sheep of Scotland are getting smaller. I hate to be the one to tell you, but it's a biological fact. Sheep in Scotland? Getting smaller.

-Remember how they powered the Back To The Future car with garbage, and we were all "man science fiction is fucking crazy"? And then they started running some cars on vegetable oil and we were all like "weird dude, that's weird as hell"? Well, now they're going to use chicken feathers to make fuel tanks. I bet that would have blown your mind back like when they made that movie about Michael Keaton doing his mom.

-While the world might seem to get bigger through facebook and twitter and...hey, assholes on blogs! It's actually not, because most people send emails to people in the same city. Hey, I know you're different. You've got friends in Tangiers and China, you're unique, bucking the curve. Anyway, it's ruining the spreading of baby names. (This is a weird article.)

Books and Arts

-James Ensor's art hasn't seen a show like the current one at MOMA in 30 years, and while the Economist is kind of rough on it and there's no nice way to spin a statement like, "...only one canvas feels truly fresh." I completely dis-a-fucking-gree. See it. It's exceptional, and--fuck man, 30 years! That means "rare opportunity."

Obituary: Michael Jackson

The best reason in the world to get married is because it means you've finally found somebody who is legally obligated to pretend to care when you have a fucking cold, wants to talk about "the craziest dream i've ever had", or because you want someone to give a shit about what you have to say regarding the death of a celebrity. Because everybody else? They don't care. It isn't because they're an asshole, either. No. You are. Take that shit to the bank.

Economist Versus Idiot: And Let's Hope This Is The Last Time The Economist Dicks Around With Marvel's Press Releases

Last couple of weeks have been a bit heavy on the old sanctinomy express, that was never the point. So let's take a load off and wallow in our joy at the Economist's coverage of the resurrection of Captain America. And no, their Michael Jackson coverage starts next issue. Oh, and if you're ghoulishly looking for the blood, it's in the Asia section this week. Otherwise, I think The Americas was the light fantastic.

The World Last Week

-There's a bronze plaque when you enter the Factual's home office that says "Remember! Shark News Is Best News!" So I'll just point you to the Economist's blurb, where its revealed that about 30% of the world's various shark species are operating under threat of extinction. Don't mess this up, people. Democracy, racial equality, a 70 foot tall statue of Michael and Farrah holding a plastic cleaning towel--we can have those whenever we want. If we lose sharks? Tears, apathy and death. That'll be next.

-The American Department of Agriculture was able to ride almost pure Democratic support for supervisory control of America's farmers. The blurb doesn't mention it in greater detail, but yes, this also means that the Department of Agriculture now gets to build yet another regulatory committee. And you know how good regulatory committees have worked out over the last decade, don't you?

-America and Kyrgyzstan came to some kind of agreement that will allow America to continue using the Manas air base. I'd imagine there's a bigger article on this coming, after the Economist gets a chance to do a Google search and, you know, "write" one.

-The Economist may or may not cover the interesting Wikipedia aspects surrounding David Rohde, the New York Times journalist who escaped with an Afghan reporter after spending seven months as prisoners of the Taliban, but that's why you have Reason magazine. Bang up shit, this one.

-The American navy is following a North Korea ship around that might be carrying weapons to the Burmese military junta. Thing is, they can only search the ship if the North Koreans agree to pull over and let them. Tough one to gauge here--rule of law is vaguely on North Korea's side, but the weapons, if they are exist, will be used to kill innocent people. (That last part isn't in doubt, by the way.) Time to whip out the textbooks, Huffington Post! You gotcherself a seeryous discussion to be having.

-The FARC keeps killing people, despite it supposedly being on the way out of Colombia for the entirety of the last two years. This is the first time FARC stuff has been mentioned without the Economist mentioning it's downhill status--did something change? Nah, probably just the blurb format.

-Hey, the United States and Venezuela reinstated their respective ambassadors! That whole shaking hands thing with Chavez worked. Ahh, this will go south in another couple of months.

-They caught another Serbian war criminal, this one the former prime minister of Kosovo. Try not to take thirty years to charge these guys the way you did with the Khmer Rouge, okay?

-Hey! Greenland is FREE! Greenland isn't run by Denmark! That's a big story, right? Hell yes it is! I hope they make a Braveheart movie about Greenland really soon.

-How many of those new iPhones sold over the course of a weekend? Over one million. In your face, Palm thing no one wants! IN YOUR FACE APPLE STYLE

Leaders

The facts that open the Economist's op-ed on America's health-care system hit pretty hard, and they do well to make the case for one of the ugliest covers in recent memory. While a lot of Americans already know how bone-jarringly stupid the current health-care system for their country is, reading about the specifics--how much they pay as compared to other rich countries (a huge amount more), the confusingly high infant mortality and life-expentency rates when compared against other OECD countries--reminds one of the hard-to-fathom disconnect between what makes sense (working towards a better system) and the reality (the historical failure of any American administration to follow through with the mildest repair possible). Take a look at this one, but don't expect a lot of new information. If that's what you're craving, there's an extensive(and much better) briefing buried in the back of the magazine on the exact same subject, shorn of the chiding. 

-Lot of stuff about Germany this week, the first being this Dear Abbey style advice list for one of the most powerful women in the world. I think I'll leave it at that, just because I'm curious to know if you know who it is without peeking. (Oprah doesn't count, as she leads a mob.) After the leader, there's a four pager on m'lady, and it covers...well, everything, really. But for some reason the Economist blurbed the article in the table of contents page with the somewhat creepy "Why is she so popular?" question, which sounds sort of like...well. Like creepy. It sounds creepy, doesn't it?

-Will Greek complaints destroy the worldwide loan system for great art amongst museums? The Economist is fretting it will. I'm fretting about the use of the word fretting. Am I wearing an apron?

-Hey, here's the business focused version of boring articles about social networking! (Hint: this focuses on LinkedIn, which is a site designed so that people can irritate everyone in their address book.)

-The Economist beats the "Hey America, quit retiring at 67 you lazy so-and-so" drum about every six months, and here it is again. All the arguments are the same as ever, which means that all the counter-arguments are probably the same too. Considering that they backed theirs up with a 14-page section on aging this week, you might even find yourself bowled over to agreement. Fight that feeling! Fight it with your fingers!

Letters

-Hey, some dude from California was in the Peace Corps in Zambia, and he wants to tell you all about why that qualifies his advice on "high-tech development solutions" to malaria. Because god knows, it really is a choice between bednets and technology, but only one. Anybody who thinks that the world should pursue both options to fight malaria is a total idiot. Just ask this guy. He was in the Peace Corps.

United States

-The Economist's opening piece in the United States section is centered around some poll results showing that American workers aren't fighting wage cuts and unpaid leave the way they normally would, and they've found plenty of evidence that this is the case. As they point out, most employees seem to be willing to accept the nut-knuckle on the short term--how long those feelings will last is another question entirely.

-Of course, there's the people who don't have jobs at all, and while the Economist seems a little overly proud of their willingness to send their American correspondent down to a Maryland soup kitchen (ahhh, local color), this article about the welfare rolls and how they're bearing up under the increase in unemployment isn't completely worthless. It's just completely sad.

-While it would be wonderful to say that the Economist's article on the resurrection of a fictional comic book character was written with all the necessary sarcasm required to tolerate its existence in a publication that usually tries to avoid completely useless information designed solely to make money for an entertainment complex that carries itself with an insufferable air of "just some fans doing what they love, what's a stock certificate, dopey me-dopes-a-lot", that isn't the case. Here's your British version of a newspaper shitting on its reputation.

-Here's a controversy for you: the Supreme Court may have started down the road to repeal a portion of 1965's Voting Rights Act. Designed to deal with some of the South's ugliest behaviors, wherein black Americans were kept from the ballot box through a variety of hideous practices, there's an emergency provision that's been consistently extended since its original expiration date in 1970. The provision took power away from electoral districts with a discrimination history, leaving it up to the federal Justice Department whenever they want to make minor changes in electoral rule. (The Economist uses moving the polling place as an example.) As the Economist reports, no one argues that this type of federal oversight was unnecessary in the sixties, because hey, it totally fucking was, because Whitey Sucked Daily back then. But now? The Supreme Court doesn't seem to think so. The NAACP does. Fight!

-Lexington dedicates his "howl in the whirlwind" column to criticizing Obama's deference to his old pals on Capitol Hill. The column isn't that far off base, but I'd rather just quote this part and let you decide on your own: "The House is dominated by veteran liberals, who are far to the left of the electorate, and the Senate is full of prima donnas." Tell me how you really feel.

The Americas

-If you read about the 18% decrease in the production of coca in some American publications, you might have been led to believe that was a big deal story. That's because some American publications--as well as at least one local New York television news program--failed to mention that last year, the production of coca went up 27%. That's what's called "pulling a fast one".

-The Economist doesn't hold back on their criticism of Antonio Maria Costa, the head guy over at the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime. In fact, they go further in their criticism than they have towards any single individual since they blatantly said "it would be fine if Mugabe was killed" and "Resign, Rumsfeld". For that alone, this blurb is worth reading. They don't write angry often.

-Over the past year, anytime you read an article about how Hugo Chavez isn't happy with some company/individual/corporation that he thinks isn't towing the line, you end up reading another article, usually in less than a month, where he's taken over, shut down or made illegal whatever company/individual/corporation the previous article was about. In other words, get ready to say goodbye to Globalvision, one of the few critical media outlets left in Venezuela.

Asia

-After playing things a little bit close to the vest, the Economist comes down pretty critically on the current relationship between the Indian government and the Maoist guerilla movements. Although this months death count isn't very high, this article doesn't paint a very attractive picture of where it could be headed. It also doesn't have a very optimistic view of the methods in which the police or the politicians are dealing with the situation. Saucy!

-While the eyes of the world turn to newer horrors, the Burmese military junta has opened up a new offensive front against one of the few groups of people left in the country who refuse to bow down and take it. The Karen militia aren't the cleanest organization in the world--they aren't fascist murderers though--but the thousands of innocent civilians who are fleeing for their lives are pure victims. Thailand seems to be the main country willing to stand up in support right now, (unless talking about it counts now) although that might change if they have to deal with more refugees. (Which they will, and Thailand has been shit with refugees for thirty years running.)

-China doesn't want the Chinese to look at porn. You're going to lose this one, guys. Porn beats everything. Steal all the American computer code you want. Porn wins, every time.

-Shakeel Ahmed Ahangar's pregnant wife and teenage sister were raped, murdered and dumped in a nearby river. The incident has spawned anti-Indian-rule riots throughout Kashmir, mostly due to the pathetic (and offensive) level of response from the police, who originally claimed the two women had drowned. Because yeah, a double rape and murder looks just like drowning. Whoever said that should be shot in the fucking mouth.

Middle East and Africa

-Not sure if we're still going to rely on this short piece on the Iranian conflict, as it's already a bit dated. The Economist, as well as Iran's ruling clerics, were surprised to see Mousavi so willing to stand in opposition to an unusually vocal Ayatollah. That's good and bad news, obviously: the strongest criticism of Iran right now has been vested in the worrisome nature of what too many termed "revolution", despite the revolution being confined to the lessor status of who Iran's president is supposed to be, as opposed to the unelected and hard to deal with theocracy that runs Iran and stole the election. When the Iranian people flooded the streets for Mousavi, that could be labeled a protest that respected the theocracy. When they went out again, after the real rulers of the country--the unelected clerics--told them not to, that label no longer applied, making them fodder for whatever violence the clerics wanted to wreak upon them. Where it goes next, where it goes now? We'll have to wait and see. Considering how rapidly Iran is incarcerating journalists (it numbered 40 last week), that's going to get increasingly difficult.

-Although the stories of increasing suicide attacks in Iraq have gone mentioned on a consistent basis, the Economist has seemed strangely removed from looking at them in detail. While they finally check in with an actual article--as opposed to weeks of blurb-age--it seems a bit distant, making me wonder whether they've pulled their coverage back for some other reason.

-Did you know Somalia was begging for help? They are. They're getting none.

Europe

-While some will complain, ad nauseum, about the specific advantages of living in countries with stronger welfare ranks and better health care, here's a reminder of what some of the fabled lands of Europe can't offer, that the US can: giving a shit about higher education. If you still want to move your kids to Germany because of the shorter work week or the longer maternity leave after reading this article about the pathetic state of Germany's universities, you obviously care less about your children then you claim. And I'm thinking of somebody specific.

-Yes, Sarkozy did call the burqa "a sign of subjugation...of debasement". He did say it was "not welcome on French territory." But did you know he was backed up by a prominent French female Muslim? Neither did I.

After last week's questionable article on Berlusconi--which spawned a letter of defense from the Italian government--it's back to the old "he's a fucking pervert" hidden under classy languge. The problem with these kind of articles is pretty simple--when it hits on somebody the Economist likes, as it did with Eliot Spitzer, they pull the old "we don't care about who he fucks, neither should you." And yet, when it hits on somebody they don't--like Berlusconi--they can't help but tart it up. That's fine, sure. I got no love for Berlusconi either. But then again? I'm not a journalist writing for the Economist. You kind of hope they'll be the bigger guy.

Britain

-Last week's Economist contained a brief mention of what had happened in Ulster, where over a 100 Romanian immigrants were attacked and harrassed out of their homes, and eventually, by their own choice, back to Romania. Of course, "own choice" ignores a simple, disgusting fact: they had to go, because no one saw fit to stand in the way of the racist white men who threatened to kill them if they chose to stay. Here's the rest of that horrible, horrible story.

-Here's one for you Britain, it comes from America: tax-increment financing. That's when you pick a location, borrow a shitload of money to build basic infrastructure, and use the future property taxes (which will hopefully be higher) to pay back the loan. If you've ever been down South, now you know why they never turn that old abandoned grocery store into a shopping center, and choose instead to build a new one down the road. Get it?

-I'm pretty much bored with jokes about bad British teeth, and so is the Economist, and so, according to this article, are the British themselves. At the same time, I watched the F-Word about three hours ago and this one table of young Cockneys had some of the nastiest shit I've ever seen hanging where a grin should be. Ah, Personal Anecdotes: is there no fact you will not ruin?

-"Mr. Blair is not likely to say, 'Ok guys, you got me--I did it out of lust for glory and infatuation with George Bush.'" That's Bagehot on the inquiry into the war in Iraq. Bagehot beats life, again.

International

-The section this week has two articles, both of which seem to have been pulled from the "this might work, run it" file. The first is...about poor people who travel to escape environmental degradation. Awesome, that's a real charmer. Thanks! The second one is....about the World Bank realizing it might need to worry about the environment. I'm sorry, when did the World Bank get so awesome at being the World Bank that it was time for it to add a fucking hobby? I don't think I missed an issue. Did something happen?

Business

-Like a lot of people, I've got a secret clique at my office where my little coffee trio talks about which interns we hate, why we hate them, and question how in the fuck they got the gig in the first place. Then we beg one another to go to the girl who picks the interns and tell her to stop shoving her head up her ass when she interviews interns, because there's no way that this is the best available out of the 40-plus she interviews every few months. Seriously, that one dude couldn't cut paper in a straight fucking line with the use of a paper cutter that is on a goddamn track.

Kind of lost the plot for a second. Anyway, if you have those sorts of conversations via your work email, watch out. Some company has developed a technique to ruin the fun.

-Problems in the Formula One racing world, and while it's an interesting enough article, I have to say: I don't really get Formula One racing. I liked that Cronenberg flick, but that was about funny car racing. And it had the Enter The Dragon dude in it. He's awesome. You ever see this? Best business monologue ever. Seriously, watch that one. Good times. It's about prop 13. Oh man, I just stopped while typing to watch it again. "Crouch bunnies". Man that's good.

-Although LinkenIn is absurdly disturbing to me on a personal level, you can't help but read an article about the Freemasons without thinking "anything that would destroy these archaic networks of drunken white men is a good thing." Bring on the bandwidth, I say. It's time to euthanize the "old boy networks".

Finance and Economics

-While Americans may have started purchasing stuff again, the Economist is curious if the emerging economies of Asia are going to take a more serious dive into the fray as well. Whether they do or not, the feeling in this article is that they should, and it's an interesting reason why. Not because it would "save the economy", but because the Asians that supply the products for Western consumers, while subsidizing the economies of the West with undervalued currency, should be enjoying the fruits of their very real labor. It's a novel take from the publication.

-Money market funds finally ended up not doing well, and the magazine thinks that has opened the door to the sort of regulation they believe it's always needed. Lot of regulation talk for a free market magazine lately. 

-While the numbers of people who will willingly dump a home loan remain low, they skyrocket when neighbors (or friends) make the decision. While one questions whether the term "unethical" should be brought to the table, maybe the Economist is just a bunch of Kant-ian categorical types. Go figure. I thought we were all agreed about fucking over the man at every opportunity.

-The Economist could have found a not-featuring-Uma picture for their brief look at the charitable work of two hedge funds, but they picked one with her in it anyway. (She's engaged to Arpad Busson, who runs one of the mentioned hedge funds.) She doesn't get mentioned in the article though, so don't go looking for gossip.

Science and Technology

-Sometimes science hurts children, and not in the way you're thinking, gross-out boy. No, sometimes science takes a look at the method used to determine the sizes of dinosaurs and goes about the business of ruining one of the best moments of a young childs life: when they fantasized about gigantic lizards. Thank god Calvin isn't here to see this. Don't read this one unless you're, like...mature or something. It made me really sad, that's all I'm saying.

-Here's a solution to a very specific problem: how do you get informed medical consent from the mentally impaired? Answer: you use Second Life. Nothing irritates more then when something you have a patented loathing for becomes useful in a real world fashion.

-Although common sense might dictate the belief that humans started hoarding food stuffs on an immediate basis, history tells us they didn't. Why they started doing so though remains to be figured out, but the trek may have gotten a jumpstart, courtesy of an archaeological site in Jordan. Ah, Jordan. I knew you were useful for something beyond serving as the host for Michael Bay's technological masturbation festival. That movie was so fucking horrible.

-Tired of being depressed? The old cynic's advice is to expect failure. Turns out that's scientifically accurate as well! This is great stuff here, and taken in conjunction with the recent story about how useless self-help books are, the Economist is proving itself to be the best gadfly that pop psychology has ever had to deal with. Considering a big part of pop psychology and self help is to ignore "the news" because "it's always depressing", god knows if the information will find purchase.

Books and Arts

-From Werner Herzog's book, Conquest of the Useless. "At the market I ate a piece of grilled monkey. It looked like a human child."

Books by Werner Herzog don't need reviews. They just need to be bought.

-As far as the Economist is concerned, the "ideal book about the financial crisis" has yet to be written, and they list their complaints with five books in one review. It's like a capsule bullet mash-up, except it's about financial literature. And they already picked their ideal book about two months ago, when they praised Vincent Cable's The Storm. So yeah, this article has some problems.

-Greece has built a home for its statues, and they've issued a demand for their return. (The statues are the property of the British Museum.) Although this article's main opinion got touched on in the opening "Leaders" section, it gets more background information here. 

-Although Atom Egoyan's Ararat wasn't a big favorite for...well, anyone, if I remember correctly, I always liked it. That might have been because I ended up watching it with a theater full of elderly Armenians, an experience that, while remarkable, isn't one I'd like to repeat. But the film was haunting, and it sounds like Rebel Land might be just the book to sit down and draw out the intensely controversial (and upsetting) story all over again.

Obituary: Ralf Dahrendorf

-If Ralf Dahrendorf had died just a few days later, he would've been the guy that went ignored in place of Surprise! You KNOW! for next week's issue. Unlike certain other individuals--whassup, Gunter Grass?--Dahrendorf was willing to put his own ass in jail for protesting the Nazis back in his youthful days, and he sounds like he took that integrity with him throughout his life, which consisted of being a pretty argumentative dude. His appreciation for socialism is a bit too much for the Economist, but there's a clear level of awe on display here. Ralf was a man who lived a life of the mind, and acted in accordance as much as opportunity allowed. 80 isn't a good argument for "too soon", but it's fine for a "he'll be missed." Hope there's more like him.

Economist Versus Idiot: Neil Young Lyrics Don't Apply, But Thanks For Playing

Pretty depressing one this week, although there was a nice spot of good news out of China.

The World Last Week

-While we hit the "hundreds of people dying in the Sudan" thing last week, let's hit it again up top: still happening, no one doing anything. Now they might have to though--a bunch of Sudanese gunmen ripped off a United Nations convoy trying to take food and medical aid to the people the gunmen haven't gotten around to killing yet. The body count on this one is not slowing down, it's accelerating.

-India wants to get its troops out of Kashmir, although things there are still too treachorous for an official time table.

-While the world looks elsewhere, Pakistan is gearing up for a full scale launch against the Pakistani Taliban.

-The mother-in-law of the president of Indonesia was sentenced to four and a half years in the clink for approving bribes to other politicians. That's messed up, sure, but if she actually does go to jail, that's kind of badass on the part of the president for letting her go down. I can't think of a single American president who would sit back and let his mother-in-law go to jail, except maybe Lincoln. That son of a bitch had a spine of metal.

-North Korea claims they're going to kill us all, but that's not really "news" anymore. Irritating as fuck, though.

-Britain got all pissy that the US sent some former Guantanamo Bay prisoners to Bermuda, and the Economist makes a sarcastic joke about it.

-Russia told the UN to get the hell out of Abkhazia. Yeah, that's in Georgia. Remember that war? One year anniversary in two more months.

-Northern Ireland was worried that people thought they had stopped being a scary place, so they harrassed and attacked a bunch of gypsies until 100 Romanians had to flee for their lives. Hey. Northern Ireland. Fucking Quit It.

-Jose Padilla is suing John Yoo for one dollar. This case should really be bigger news, I don't care how sick people might be of thinking about it.

-Myspace fired a bunch of people. Here's a hint as to why: Myspace was really ugly.

-British Airways asked if anybody on staff wanted to work for free, due to the economy. I tried this trick at the grocery store and nearly got arrested for vagrancy.

-Blu-ray discs didn't fix the gaping hole caused by people realizing that not buying DVDs was a good way to save money when the economy started tanking.

Leaders (Iran)

-Okay, the Economist also wrote about Israel, Argentina, financial regulation, the Japanese economy and fund management. But we all know the big story.

-The opening leader is a simple, direct essay regarding Iran, and it leads well into their extensive (and dated) briefing article. Both point to the still breathing merit in news articles written less then a day after the news happens. The salient point, the one that should probably be mentioned more often, is this: "Iran is not a democracy, but its system, which combines unelected religious authority with a subordinate elected civilian one, was designed to give people a chance to let off steam from time to time within carefully set electoral limits." It's all well and good to talk about the ballot box, and it's incredibly moving to see so many in the streets. That doesn't mean the people in the streets are out there protesting the Ayatollah--not yet, at least. What's happened in Iran last week, what continues now--that's a big enough deal on honest terms alone. Pretending that it's something more--like a fullscale rejection of theocracy--is irresponsible, ignorant, and, worst of all, unhelpful. Being excited is one thing, and it's understandable. Rewriting the story wholesale to match up with hopes helps no one.

-The Economist's review of Obama's "wait and see" approach to Iran's election includes one point that's worth repetition: if and when Obama comes out with "full-throated or even material support" for Mir Hosein Mousavi, (beyond the recent stuff, yes) that might work as an immediate motivation for some Iranians to step away from the man. The tendency towards seeing female Mousavi supporters and the physically battered (and dead) protesters as if they are also pro-Americans is purely self-centered identification: some might be, sure. But they aren't in the streets because they're interested in Iran being more like America. They're interested in Iran being their own country, where their vote counts. If a bunch of random Americans were to fly in to stand along side them, some will back away entirely. The easiest thing in the world for the tide to turn would be for America to make it easy to label Mousavi as being, as the Economist puts it, a "stooge of the Great Satan." His support is strong, but not widespread enough to fight that label at the same time he fights the Revolutionary Guard. And here's the thing: that's exactly what Ayatollah Khameni wants--to be able to point to Mousavi and say, "Look. An Agent of the West." 

-The other big story is, yes, Twitter. As the Economist sees it, neither Twitter nor CNN won, although CNN was fucking useless for days. Instead, the praise here goes to the justly deserved Andrew Sullivan, the unfairly maligned Robert Mackey, and some person who I refuse to acknowledge out of contempt for the website which employs him.

Letters

-There was never a hard rule instituted that it was going to be snarkdown with the letters, it just went that way. And yes, there's a good one here--some lady in Washington DC wishing she lived in Columbia because she saw somebody get mugged, the sort of letter that makes you want to crawl around gurgling warm piss because, hey, this is a human being who can vote and stuff, have kids, and yet, and yet, and yet: fucking idiot, she's a fucking idiot. 

But then you read Chris Lowsley's anecdote letter, about how he went to pick up a copy of The Economist in the Shanghai airport during the first week of June, looking to read about the 20th anniversary of Tianmen Square. And guess what? By hand, someone had removed the pages. From every copy. He even got a 5% refund, just to see if he could. That's a good story.

United States

-We'll have to see if that train crash changes things, but as it stands right now, there's no real answer as to where the money for the new $500 billion transport bill recently presented by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Is it needed? Yes. But when's the last time we got excited about infrastructure in the US?

-Lots of people putting chickens in their backyard, which is nice, unless you peel back the surface and see what this really means: dirty hippies, living near you and your children.

-New York's school system has benefitted from letting Michael Bloomberg run it with his iron fist, or so they say. But the deadline to relinquish control is fast approaching, and Albany wants New York to remember that Bloombergs don't last forever.

-Guess what? Those church surveys that said more people are going to church because of the economic crisis? Not true. In fact, the only real spikes have been after the Cuban Missile crisis and 9/11, and neither of those were permanent spikes.

-Lexington gives a cheesy look at how well Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama get along, and while he's top notch with the information, there's something pretty naive about his surprise. Hopefully he's just faking, but c'mon--high-level politicians getting along out of necessity? That's news now?

The Americas

-Although 28 government officials were arrested last month in a decently-planned Mexican raid, none of those arrested have been charged yet, and it looks like that was the plan all along--bring them in, figure out why afterwards. Few believe that those arrested--prosecutors, ten mayors, a judge, etc--are innocent babes, they're all probably in the pocket of a large drug operation. But without decent evidence, they may go free. Which would kind of miss the point.

-Canada doesn't want to make radioactive isotopes for medical use anymore, which is good, because they were doing a shitty job of filling orders. But the kicker here is that the minister responsible for the state-owned atomic-energy company was caught on tape talking about how it would be really great for her if she could solve the "sexy" isotope crisis. While that's opportunistic and somewhat offensive to the cancer patients who rely on the isotope-powered therapy, i'm more curious as to why she used the word "sexy" in the first place. That's just weird.

Asia

-Australia's had a flare up of anti-Indian violence lately, and Kevin Rudd doesn't seem to be taken it seriously enough for the prime minister of India. Admittedly, the article isn't descriptive enough for one not to lend credence to the Australian explanation--that race is less a factor than urban crime rate--but common sense dictates that, when the prime minister of India steps up and calls the attacks racially motivated, one's relationship with one of the most populous countries on the planet might be better served than to respond by saying "you're wrong, dude."

-I didn't know this was the week that I was going to find out about the progress made in gay rights for homosexuals in China, but it is. You're not going to be mistaking Shanghai for Fire Island anytime soon, but still: progress for homosexuality in fucking China? That's good news.

-Of course, then China gives you the bad news: snail-fever, which is probably able to claim some fatalities because nobody takes a disease called "snail-fever" seriously. Take this one seriously though--and be thankful you don't have to deal with snails that "tunnels through human skin, invades the bloodstream, and lays eggs." Gross as hell, this one. (And the article is titled "Hello Again, God of Plague".)

-Kazakhstan may have allowed more press freedom in recent years, but that doesn't mean that reading about Kazakshtan has gotten much easier--case in point, this article about the recent wave of arrests, almost all of which are amongst the elite. (That's unusual.) With little to go on, the Economist has to play it safe, the "That is ludicrous" response to Stalin's purge comparisons notwithstanding. Here's some information, they say. Interpreting it--that's going to take some time.

-Banyan gives you the North Korea ruler breakdown, and get ready: it's intense, and totally necessary reading. This is the kid who takes over for Kim Jong Il when he goes the way of all flesh. He's 26 years old. We don't know shit else.

Middle East and Africa

-Things in Kenya that happen on a regular basis, according to the Economist: lynching people over petty crimes, lynching people who try to soapbox about their rights on city streets, and--seriously? Okay. Uh, witch hunts. Like, yeah, Crucible style witch hunts, where people chase down and kill old women. For being witches. This is a short one, but it'll stick with you. Vomit.

-Here's the way things have been going for Morgan Tsvangirai: he visits a country, everybody tells him how courageous he is (because he is courageous, a big ole swinging dick of bravery) and then they tell him to head on home without any financial help. That sort of makes sense--Zimbabwe is so corrupt when it comes to aid that the best way to ensure helping the country is to get the money directly into the hands of the population, bypassing the government entirely--but it doesn't change the growing sense that the world is content to sit back and watch Robert Mugabe continue to drive that country into the ground even further than it already is. If Tsvangirai ends up dying a hero, it won't be because the world wasn't aware of him in advance. Nobody twitters about Morgan Tsvangirai now. But if something doesn't change, they will.

-Binyamin Netanyahu had to break down the rhetoric a little, and he actually seems willing to accept a two-state solution. His terms are currently unacceptable to Palestine, pretty far short of what the US wants--but this is Israel we're talking about. It's still a big story.

Europe

-Considering that the Economist has been sued by Silvio Berlusconi (something they don't try to hide), and that Berlusconi recently referred to a Financial Times piece about him as being "bad and dishonest journalism", you probably want to take this article with a grain of salt. At the same time, there's not much room to defend Berlusconi--the guy hates journalism, he always has, and he's done everything one can do, short of some steampunk incarcerations for reporters, to shut them down. Still, this article has to deal out so many specific admissions of possible bias--the Financial Times is a part-owner of the Economist--that it might be better if it was coming from a different publication. (Good luck finding a clean one though. Berlusconi really does hate everybody in this particular field.) Oh, and the girl in the picture is 18, and Berlusconi is a big fan of her. Hint. Involves money. 18 year old girl. In the picture. Hinting.

-One thing France seems to get away with, which is so far beyond me that I even feel somewhat uncomfortable criticizing it, is the way that France keeps dipping their fingers into all their old African colonies. This article points to what Nicolas Sarkozy is doing to get out of that business, but still: why are we still talking about this, France? Get your paws off countries that aren't yours.

-Russia is going to make up its own NATO, which they're calling the Collective Security Treaty Organization, as an alternative to messing with the World Trade Organization. It probably won't work, which could save us learning new acronyms to protest against on trips to Seattle, because at least half the countries involved kind of hate Russia. Or they're the types of countries that like to play the US and the EU against Russia. Wait, that does make it sound like NATO.

-It's always a pleasure to see people pick the same fights for the 900th time, especially when it involves anti-government conspiracies and the threat of violent coups. Don't go changing, Turkey!

Britain

-Did you know that there was going to be an inquiry into British involvement in Iraq? No, I mean again. This is the fifth one. Yeah, lucky number five! It's going to be private, run by a crew that includes a Winston Churchill-focused historian! I bet when they get around to number six or seven, that's when they'll get Russel Brand involved.

-Sometimes politics fight preference, as is the case presented here, with this article about the growing disgust some Brits have for the license fee that goes to the BBC. (The fee hits any home in Britian that has a broadcast-receiving television.) Part of the reason I like the BBC is because of the money they have, because that money allows them to make shows that others couldn't afford (not the reality stuff, that can be done anywhere). And yet--people shouldn't be paying for a television network unless they want to. Luxury problem debate time! You bring the ladyfingers.

-And then there's the other times when Bill Hicks definition of Britain as being "a socialist's wet dream" seems spot on, like when there's a debate about a new tax to pay for high-speed internet. Sure, it's "for everyone", and it would probably benefit them, but what's next? A tax to pay so everybody can have high speed computers? Where does Britain end, and personal choice begin?

International

-There was a meet and talk about dumping the dollar greet between India, Russia, China and Brazil recently. They actually do refer to these meetings as "BRIC" meetings, and I know what you're thinking: I'm thinking it too. Which country whose name starts with a K could join up and make this thing legal? Kazakhstan is a possibility in crazy magic world. Maybe Kentucky could secede. I haven't heard good news out of Kentucky in years.

-You can't really call this particular blurb of horrible information "buried", but after reading about the simple numbers of what has happened to the world's poorest since the advent of the economic crisis, it's hard to swallow it not being as a big a news story as the latest developments in America's attempts to run car companies. Simple, brutal facts: 50 million pregnant women with anaemia, an expected climb of 200,000 to 400,000 in dead children every year, a rise of four million in the already horrifying 121 million underweight children. 

We lose jobs. They lose more. 

Business

-As far as the Economist is concerned, perennial economic whipping country Japan doesn't get to make progress, they get to be patted on the head while everybody sneers and says "Not enough, but thanks for playing." Is the Japanese corporate setup a stupid one? Of course it is. But it's one that's been in place for a long time, it worked extraordinarily well for them, and the fact that they're fixing some of its problems--shutting down unprofitable subsidiaries, pursuing a real diversity with investment--is worth a bit more credit than this article, and this particular publication, seems willing to give.

-Saab was purchased by the Koenigsegg company, which has 45 employees and makes less than 20 cars a year. (The starting cost for one of those cars is 1.2 million dollars.) That's a weird business model, made even weirder by their purchasing a brand that's been throttled into the ground for the last twenty years.

-There's a really nice soap opera piece about some backroom crazy at the house of one of the richest Arab businessmen in the world, one that would take more space than you'll tolerate for me to shrinkwrap. But if you got a hankering for mysteries, this article is a good start.

-Part of the reason people read the Economist is because they can count on the Economist not to waste a line of print on Jon & Kate Plus Eight, which is a show about how America deserves to be attacked by terrorists on a 24 hour basis until all of us are dead, dead, dead. Let me be the first to offer you a shoulder, brothers and sisters: that day is no longer.

-Here's a specificly focused blurb article on the way in which Marcegaglia, a steel company in Italy, has been granting extended vacations to employees (with pay) in exchange for promises that the employees will "make it up" by not taking overtime pay when things get busy again. It's interesting enough that the Economist should have just written it straight, but they introduce and title it like it's a some kind of widespread idea a lot of other companies are a part of. Not exactly, dude.

Finance and Economics

-If you're interested, here's a link to the US federal government's "white paper" on financial regulation. It's straight to a pdf and it takes some time to download. If, after looking at it, you want to know what the Economist thinks, go to this link for their take on it. Here's some alternatives, all of which seem to be really popular right now.

1) Misquote, misremember, and outright lie about its contents.

2) Memorize one or two things in it that you don't agree with, talk about those ad nauseam.

3) Cynically smirk and say "it's going to be totally different when the legislative branch gets done with it, so everybody should chill out."

No matter what, make sure that you mention how much you "love politics" when talking about it, that way people know how serious you are.

-How long did it take for an American private-equity firm to hightail it out of China after realizing that the playing field was about as level as that spike floor in the old Flash Gordon movie? Five years.

-They invited, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisors to write an article, which she totally did, one where she drew parallels to the Great Depression, argued against the relatively accepted argument that the Depression was ended by World War II, and basically said "trust me, I'm really good at this stuff." She's a pretty well-known scholar of the Depression and one of the policy-makers involved with current American economic planning, which makes this article a worthy, intelligent read. But it's also propaganda. And while propaganda can, sometimes, be just as accurate as anything else...it's still fucking propaganda.

-It would be pretty interesting if the bankruptcy of Six Flags--OMG didn't you hear?--was the straw that broke the camel of irresponsible credit-default swaps, but considering how difficult it is to grasp ahold of the complex equation of what (probably) happened with Six Flags, that won't happen. (Financial regulation still requires a mob complaint, and mobs need a simple premise for the torch-lighting ceremony.) Pointedly, it could be boiled down to "bankruptcy [being] more attractive than solvency" to lenders, but even that requires some further explanation. Like, further than me. C'mon now.

Science and Technology

-Although this article is entirely focused on some people who are working with sound to make black holes on a desk--yes, and now you want to read it, don't you--my favorite part is where they open by talking about the Large Hadron Collider, which costs a bunch of countries billions of dollars, broke after a week of use, and hasn't been fixed yet. Remember that rap video? Looks pretty dumb now.

-They might start using a plasma torch to deal with tooth infections, and since that could be a relatively painless process when compared to the current one, a lot of people will probably be very happy to hear about that. My dentist is my abusive father, and I don't anticipate him making the upgrade, so I remain nonplussed.

-If you look more like your dad, your dad subconsciously loves and treats you better. That's what science proved this week. (Kind of.)

Books and Arts

-Liberty in the Age of Terror sounds like a must read, even when you just focus solely on the simple, concise idea that author A.C. Grayling puts forth regarding the "if you don't break the law, you have nothing to fear from the ever-expanding powers of the government to spy on absolutely anyone for imagined reasons" attitude. As Grayling puts it, that mentality stems from the belief that the government's interest "will always be benign". It speaks to a mindset where the individual can place faith in governments that lie about the reasons for war, governments that fail to protect and care for their own soldiers, governments that torture the innocent--governments that pad their expense account to build a moat. It's the mentality of the fool, the ignorant, and the damned.

-Hey, a book about roads!

-Hey, a book about quitting a high-paying government job due to ethics! RARE.

-Due to the job that I spend my non-blog time at, I've had to pay way more attention to Art fucking Basel than I did to the food/sleep equation during the run-up to the show, and now that it's over, I could give two fucking shits about reading about it. Is Art Basel a big deal for a lot of really fantastic people? Sure is. But if the entire place burned to a cinder, the world would lose a lot of septic trash alongside the tragic destruction of the masterpieces and lovely folk as well. And if you think you disagree with that statement, than guess what? You don't know a fucking thing about Art Basel.

-This Thursday, at a theater near you, maybe: Helen Mirren as Phedre, live. How can a play be live in a theater near you, regardless of where you are, maybe? Because it's going down Wrestlemania style.

Obituary: Omar Bongo

-Fantastic piece of writing here--gotta say, the obituaries are really stepping it up as of late. Omar Bongo had been the president of Gabon since 1967, a forty two year period in which he used the entire country as his personal bank, giving himself a life few in Africa could realistically imagine. (If you don't have the internet or a television in certain parts of Africa, you could conceivably live your entire life without any knowledge of Genera Hypercolor and Spencer Pratt, lucky devil.) At the same time, I'll acknowledge the same depressing fact that this obit closes with: Gabon's history isn't covered in the sort of horrible degradation and terror that other Central African countries are. That's not to excuse Bongo's sociopathic selfishness. But you can't really call him a monster. Sure knows how to pose for a photograph, too.

Economist Versus Idiot: 140 Characters Tattooed Across Your Face

This installment includes a litany of horrors, the worst of which can be found in the Asia section. Wednesday publications of the Economist Versus Idiot columns is an experiment, and here's hoping it works. Apologies for the long wait.

The World Last Week

-Forty-four children died--that's an "at least forty-four" by the way--when a warehouse next door to a day care center caught on fire. The day-care center had one working exit and no windows. That was in Mexico, the same week that twenty people--eighteen "drug gangsters" and two soldiers--died in an Acapulco shooting war. I don't know if these stories were covered on Twitter or not, you'll have to let me know.

-Italy paid "reparations" to Libya last year, so this year they got a visit from Muammar Qadafi. I wonder if that was part of the deal? I don't know about you, but if I had given Libya money, I would expect a promise that I didn't have to put up Qaddafi for the night. Dude's a creep.

-Here's another story that Captain America's resurrection kept off the front page, haw haw--after two months of violent protests, twenty four policemen and nine Indians died in the jungles of Peru. The Indians have been blocking roads and oil pipelines due to their belief that the Peruvian government is ignoring their right of control over their traditional lands.

-Eighteen people died after a suicide-bomber blew up Pakistan's biggest international hotel. Two of the people were UN workers, and the government of Pakistan has already blamed the Taliban. (They're probably right.)

-Oh, and those American journalists that North Korea arrested have been sentenced to twelve years of hard labor in whatever North Korea calls its gulags. (What's Korean for "hellish place no sane person can think about without wetting themselves"?)

-Althought Syria says they don't have a secret nuclear program, the IAEA found more traces of uranium, for which there is no explanation. I'm sure this story will end fantastically.

-The President of Gabon died. He's been in power since 1967. That's going to be a weird shift.

-Some island you've never heard of called Palau agreed to take on 17 Chinese Muslims who had just been released from Guantanamo Bay. The odd thing about this is that China had demanded they be returned to China--doubtfully a place they would have wanted--and Palau was the country that stood up to them.

-The Supreme Court said it wouldn't hear the appeals of the various pension funds that serve as Chrysler's senior creditors, which was a necessary step for Chrysler to continue with the whole "Fiat is so crazy that they are actually choosing to buy Chrylser, isn't that Crazy" thing.

-The guy who used to run AT&T is entering the manufacturing business for the first time--he'll be taking over General Motors. He actually was quoted as saying he'll "learn about cars." Ha ha ha, you dick. 

Oh, speaking of General Motors, I loved this line from one of the guys at Reason magazine:

"[President Obama] can imagine a world in which the internal combustion engine is obsolete but not one in which General Motors is."

Oh, ZING of the day, that one.

Leaders

-This week isn't likely to be one of those issues where a lot of people check out the Economist based on hilarious or controversial covers--"Debt" may be a zany topic when they do it on the news and whip out the old neon signs and cowbells, but "Debt" and this particular newspaper means some Financial Reading 101. The opening op-ed isn't that too tough though, and it's pointed towards a pretty simple--though Completely Improbable--solution. The Economist wants the world's governments to pay down their deficits when their economies get stronger. Scratch that, they want the world's governments to promise to do that. We'll see how that turns out. As the piece notes, the US is interested in bringing back the relatively succefful deficit-controls that saved America before--but they haven't done it yet. Wants and promises are nice. Action though? Hell of a lot nicer.

-The Economist is still tired of writing the name "Gordon Brown", but even they're willing to admit that an un-elected successor limping his or her way towards the next election wouldn't be preferable. That's not a wholesale reversal of previous op-eds or anything, guys.

-The European Parliamentary elections made two cases, one that's for sure, one that you better hope is only true for now. The first one is that nobody really cares about voting in the European Parliamentary elections. The second one is that liberals and the center left really fucking suck at getting their ass to the polls, and that hardcore right-wingers and xenophobic racist nutjobs don't. Good job, Greenpeace. You sat on your ass and drank chai tea, and now the European Parliament has given wacked-out bigots some actual fucking power.

-There's a whole lot about the Amazon this week--besides this opening op-ed, there's two briefings about deforestation and the violent Peruvian protests over oil and land rights. It's a lot to take in, but it's worth it for gem like facts like this: due to the haphazard and poorly set up way that farmers can claim land, it's acutually beneficial for farmers to clear trees and destroy the rain forest, because they can use fines from the Brazilian environmental agency to prove the land belongs to them. Don't think that was intended, ladies and germs.

-Here's a Sri Lankan follow-up--the current president is describing the war in pre-Biblical analogies and "relishing" the population's desire to treat and call him a warrior-king, a ship of relief supplies for Tamil refugees was turned away despite the government's own admission that the ship had no "dangerous intentions" and the government ministers have started rounding up any journalists critical of the type of war they just fought. Sorry, that last sentence should say "any living journalists". They aren't even going to put this in World History classes, you realize that? That's how little the world cares about these people. Why don't you put change the color scheme on your Youtube page to show your solidarity with the memory of their dead children? That'll teach 'em!

Letters

-Everybody seems to have a decent little cross to nail themselves upon in this week's letter column, and my personal favorite for Most Cantankerous is split between the guy who writes in to say "Hey, if you're going to criticize Myanmar, let's Really Fucking Take It To 'Em" and the guy who writes in to say that bankers have no permissible claim on the word "innovation" as their industry hasn't produced any useful developments that can't be filed in the "shuck and jive" category.

United States

According to the Economist, the method with which Democrats use to argue away the National Debt--oh, they added another number to that "debt clock" that nobody cares about--is a three-parter: First they say that the complainers are hypocrites who should've spoke up when Bush was spending like mad. The second tactic, which is sort of like the first, is to just say the name "George Bush" over and over again, the same way a five-year-old repeats "Why" or "Are we there yet" or "I bet you wish you'd pulled out". The third is to say that the deficit is a short-term necessity. The article goes on from there, but that's its general point. That deficits are bad. Thanks?

-Hey, they're going to do the Census again! It's funny how so many people can get a job doing Census work, but those jobs are created mostly because so few people send that little form in. (In the defense of people who don't send in the form, the government seems to barely know where anybody is unless they need you to pay taxes.)

-Next time you hear some city slicker complain about medical insurance, tell them what you read in this article about rural health care in Kentucky. It might end the friendship, but hey, fuck friends. You've got an internet connection.

-Nice look at the way the "three strikes" criminal law works (or doesn't) in California, check it out. Here's a taste: some guy got a life sentence in 1995 for shoplifting a pair of socks. In 1981, when he was a teenager, he'd assisted in a couple of armed robberies. 

-It's been a few weeks since the Econ first name-checked the Supreme Court case "Caperton versus Massey", but that's just because we had to wait for the Nine to drop the hammer. They did, five to four against Brent Benjamin, the West Virginia judge who received three million dollars for his election fund from a guy named Massey, and then decided that three million dollars wasn't a bias concern when Massey showed up in his court with a fifty million dollar claim leveled at him for an unrelated business matter. The Supreme Court were all like no, I don't think so dog. You were tots biased, SUPREME COURT STYLE.

-Being a product of the American public school system, excepting a short stint on a foreign Army base where the rules were more harshly enforced, I can tell you this: I am not offended at all by Lexington's argument that the children of America are pretty fucking lazy, and that laziness isn't preparing them for the future work they'll have to do. I'm a bit jaded though--I hate children, especially American children, and even more so, white American children. Who are fat. And talk about video games. And myself.

The Americas

-Nice big article about the economy of Brazil. Damn it, you come right back here. This is good for you! It's like medicine, but with numbers and graphs.

-Of course, if you're just looking for Wacky Human Interest stories, you can't go wrong with a story that uses the tale of Abousfian Abdelrazik--he's the Canadian/Sudanese dude who has been living in the lobby of the Canadian embassy for the last year--as the intro to a story about how Canada's government doesn't really care what happens to its citizens when they leave the country. Even if they just want to come home without, you know, being shot and stuff.

-Columbian wastepickers have now been classified as "entrepreneurs", and this story goes into detail about why that's a good thing for them. The Western tendency towards getting upset about these sorts of jobs might want to pull back a bit--none of these wastepickers sound like they dislike their jobs in the slightest. I'm sure there's some really sensitive white girl from North Carolina who has some choice words though.

Asia

-American and Chinese climate-change officials met in Beijing recently for more of the old "you guys are really dirty" "but you were dirtier first" games, and I'm starting to think--hey, what if all that climate-change stuff is like, for real, you know? Like what if skyrocketing Chinese carbon emissions are actually so bad that we all do end up Mad Max-ing it? And when we die, as a wise old sage once said, what if it turns out that all that heaven and hell stuff is real? That would suck.

-In February 2008, Cambodia outlawed prostitution in hopes of pleasing the American stae department. It worked, and three months later Cambodia was removed from the human-trafficking "watch-list." For some reason--laziness or insanity--the Cambodian police proceeded to declare some kind of psychotic war on the prostitutes they captured, using a "rehabilitation center" as a fucked up torture house, where multiple women died from the daily rapes and beatings. (And it didn't matter if one of the prostitutes happened to have four-year-old with her at the time. Just chuck the kid in a cell.) The prostitutes that were able to escape arrest began hiding out in karoake bars and the streets, effectively handicapping the successful AIDS prevention programs initiated by the governments health-care workers. All of this was supposed to have stopped, and the "rehab" center had been shut down.

And then in late May of this year, it re-opened, and the process began all over again. And it's happening right now.

Middle East and Africa

-Last month in the Sudan, a group of heavily armed Nuer attacked a small village called Torkej. Torkej is basically a camp, with little more than women, children and cattle. When the Nuer were finished spraying the camp with bullets and shooting women in their beds, 71 people were dead. To save bullets, they drove children into the river to drown them. Besides the 71, 57 were wounded. That's the sort of thing that is happening on an ever-frequent basis in the area soon to become the new country of South Sudan.

-Oh, Iran would go here, wouldn't it? But no, the election hadn't gone down until after this issue hit the stands, so there was no way for the Economist to prepare for what happened. (If you go back a few issues, you'll see that they've been wondering how much of a struggle Ahmadinejad would have with Mousavi, but that's about it.) You can see more of their current take at the website, and I'll leave you to it. For what it's worth, it's very nice to see the interest that the Iranian election and riots has spawned in America--while it's easy to criticize the over-the-top blogging and twittering right now, especially after those same individuals almost universally ignored Sri Lanka, Georgia, Zimbabwe and the variety of horrors that continues in Myanmar, among others...it's still attention on a place that needs and deserves it, and that's a good thing. The problem--because there is one--is that the bloggers and twitter types fail to recognize that They Are Not The Story. Is the Western media having trouble getting the story out, both due to Iranian media blackouts, intimidation, and a basic lack of Western spinal columns?

Sure they are. But that doesn't make people who re-tweet youtube videos of beatings important. The story is what matters. Not the confirmation bias of children. Right now, we're sitting around watching two things happen--one of them, the story of Iran, matters. The other one--about the brave kids in Brooklyn who are updating their Facebook status with statements about how "important" this all is--that's not a story. That's meaningless shit, and it obscures the point. Information matters. The audience doesn't.

-By using the law set forth in the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789--a law designed to combat the skull and crossbones type of piracy--a court case was brought against oil giant Shell stemming from the death of an environmentalist, who was executed by the Nigerian military over made-up charges related to his activism regarding Shell's activities in the Niger Delta. Shell just settled the case last week, dealing out 15.5 million. That's--well. That's that, I guess. In case you're wondering about what happened to the Nigerian General who presided over the execution, some Indian newspaper I know nothing about claims he had a heart attack after having an orgy with four women.

-Just a quick update: Israeli Binyamin Netanyahu is totally thinking about not building more settlements after talking to Obama about it. He's building settlements while thinking about it, but seriously: it's on his mind, like, a lot.

Europe

-After the fourteen page special report on the Euro, a tremendous collection of dry, unwelcoming prose if I've ever seen one, it's a non-stop dive into the European Parliamentary election results. As was expected, turn-out was a record low--unless you happened to be a right-wing anti-immigration border-line Nazi. In that case, you had no problem goose-stepping your fascist ass over to the polling place while all the liberal, forward thinking types sat around...doing what, I wonder. Not voting. There's probably more truth than the Economist wants to admit to the idea that the European Parliament is somewhat ineffectual. But that doesn't change the simple fact, which is that a whole bunch of people sat around while all the nutjobs got their shit together and won elections. Charlemagne throws out some ideas on why people don't care, and his climax is one of the most correct things of all time: "When experiments fail repeatedly, it is time to try something else." 

Britain

-Oh, and here's the two British National Party leaders that won European Parliamentary seats: Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons. Here's some choice shit from this fuckface: Islam is a "wicked, vicious faith" and the only reason that the BNP didn't win do well in London is because Labour activists were "ferrying Africans who can't even speak English" in to vote against them. Let's be clear about something, Idiot style: You want to be a fucking dipshit racist, you go right ahead and be one, that's your right. Nick Griffin isn't the problem. The problem is the people in Britain who aren't racists numbskulls. Because it was their job to get off their fucking ass and vote against this piece of wet shit. Instead, they laid back in the cut, and they better hope the European Parliament is as useless as the cynics say--otherwise, Britain just decided it was okay to be represented by two bigoted sacks of trash. Smooth fucking move, that one.

-Want to know why the Economist thinks Gordon Brown is still in power?

Yeah, I'm getting a little tired of hearing them talk about it too. Read enough about Cambodia, you do kind of get to the point where you look at Gordon Brown and say "Hey, this guy doesn't rape children, right? He's okay then." Bagehot's take on the same subject is a little funnier, so credit for that.

-No one was ever convicted in a criminal court for the Omagh bombing that killled 29 and wounded 220, but some of the familes have finally won some kind of justice in civil court. This one is kind of heartbreaking, so fair warning.

International

-The Economist actually grades Ban Ki-moon's performance as the UN secretary general so far. That's the kind of silly absurdity I can get behind, especially when it's couched within a crash course on what the UN has been doing for the last few months.

-The Economist read secret documents regarding business transactions involving a business that isn't actually supposed to be operating yet. If that doesn't interest you, check this out: the prime minister of Papua New Guinea is having to carry out a review due to these documents. Oh, it's about tearing down old-growth forests too, if you still haven't checked. 

Kind of irritating how I wrote that last one, right? Like it doesn't make any sense? That's in reference to the article, which is clearly about something really important, but seems to think that playing games with prose and delivery is more fun than delivering the fucking information.

Business

-The Economist barely ever pays attention to Apple's big tech extravaganzas, but they would have if Apple had released their supposedly game-changing "tablet" computer. As the Economist sees it--as well as anybody else with a brain--the change isn't coming, it's already here. Nobody cares about their OS anymore, and computers have gotten as fast as is necessary for most consumers. Now, it's about the internet, cloud computing, and portability. Everything else can go screw. Get ready for the blood of corporations to hit the floor.

-I didn't realize that Palm had retooled pretty much everything about their company and their products, but they did, and they have a new phone out. Something tells me that it must not be that big of a deal, because God knows nobody shuts up when they get a new iPhone application, and I'm hearing about Palm developments for the first time in a week-old magazine.

-Hey, India decided that 2009 was the time to get sub prime mortgages! That's really stupid!

-It's kind of funny that Ford didn't take government money and will probably go out of business because of it. I mean, you have to forget about the people who will lose their jobs for it to be funny, but still. Maybe ironic is a better word, but I don't know what ironic means.

-Since the Economist likes the new rules on executive pay, I'll make the snap judgment that a lot of other people don't. I'm ambivalent, but that's just because I'm exhausted from feeling superior to people who rely on social networks for their "news".

Finance and Economics

-Although ten banks have already paid off the money they were loaned under the Troubled Asset Relief Program--by the way, Economist, you don't get to determine the spelling of "program" in that acronym--it's questionable whether or not the "stress testing" that allowed them to raise the necessary capital to make those repayments possible. Although it was the results of the tests that opened the funding doors, the tests were based off a worst case unemployment rate that's already looking to be not "worst case" enough. On top of that, some people are claiming--with good reason--that the data provided by the banks may not have been wholly accurate. Surprise!

-Buttonwood's column this week is a nice little dive into the state of hedge-funds, an industry that can occasionally find a lot of success during wildly fluctuating markets. Wait, I don't know why I used the word "nice." It's just a dive. Take a snorkel.

-Jesus, that was a bad joke.

-Although I don't fully comprehend this little article about sovereign credit-default swaps, it is interesting to find out that a corporation has more leeway than a country when they enter a "credit event"--that means default, pretty much. Corporations have a grace period before they have to pay out, but countries are stuck the second they cross the line.

Science and Technology

-Oh shit, this story is on the way to Real Deal status: The Power of Positive Thinking, Dale Carnegie, The Secret--it's all bullshit son. "Given that many readers of self-help books that encourage positive self-statements are likely to suffer from low self-esteem, [the books] may be worse than useless." The only thing I love more than watching sad people hate their own game is watching sad people try and fail to feel better about themselves. Science says: they be fucked-for-life.

-You know, this article about how storing wine in a box is better for the wine's taste could also include scientific proof that storing wine in a box will give you the power to win the lottery and fly like a Spitfire, and the entire world would still join me in saying "its fucking boxed wine."

-Some Chinese scientists better hope they got great patent protection, because if some Chinese scientists have really come up with a way to prevent windshield fog, that shit is going to be standard issue in less than a year.

-The opener article is about long-range solar powered airplanes, and while it sounds like the technology has a good long way to go before it becomes useful in any real fashion--planning for "every morning" to be in sunshine sounds more than a bit difficult--it's got a Wright Brothers crazy that I kind of like.

Books and Arts

-There's a lot of love here for the "Pen and Parchment" show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and this is one of those rare times when a gallery show is actually important enough that the expense of traveling to it is worth looking into. A good portion of the work shown will eventually be returned to monasteries and other impossible-to-visit galleries, and it's insane to think that the sort of perfect borrowing storm this show is the result of will happen again. Besides all of that "opportunity of a lifetime" stuff, the Economist goes so far as to wonder whether the show itself will change the way drawing is regarded in the history books. This one is nerdy, yes: but it's that big deal kind of nerdy.

-If you want to get right to the heart of being able to criticize rational market enthusiasts like Milton Friedman without going off into the "the Chicago school drank the blood of virgins" type of argument, it sure sounds like you could do a hell of a lot worse than reading The Myth fo the Rational Market. As an alternative? Head, in the sand, Air America on the iPod. I'm all about choices.

-There's a realllllly complimentary review of Brian Nelson's The Silence and the Scorpion book detailing the story of 2002's Venezuelan coup that saw Chavez out of office, back in office, and more than a few dead bodies. The exoneration of the United States seems questionable--can one book really do that?--but it's probably worth reading anyway. At the same time, the Economist has never been a fan of Chavez, and the complete lack of criticism for the book in this review is questionable. Chavez is a fucking liar, sure. But the Economist saying "Those who truly care about human rights"? That doesn't track.

-Books like Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: A History of Anti-Smoking sound interesting in concept, but it's a concept that seems best served by a really good magazine article. I think I'll stick with the review, which includes enough trivia to pass the time: the first being that Agatha Christie "apologized for not smoking", and the second being that anti-smoing activists apparently demonized the scientists who first proved the connection between smoking and death when the guy refused to prop up the bad science behind second-hand smoke related illness.

-One can't tell by reading this review of Harold Varmus' autobiography whether he's an insufferable dick on a personal level, but god I hope so. If this Nobel prize winning doctor/poet, polticial scientist, cancer researcher, former NIH director and current co-chair of the Council of Adivsoers on Sciene and Technology for Barack Obama is a nice guy, than I might just have to start believing in ANGELS.

Obituary: Danny La Rue

As an exercise, this obituary is pretty impressive. It seems to be entirely written in a subjective third person, with very few sentences missing a "him", "her", "he", "she". While the word "drag" shows up, "queen" does not, and the line that contains the former is this "she could never be...just a man in drag". Impressive, respectful, but there's something else going on here as well--and that's that the Economist seems to know very little about the internal life of Daniel Carroll, or Danny La Rue. His thoughts might be put down somewhere else, although that seems unlikely. After all, anyone who performed for fifty years without missing a show while never allowing anyone to witness the preparation for the La Rue costuming doesn't sound like a person who allowed a microphone into their private life. For her, everything seems to have been on stage. That's probably the legacy that Danny would have wanted.

See ya next time.

Economist Versus Idiot: Earlier Meant Later

The World Last Week

-Everybody figured that India's general election would end up with another coalition of disagreement, but that isn't the way it went down at all. The Congress party smoked the competition, and the guys and gals who write the Economist broke their legs falling over each other in the race to call that awesome.

-According to the United Nations, Pakistan's ongoing struggle with the Taliban has forced 1.5 million people to leave their homes in hopes of not getting killed. Pleasant, that.

-So, if a British lawyer gets convicted of perjury over lies he told to "protect" Silvio Berlusconi, doesn't that meant that the same Italian courts now have evidence against Berlusconi as well? Oh wait, that's why Berlusconi changed the law to protect Italian prime ministers last year, isn't it.

-Hey, just because some report was released that says children have been abused at Irish Catholic institutions on a non-stop basis for sixty years, don't get all worked up. The head of the church said he was "profoundly sorry." I'm pretty sure that Christians are supposed to forgive and forget in cases like these. Isn't that how it works? I can't be sure--i've never physically or sexually abused children for sixty years, so I might be the wrong guy to ask.

-Here's a nice update on the war on drugs: an armed gang released fifty prisoners in Mexico, including some high ranking cartel guys. That whole prohibition thing is working so fucking well.

-Three bomb attacks in Iraq, including one in Baghdad, took the lives of at least 63 people. Remember last month when they were saying how much better things were? Last month was pretty great.

-The Nigerian military is running its own little version of war right now, attacking militants in the Niger Delta. The reason this one isn't being made a bigger deal (lots of human rights violations and dead civilians) is because the groups they're going after are clogging up international oil sales.

-Daimler thinks that Tesla Motors has some serious profit potential, and they've taken on a 10% stake in the California based firm. Lithium-ion battery pattered cars: soon to be widespread? Possible.

-And here's the best story of the week, despite it not being a story that got reported enough: Proctor & Gamble were trying to escape a value-added tax that Britain places on potato chips by saying that Pringles don't have enough actual potatoes in them to be legally considered potato chips. The British court of appeals, apparently big Pringles fans, disagreed.

Leaders

-Although India's electoral surprise takes the cover and lead feature, this week's issue is stained with Sri Lanka. The government has officially claimed the 26-year war with the Tamil Tigers over. The conflict has left thousands of civilians dead--some because the Tiger's ganged them up for use as human shields. If it were up to Sri Lanka, that would be the end of it. For the world, it probably will be. But the Economist is unwilling to join the choir that wishes to paint this particular conflict as yet another sad story of Good Guys Versus Evil Terrorists, choosing instead to continue singing the same song they've sung for the last 16 months: Sri Lanka has kept the truth of the conflict from their own people, strongarmed journalists from reporting the story, and blatantly scoffed at the United Nations complaints and fears regarding civilian casualties. There's no mistaking the tone here: Sri Lanka won, yes, the Tigers were an awful bunch, true, and yet the method with which this conflict has played out over the final months was a horrific crime against innocents, and Sri Lanka may have damned themselves to a future of hatred, a garden they've watered with the blood of men, women and children. If, or When, the survivors of this conflict begin to question why so many of their family's had to die in a war they were only unlikely enough to be caught between, the answer will stare them right in the face: because the government of Sri Lanka decided that their lives where without value. They are wrong. And while this particular version of the conflict may have reached conclusion, they will face the repercussions of the horrible decisions they have made for decades to come.

Letters

-Hey, some dick from Oxford quotes Seneca and babbles on about how awful it is that people are angry all the time. That's some fascinating stuff there, you fucking degenerate shit-for-brains. Last time I checked, anger wasn't the problem. It was snobby intellectuals who jacked off all over credit deriavites. Go fuck yourself. Until you are dead.

United States

-The Economist devotes two articles to criticisms of the new climate-change bill, both of which are centered around the belief that a simple carbon tax would have been far more useful to the planet than the loophole-filled cap and trade system that was just passed. Although this might be a hard pill for some to swallow, especially since Al Gore referred to it as "one of the most important pieces of legislation ever introduced in Congress", the truth is, the Economist is probably right. Cap and trade only works when it plows across the board indiscriminately, and when it's run by an organization not beholden to lobby groups. While a carbon tax would have been a tougher sell, it would have been much harder to poke and prod it into a Katamari of corporate write-offs. Good job, America. You failed.

-Without even the slightest hint of a surprise, California rejected all the various ballot measures that were being feted as the solution to the state's massive deficit. (Except for the pennies-on-the-dollar "you legislators can't have raises" one.) By doing so, here's what California may have voted FOR when they voted no to the ballot measures: massive cuts in welfare, which is always a crowd pleaser, as well as a destruction of health care programs for impoverished children. And then they upheld that whole banning of gay marriage thing. Good job, California. You failed too.

-So yeah, they busted a terrorist cell in New York who were planning to blow up some synagogues and shoot down some planes. Where did the terrorists get the missiles and the bombs? From the FBI, who had been stringing them along for 11 months. Interestingly enough, this article never uses the word "entrapment", but go figure. I never did take criminal justice.

-While you may not be that frightened of swine flu anymore, here's a fun one for you: white-nose syndrome. It's a fungal infection killing America's bats by the thousands, with half a million dead so far. That means that at least 2.4 million pounds of insects won't be eaten this year alone. Have a great summer! Being itchy and irritable!

-Lexington is a man after my own black heart this week, with an out-of-nowhere Must Read To Believe column about how incredibly good the Onion is. Yes, the Onion. I know! Lexington likes the Onion a hell of a lot more than Absolutely Every Other Humorist In America. He wrote a column about it. That's what we call Fucking Fantastic Stuff.

The Americas

-First up, this already hit the internet in a big way. It's the Guatemalan youtube video of Rodrigo Rosenberg that he recorded prior to his murder on May 10th, where he opens by saying "If you are watching this message it is because I have been murdered by President Alvaro Colom." Yeah. That one. Colom denied the allegations, and at first it seemed he was going to bury the investigation. Something changed though--probably the viral quality the video had, it must have been picked up by all and sundry within two days--and Guatamaela has asked the UN and the FBI to help out. There's not a lot of evidence at this point, and the Economist plays the story pretty gingerly. Either way, it's damning stuff, and the case made in Rosenberg's video is a frightening one. If you haven't watched it yet, do so.

-Did you know that the Brazilian Supreme Court was considered a joke? Or that was it "the most overburdened court in the world"? Shit, I didn't. What do you read, that you knew that? Ahh, too late, they're going to fix it now.

-Although it's tempting to gloss over another article about corporations using the Cayman Islands as a tax-haven, you really never should, simply for statements like this. "[President] Obama has pointed to Ugland House, the Cayman Islands' office of a law firm, Maples and Calder, which last year was the legally registered address of 18,857 companies and other bodies, almost half of which had an American billing address." The tiresome thing about these stories is that the blame seems to get doled out first to American corporations, with a second helping to the fucking Cayman Islands, and then nobody has any steam left over to say "fix the completely jacked up American tax code." Jesus, when did these posts get so editorial? I should mind my own business.

Asia

-In case you haven't caught on to how much of a fuckup John Yettaw is, here's your chance. Now, it's pretty shitty to be pissy towards a Vietnam veteran around Memorial Day, but it isn't like Yettaw gave anybody a choice. On his second attempt to use wooden flippers to swim, uninvited, over to the house where the Burmese junta keeps Aung San Suu Kyi under arrest, he succeeded. (He had a vision she was going to get murdered, because he's a crazy person.) The junta are using this particular incident to show off what a great example of fucking trash they are, and charging her with breaking the terms of her house arrest. (She's under house arrest because she's a non-fucked up human being that Myanmar made the mistake of voting for years ago, thinking they were allowed to purse representative democracy.) And yeah, sure: the Burmese military junta is really to blame. But still: goddammit John Yettaw. Why couldn't you be a spat-upon homeless veteran ignored on subways, the way America's rich prefers?

-Having seen next week's issue of Economist online, I can tell you that they're having as hard of a time keeping up with Kim Jong Il's current crazy-by-the-minute shit as everybody else is. Here's the first of what looks to be many already out of date articles on the crap he pulled last week. (Notably, shutting down North Korean participation in the one bright economic spot they had, the Kaesong industrial zone.)

-A rare moment of uncomfortable early retirement in the higher echelons of the Chinese government happened last week, all due to the three month old fire that destroyed the ridiculous "big trousers" complex built for the sickly Chinese state broadcaster. Interesting story, but I had to resort to google to see what it looked like. Disappointed in you, Economist.

-Banyan's focus continues to be on China, and this is one of those list-Chinese-problems so nobody gets too cocky columns. Not bad, but a little repetitive of previous issues. Come to think of it, he/she probably wrote those, so hey: no re-runs in your first couple of months. Uncool.

Middle East and Africa

-The Somalian gangs and warlords have found another way towards being scary as hell, as their ranks are being swelled by American, British, Italian, Arab, Chechen, Pakistani and Uzbek fighters, all eager to kill. What's the attraction? An opportunity to play insurgent religious extremist in a country that has all but been abandoned by the world. Their current goal is to provoke Ethiopia to attack the country, which they hope will unify all the various groups into one massive force of horror, which the warlords hope to control.

-South Africa's new transport minister decided not to hold onto the two cows and six figure Mercedes he was given as a gift, but he's keeping the flat-screen and wine glasses. I'm being serious, by the way. In South Africa, bribes take the form of prizes from The Price Is Right. I'm going to buy a South African city next year. Just gotta find a good set of steak knives.

-Binyamin Netanyahu met Barack Obama, and while it didn't go as badly as when Bill Clinton used to deal with the guy, it still didn't go that well. Note to Israeli prime ministers: when visiting the US President for the first time, say hello and talk about nice things for a good couple of minutes before launching into "an apocalyptic lecture on 4,000 years of Jewish history." Not that the US President won't be interested. It's just that lectures make really bad first impressions.

-Kuwait elected some women to parliament, and the Economist hopes that's going to be the first of the many steps required for Kuwait's democracy to stop looking as shitty as it does. Kind of an odd story to read, as it paints an excellent reason for why forcing Iraq to vote didn't work so well: they had a godawful version of what voting did right next door, anytime they wanted an example. Still, this is pretty good news.

Europe

-The Economist does their best to write an article about Dalia Grybauskaite, the new Lithunian president. Their best means one that's very short, has some odd personal details, and uses the word "tough" to describe her personality and potential leadership style for about 30% of the word count.

-This article about how miserably the Turkish government is treating their Kurdish citizens is just fucking irritating as hell. It's like reading those articles about how fucked up Somalia was last year, because it's just paragraph after paragraph of how those in power disenfranchise and mistreat an entire class of people, never grasping the fact that those people will eventually reach a point where the only solution they look to is one of violence. This shit right here? It always ends badly. 

-Charlemagne gears up to start writing about the upcoming Irish referendum on the EU's Lisbon treaty, but considering that the vote won't be until fall, you can bet that this won't be the last time it's in the magazine. I love Ireland, it's one of my favorite places on the planet, but the fact that there are still Irish citizens who believe that voting yes means that they could be conscripted into a magical European army is aggravating. It's totally within their rights to say no to the treaty. It would be nice if that "no" wasn't based on completely made-up bullshit.

Britain

-Nice big article about the ejection of Michael Martin, forced to resign on May 19th due to the blow-up over the expense scandal. He wasn't the most overtly greedy of the bunch, but he sure did a shit job of handling this whole controversy, huh? First time the speaker of the Commons has been ejected since 1695, so yeah, this is sort of a big deal.

-Although I can see how some might take this story about a soldier having "right to life" as a sort of slippery slope where civilian courts get bogged down with parents and spouses suing the government for the death of their soldier relatives, this specific case--where Private Jason Smith died of heat stroke only because the army failed to treat him properly--seems like one they might want to shy away from. Soldiers die, that's a necessary part of their job, but somebody should hold the Army accountable for when it fails this miserably to protect its own.

-I liked this Bagehot column a whole lot. Here's a quote as to why, and its a quote that applies to me, America's bloggers, and the majority of the news media's most popular pundits, especially when the language gets overblown: "It is brave to attend a protest rally in Burma. It is brave to be an independent journalist in Russia. It is brave to be a human-rights monitor in Syria. In Britain heads roll or are impaled on spikes only metaphorically. Only ink actually gets spilt: there will not be blood. The costs of sticking out a neck are pifflingly low."

International

-I normally give the international section shit, and that's because it seems like half the time the Economist doesn't know what to shove into it. That's not the case this time, where they devote the whole thing to the unsettling land acquisition going on among the food importers of rich countries. You can take a look at the chart to see it in living color, but here's the simple breakdown: corporations from rich countries--or the actual governments of rich companies--are buying up the farmland in poor countries. The problems that can come out of this are extensive, the most obvious being that poor countries are usually run in a corrupt fashion, meaning that the land being sold can potentially be farmland that the impoverished depend on--they just aren't able to pay as much for the food it produces. This one is long, and it may not be to your liking: but the potential for truly awful shit is higher than just about every other article this week.

Business

-Europe's small businesses may be facing a much tougher economic climate, one where it's difficult for them to finance and seek out loans, but they're surviving--and in some cases, flourishing--in a way that their larger European brethren are not. For all the articles you read that label America as "turning into France", here's one that points to how plenty of people in Europe are just as interested in small business start-ups and entrepreneurial endeavors as the US is, despite the culture being one that usually ignores them. For the second time this week: good news!

-GM and Chrysler have wanted to cut down on the amount of dealerships they've had for a long time, and the threat of bankruptcy, as well as government involvement, have finally made it possible. It's interesting to see how much control dealerships have been able to exert over local governments--god knows, if you've ever been down South, you could make the jump.

-Apparently the best-selling Chinese books are pretty much illegally printed, since only a few major publishers are allocated the serial numbers required to make them above board, and those major publishers--state owned--rarely print anything people want. That's changing now, as the shadow economy of private "culture studios" are joining up with the big guys to make the whole thing kosher. The Economist is mildly cynical about it, and rightly so. State-owned publishers haven't been able to figure out what the Chinese people want to read for years, and the likelihood of them letting artsy types call the shots isn't good. Hey! Let's call this one: "Developing."

-What do you do when you're a Japanese wigmaker who doesn't want to be bought out by an American investment fund? Sell out to whatever japanese company you can find at a huge japanese-only discount.

-Although I haven't watched the Girlfriend Experience on television yet, I totally could, and apparently the whole release-first-run-films on television for profit is apparently working out pretty well. Considering how mad theater owners got with Soderbergh back when Bubble dropped on DVD same-day as theatrical release, this story has some strands the Economist ignores, but still: good stuff.

-Here's a pretty obvious breakdown of why GM's shareholders are going to take their chances in bankruptcy court instead of accepting the buy-out that Fritz Henderson offered. Looks like we'll get to find out whether or not GM is "too big to fail" or not, in living color.

-Face Value covers Jacqueline Novogratz, a former corporate banker who set up a "social venture capital fund". Although the testorestone in me screams that you can only call someone a badass when they do something involving cars and explosions, Novograntz hits pretty close to the definition, despite having no obvious Karl Urban comparisons. "I don't live in a world of shoulds." Hell yeah, lady. You make the bottom 99% look like a bunch of useless loudmouths. Impressive.

Finance and Economics

And yeah, the section was fine this week, but the only one that really jumped for me was the three-page briefing on oil. When you get into the nuts and bolts of the oil business, it's easy to see why so many give their lives over to it. Fascinating stuff.

Science and Technology

-Short version: satellites can determine the level of photosynthesis in plants. Due to the research of David Rogers, a link between those levels and the size of a west Afrian tsetse fly's veins has been confirmed. (One specific vein, which is in their wing of the fly.) There's a sweet spot the vein hits, where the likelihood of the fly spreading disease skyrockets to epidemic proportions. By chunking all this various data into a computer, satellites--which were gathering the data already, so no additional work is necessary--it's now a matter of reading the numbers to predict, and therefore take proactive steps against, any number of the diseases these types of insect can spread. It's already seen success, after NASA researchers were able to give Kenya a heads up back in October of '07. Great shit.

-There's a connection between eczema and asthma, so if either of those cause you problems, rock out with your cock out. Boom goes the link.

-It turns out that animals do actually have personalities, after a study on birds revealed some pretty interesting behavioral patterns. But the real story here is buried at the bottom of the article--if the study performed on the birds is accurate, it could put into jeopardy every single scientific study that used animals caught in traps. All of those studies are dependent on one kind of animal--arrogant ones.

Books and Arts

Let's move through these quickly, because the only one that registered as being worth checking out with me is the Congo war play Ruined, which just won the Pulitzer prize.

1: Hey, there was an industrial revolution in Britain, read about it sometime.

2: Even in a secret diary, Chinese communist leader can't bring himself to criticize the people who fired him and blamed him for tons of shit that wasn't his fault.

3: Iran! It's a country!

4: So is Spain!

Obituary: Velupillai Prabhakaran

-Out of all of the articles on the Sri Lankan/Tamil Tigers conflict that the Economist has written, this one--an obituary for the Tiger commander--is probably at the top of the pile by pure writing standards. It's a brutal trick they play here--an obituary of a man who is either defined as terrorist or hero, depending on who's talking--and it worked out really well. The only thing that might be worth adding?

Good riddance. The guy was a fucking monster. The Tamil people have very real concerns, very real problems, and Sri Lanka has been absolutely horrible at dealing with those in any decent way. All that Prabhakaran did was force the debate to be about one thing, and that's violence. That's the only legacy he earned, and it's the only one he deserves.

Economist Versus Idiot: We Are Your One True God Now, Our Name Is Steve

The World Last Week

-Everybody is still waiting for the Irish to go to the polls for the second time to prove they really meant it when they first voted "no" to the European Union's Lisbon treaty, and by everybody I mean countires like the Czech Republic and Poland, because they are making the Irish people the barometer for how they handle the treaty. They don't describe it in those terms exactly, but hey: that's exactly what they're doing.

-Kosovo is going the ingenious route of joining whatever clubs will accept them as a member to shove the "we're a soverign nation whether you like it or not" statement down the throats of any country who disagrees; this week they joined the IMF. That got Saudi Arabia on board the whole "recognition" team. I bet a Rotary Club card will convince Russia to let them print their own money. Try that next.

-Hillary Clinton apologized about that accidental bombing of Afghan civilians. It went over better on radio, because she was standing in front of a picture of a smoking World Trade Center in the video broadcast, and somebody let out a bunch of doves right when the camera zoomed in on the single tear falling from her cybernetic eye.

-I'm a little unnerved by the tone in the passage about Canada's new trade deal with the European Union--if the Economist goes the sarcastic blurb route, that's going to make these blogs even more pointless than they already are. Anyway, Canada and the EU made a trade deal within minutes of the European Parliament banning all seal-related products from the Canucks due to that annual bash-em-on-the-head thing.

-Jacob Zuma's party won a landslide victory, so if they really are going to go after that cartoonist guy for being courageously spot-on, they're going to have a hard time proving he accomplished his secondary goal of convincing South Africans to think seriously about electing a corrupt moron. (The primary goal of getting the world to laugh hysterically at Zuma? Total success.)

-It's been a while since there was some good news out of Zimbabwe, so it's tempting to treat the release of 18 human- and political-rights campaign workers on bail as a bright light: it isn't, since this is the second time they've been realeased on bail, and it's part of an obvious power struggle between the supposed unity government. A power struggle involving sending people back and forth to jail. For the crime of not being criminals. Oh, and "unity" is still supposed to mean team-up.

-Israel's new prime minister is willing to "resume negoitations with Palestine", but considering the guy has no serious interest in a two state solution, one wonders how useful that talk will be. What do they do? Just sit around and say "It would be great if you would move away. Now, will you move away? No? Well, good talk."

-It would be pretty great if Washington DC recognized gay marriage, just because...oh, just because. They've got 30 days to sign it into law.

-Volkswagen teams up with Porsche, which brings the day when you might be able to buy a Porschewagen that much closer. And don't lie to me: you know you would in a second.

-Remember the Tata Nano? They can only make 60,000 a year right now--and they've got 203,000 orders already. Wake up, American auto manufacturers--there's plenty of people willing to buy your product, you just have to make the one they want instead of what you think they should want.

Leaders

-Ugh, what a cover. Why can't the Economist hire a fuck-around-with-Photoshop person whose skills extend beyond the computerized equivalent of a 3rd grade art class? This week's opening article is one of those two-fold punches: an op-ed describing the French model of economics and how it's currently trumping Germany's "we save money and depend almost totally on exports" and humiliating Britain's "sort of like America, with less guns and fewer dollars" ideologies. The Economist holds the line, believing that Germany and France will eventually taste the bitter fruits of an over-regulated economic model, but they still are willing to go to bat for Sarkozy and crew in the follow-up article, a three-page briefing on what the French are doing right. There's some great tidbits of info scattered throughout, and it's good to see the Economist is willing to back off their inherent distaste for French economic policy long enought to do some objective anaylsis. Jumping out to me were two: first, that the American complaint that nationalizing banks will "make us French" ignores the fact that France has been pulling out of state ownership for the last 15 years, and it's even stupider to say considering that France hasn't nationalized a bank yet, nor have they had any major bailouts. The second was that French fast food restaurants usually have about 2/3 the staff of their European and American counterparts. There's reasons why, but I won't remember what they are in six months, so why not start forgetting them now?

-Here's one to scream at each other about: those people that Barack Obama and various newspapers are calling "speculators" for condemning the Chrysler and GM bailout and bankruptcy negotiations? They are speculators, that's totally true, but what they were doing wasn't illegal, and it's a normal part of financing. They loaned money at a far cheaper interest rate to Chrysler and GM, and in return they were supposed to be at the top of the repayment que in case of bankruptcy or financial collapse. The American government's deal stripped those agreements in a completely illegal fashion--to please the newspaper reader, mostly--and gave them anywhere between 5 and 28 cents on the dollar. Why isn't it a bigger deal? Beause the people who got the better repayment deal, despite being lower down the scale, are health-care trust funds related to employees. So yes, sounds nice...hell, sounds "right" from a populist point of view. Doesn't change one thing though: it's illegal, and it's the same kind of interference--with better motives, sure--that Russia was using when they strip-mined companies throughout the early parts of the decade.

-Hey, guess what you have to do if you're going to run Nepal and make a bunch of promises to the Maoist guerrillas in exchange for laying down their arms? You're going to have to keep your promises. Otherwise, the guerrillas have no reason to keep theirs.

-On May 4th, Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote a New York Times article saying that America was going to experience deflation if something didn't change. Federal Reserve historian Allan Meltzer wrote a piece that America was going to experience a period of inflation if something didn't change. Both articles were published on the same page. Now, I don't know about you, but I think that's just mean as hell. I wonder if there was an old school Rock-em Sock-Em graphic along the header.

-The Economist throws a bone in PETA's direction and says "It would be wonderful to live in a world where no one experiments on rats and stuff" and then goes on to say that the European law restricting animal testing should never have been passed. I'll let you blow off your steam on your own with this one, although I find it kind of interesting that America doesn't count mice and rats when they come up with the total number of animal experiments they perform. (I assume there's a specific reason, otherwise--well, what? Mice and rats are still animals, last time I checked. And I live in New York, so I have to check all the fucking time.)

Letters

-Hey, who would have guessed that a physics professor at a French university would write a really snobby letter about casinos? Oh wait. The answer is everybody, isn't it?

United States

-The opening article here is about the recent announcement that David Souter will be retiring from the Supreme Court, which wasn't much of a suprise if you read Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine, which I happen to think is a spot-on must read, regardless of what you think of the current squad. It's great stuff. Souter is an odd bird, and the Economist touches on this a bit--he's a solo dude who lies on his own in a shitty little house in New Hampshire, he doesn't have a television (and he didn't have a telephone for a long time either), he never really goes anywhere publicly--I could go on, his diet is odd as well, but that's not really the point of the article. He was picked because George Bush Sr had been promised he was a hard-line conservative that could be pushed through confirmation hearings because of his anonymity and lack of record. That was true, and he was pushed through. But then he turned out to be a rather reserved kind of guy who wasn't that easy to peg, although modern day Republicans just label him liberal from where he's fallen on various rulings. Either way, the search is on for a replacement. It might be a Hispanic woman (a first for the Court), but if confirmation hearings have taught us anything over the last twenty years, it's that these things never play out the way we expect them to.

-Cuban-Americans who have been in America since the 60's aren't the biggest fans of Cuban-Americans who started coming over in the mid-90's, after the uptake in how many Cubans could be granted visas. The old school doesn't like that the new school is so hot to trot to fly back to Cuba to visit relatives. I get the argument, but with all the empathy in my heart, I think telling a woman that being desperate to get medicine to her grandparents "That's not right" because it betrays a lack of political will is the height of fucking arrogance. So yeah: shove it up your ass, Joe Garcia. I mean that with love.

-The new crackdown on the corporate tax code brought forth by the White House: you can only deduct the cost of foreign investments if you pay tax on any ensuing foreign profits. While the Economist acknowledges that it makes great political sense--taxing rich companies always does--they point out that adding more rules to a system with too many already isn't very bright, and that this is another strike against why corporate desire to maintain strong footholds in America. Points are good all around, but this one needs some more time to play out, I'm thinking.

-Huh. Here's an interesting little fact to choke down your throat--the top five debtors in America are, in order, California, New York State, New York City, Massachusetts, and the Metropolitan Transport Authority. For those who don't know, the MTA is the New York subway system, the commuter trains, and bus routes. Besides being a surprise--I'm assuming this list ignores banks and auto manufacturers?--to see MTA up there with California, I gotta wonder about the Massachusetts thing too. Cali and NY make sense, but Massachusetts? Really?

-Hey, they used a picture of some fat guy with a giant cigar for their boring article about the Kentucky Derby. It's not online, but you should track it down. He looks like a cartoon version of a pig, but he's totally a real person. Rush Limbaugh, I think.

-He didn't get the back-page, but there's a nice little write up about Jack Kemp here, one of those rare guys that got called a "bleeding-heart conservative."

-Lexington still holds his ground: no decision of Barack Obama will go without scrutiny, and while I'm still gettting the sense that he wasn't all the way behind the Economist's support of the current US president, you can't fault him for writing a pretty solid piece on Arne Duncan, the current education secretary. I'd quibble with the unsourced praise for the No Child Left Behind Act, but hey, I'm a dick.

The Americas

-Out of the initial 149 swine-flu deaths reported in Mexico, it turns out only 50 of those were the actual swine-flu, which is leaving many Mexicans asking whether the massive shutdown was the best route to take. Ah, hindsight: will you ever be anything less than 20-20?

-Huh. France still has a piece of empire left, totaling 6,000 souls off the coast of Newfoundland. Now that the area--Saint Pierre & Miquelon--is laying a claim on some of the off-shore oil and gas that Newfoundland makes serious cash off of, it's time to do one of those "hey, what the fuck are you doing running some island on the other side of the Atlantic anyway" discussions. Expect it to be long and boring. I never want anybody to die brutally over stupid bullshit...at the same time, I'm kind of just reading this and going "C'mon! Hit him in the nose! Do it!"

-If your knowledge of socialism stops where Howard Zinn's writing does, you might think that labor unions and commies run hand in hand through fields of gold, but hey, that's why we need Zinn to talk more about Venezuela, where socialism is the word of the day and labor unions are the enemy of the people. Damn it Hugo Chavez: will you ever stop eviscerating your enemies?

-Peru has figured out a whole new business: print counterfeit American currency, passports, visas and all the sundry needed to emigrate and travel. Oh, counterfeiting: you aren't a victimless crime, but you'll always be my favorite.

-Has America ever had a president who used be called the "Supermarket King?" If not, that means we've missed the opportunity for a title Panama just stole form under our noses.

Asia

-There's a feminist organization in Singapore that took over an advocacy group for woman's rights by surprise last week. Sounds like it's the beginning to a good story, right? Well, not really. The take-over was initiated by some kind of women's group made up of evangelical Christians who believe sex-education courses will turn the female children of the country into lesbians. Now, I don't quote Homer Simpson as much as I could, but I think his old statement fits best here: Democracy doesn't work. At least, not when you have to actually debate with people who have fundamental shit where brains should be. Seriously, if you think that sex education Makes Girls Homosexual, you shouldn't get to vote. Hell, you should probably be drowned in a bucket of gin. Here's an interesting sidenote: none of this background shit seems to have changed AWARE's website, which still has some solid shit on it regarding sex education. Oh, and here's one more: their wikipedia page is in the middle of a copyright violation fight.

-After spending a healthy majority of years dependent on the British or Americans for their naval secuirty, Australia is taking on the gigantic expense of expanding their own military, supposedly to deal with the the vague possibility of a confrontation with "a major-power adversary." No surprise who they're talking about here, but you still gotta wonder if a barely concealed implication of Chinese threat is going to go over well with their biggest trading partner, who is, of course, China itself.

-The guy in charge of rooting out Indonesian governmental corruption--who was actually doing a semi-okay job--got arrested for "masterminding" a drive-by shooting of a pharmaceutical giant. His anti-corruption organization dumped him immediately, and they seem to be going ahead with their work without too many hiccups. Guilty or no, this is one tremendously fucked up story.

-Yeah, Hamid Karzai probably isn't going anywhere, despite his 15% approval rating. Boy, this guy really turned out pretty bad, didn't he? It would be one thing if he was just a shitty American crony that the Afghan people can't stand, but he's something even worse. A shitty American crony that disappoints the Americans as much as he does the Afghan people. You'd think the US would've learned how to prop up leaders of their own design, considering how often they do it.

Middle East and Africa

-While everybody is up in arms about that whole clubbing baby seals thing, don't go hoarse screaming at one rally alone. You'll need to make time to protest Egypt's decision to slaughter every single pig in the country. Even the World Health Organization--the people who ramped swine-flu to one-notch-below pandemic status--called it a "drastic overreaction."

-A lot of Iraqi prisoners are going home, one prison near Kuwait will drop from 22,000 to 7,400 over the next year. Some will be released outright, others will be turned over to Iraqi authorities to handle as they see fit. Interesting tidbit here--apparently Iraqi prisons are still toxic with corruption as well as rumoured human-rights abuses. Worse than those pictures you're not allowed to see? The article doesn't say.

-Could Iran finally be sick of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? The Economist seems to think that it's a possiblity, althought the meat of this article doesn't read that much differently than the previous ones on the same subject. Oh, that should read "previous ones on the same subject that turned out to be completely wrong."

Europe

-Hey, after weeks of hating on Berlusconi for his actual political views and decisions, the Economist gets a chance to get wet in the sea of personal controversy, because his wife has decided she wants a divorce due to his unrepentant lothario ways, as well as his proclamation tha the would put up a bunch of showgirls as candidates for his political party in the next election. In the Economist's defense, Berlusconi has used his personal life as fodder to win elections and make policy decisions before, so he's already opened the door to this kind of gross scrutiny. Still, this kind of reporting is pretty sleazy.

-While I don't read every newspaper in the universe, it's kind of curious that the Economist refers to the German export model as "coming under fire". Besides the Economist, by whom is it coming under fire? If you say bloggers I'm going to poke you with a stick.

63% of possible voters participated in the 1978 European Parliamentary elections. In 2004, it had dropped to 46%. Estimates for this year put the figure at a probable 34%. Charlemagne gives over his column to examining why this week, and he of course finds a delightfully sardonic "Because it's fucking boring" answer in the process. God, Charlemagne just sets the tone. Guy should write greeting cards.

Britain

-While there's plenty to criticize about the heavy-handed way in which Jacqui Smith keeps adding new names to her list of people who aren't allowed to visit Britain, it's still kind of hard to feel sorry for Michael Savage, who once told a "sodomite" that he "should only get AIDS and die, you pig." Don't get me wrong: I say something to that effect about four times a day, but never just because somebody is a "sodomite." I try to reserve that bon mot strictly when dealing with people who like Green Lantern. You gotta have principles.

-There's a wild chart to go along with this article about the way British Muslims view the world and how it compares to Muslims in France & Germany. It's a Gallup poll, so bear that in mind, but I wonder if margin of error can really explain away the startling difference between the two groups. The Muslims of Germany and France agree on just about everything, while the Brits have a lot more in common with America's Southern Baptists. (Homosexuality, abortion and premarital sex: all unacceptable.)

-Gordon Brown sucks. Seriously, we get it Economist. You'd like to punch him in the nuggets. New point, please.

-Are there any good arguments for these stupid ID cards? Because they really should start advertising what those are as soon as possible, because this just sounds like a shit-whore of a plan.

International

-Nobody wants to deal with pirates in international courts, nobody wants to deal with pirates by going to Kenya (because that means naval warships leaving their posts to fuck around in Kenyan court), so the common response is to chuck their weapons in the ocean and put them back on their boat. The more you read about these Somalian pirates, the more it seems that it's the best job available. Money is good, punishment is nil (as long as you avoid Americans), and you get the fringe benefit of not having to be in Somalia, where life has somehow figured out a way to be worse than a suicide inducing awful.

-The credit crunch is, unsurprisingly, having a terrible effect on charitable giving. While rich charities still lag far behind your Western Union style "remittances" handled by hand-to-mouth immigrant types, those remittances are dropping as well. Oh, and because we don't get to mention it enough, America is still the absolute shittiest when it comes to charitable giving amongst other rich countries. It's not even a contest, and it never has been.

Business

-Face Value, the Economist's weekly "bio-in-a-page-for-someone-not-dead" feature goes after a subject this time that looks like it could've been better served with an actual article. Paragraph after paragaph about Anne Lauvergeon, the boss of nuclear giant Areva, leaping back and forth from praise to blame to anecdote all the way cringing futurism, this just might be the worst one of these I've read. Get it together, kitty cat.

-And we're back in antitrust fights one more time--although the amount of last weeks European Commison fine against Intel was released after press time (it was 1.44 billion), that's just a hint of the fight going on here. All the players are getting back in the ring (hence the article's cartoon), and it's all the familiar names: Google, Microsoft, IBM, AMD, Intel, so on, so forth. Last verse, same as the first.

-Everybody gets ready for the announcement that Time Warner is finished with the AOL partnership, but this Business article isn't just a look at that--it's also a ground view shakedown of hte differences between television money and online video, which makes it a neccessary read for certain individuals who won't read it because it's not written in crayon on the side of Little Mermaid DVD by a fucking monkey. Probably my favorite article this week, and I'll bet you the coming articles about Time Warner's divorce will be just as good.

-Rolls Royce had a record year in 2008, selling 1,212 cars. I'm thoroughly impressed, because I was under the impression that car companies moved more product than Canadian comic publisher Drawn & Quarterly. I stand corrected.

Finance and Economics

-I've made my own fascination with what Fiat's Sergio Marchionne plans to do with Chrysler known before, and if you didn't care then, you won't care now. But for those of you who might have the smallest inkling, this two page article regarding the merger is a great breakdown of the story thus far. Although a lot of people will be losing their jobs, Fiat's business model seems to be far more realistic and likely to survive then that whole "hold your breath and pray for rain" thing that Chrysler was doing for the past decade.

-The banks of the Middle East may look like fearsome giants, but many of them have very little in the way of assets. Due to the collapse in oil prices, the area is finally seeing the oft-predicted consolidation that's currently in vogue amongst the techonology and pharmaceutical industry. It can't come soon enough for an area seeing the growth of sharia-compliant banking, which is taking off faster than the Economist predicted when they first started talking about it last year.

-Buttonwood plays the "you better check yourself before you wreck yourself" card this week in his piece on the return of optimism to the bucket list of investor-types. I guess I should let go my disdain stemming from that gross piece he wrote late last year about making money off the backs of the bruised--he's been a lot more reflective lately. Oh, and I still don't know if it's a he or she, but I've taken to assumption with a higher frequency. Makes cooking easier.

Science and Technology

-Here's an interesting footnote problem to electric and hybrid cars: blind people, pedestrians and cyclists can't hear them coming. A company called Lotus has been working on a solution for a while now, and some other companies are getting involved. Happily, it'll probably be a directional based noise system that won't contribute to keeping people up at night.

-If you want to know why it's so hard to respond rapidly to an influenza pandemic, here's the hard science article to explain it. Short answer? They have to make new vaccines in live chicken eggs, and that happens about as quickly as your brain just imagined it taking.

Books and Arts

-Although blogs technically allow people to trawl the archives to find instances where the writer contradicts themselves on a frighteningly consistent basis, nobody ever seems to do that. I'll still own up to the obvious fact that I usually talk shit about books like A Single Swallow: Following an Epic Journey from South Africa to South Wales, which is about swallows, flying from Point A to Point B. For some reason--maybe it's the picture attached to the article--I kind of thought it was cute. 

-Do you want to read short stories about "striving, privileged New Yorkers"?

For the love of a dead God, why?

-If you only read one article about contemporary jewelry this year, I feel sorry for you. Because I've only read one article about contemporary jewelry this year, and brother, let me tell you: that article was one too many.

Obituary: Hans Holzer

-Since I don't take the time to figure out the demographic breakdown of who reads this blog due to not giving a remote fuck, I may alienate and disgust a reader by saying this: I think Hans Holzer wasted the majority of his life doing something that's complete and utter bullshit. I hope he enjoyed it, and it sounds like he did, he did apparently get laid a lot. He was a "ghost hunter", which I initially hoped meant that he was some kind of Nazi hunter with a less cool job title (nothing beats "Nazi Hunter"). I'm not sure how you celebrate a man's life when he does something so patently ridiculous with the hero's portion of it. Sorry dude--but what the fuck? Ghosts? Are you five?  Oh never mind. He can't read this anway, becasuse there's No Such Thing As Fucking Ghosts.

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All art from the Economist, unless otherwise noted...here: Marcel Gotlib's cartoons belong to Marcel Gotlib, Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine belongs to Toobin, the art piece "Hindsight" belongs to Mary Tsiongas, AWARE's logo belongs to AWARE, the bandwagon usage of Miss Piggy to illustrate a swine-flu article results in a credit to Disney, Kramer Vs. Kramer belongs to Columbia, and Columbia is owned by Sony, so that's who owns Kramer Vs. Kramer, nice message from Green Lantern, thanks Time Warner, and all weird Fiat concept cars belong to Fiat.

Economist Versus Idiot: Shorter, Because I Love And Miss Sleep

The World Last Week

-If you curse on live television, even if you just curse once, you could get the broadcaster who trusted you sued. That's what the Supreme Court was doing last week. They were dealing with that. That was something important enough to take up their time.

-The White House is totally sorry that they felt the need to fly a presidential jet right by the skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan without making sure that wouldn't freak a bunch of people in Lower Manhattan out.

-Albania asked if they could join the European Union. I hear they asked nicely.

-I like that the Kremlin "promised" that the mayoral election in Sochi was going to be fair. Doesn't it seem like you really shouldn't have to make that kind of promise in advance? That's like promising your girlfriend you aren't going to bang her friends every time you leave the house for work. Just don't bang her friends. Making promises you won't points to a deeper problem.

-They only mention a few of them here, since they were so close to press time, but there were quite a few car and suicide bomb attacks in Iraq last week.

-82 men got sentenced to death in Sudan. They were allegedly all involved in the attacks on the capitol last year. 82 people. You gotta imagine they can't all be guilty. Sudan isn't exactly graced with an amazing investigative police force.

-North Korea, once again, decided not to participate in the six-party nuclear talks. They also threatened to carry out more nuclear tests. And then they flew to the moon on a skateboard.

-Pharmaceutical companies are still doing okay, with Bristol-Myers Squibb reporting a profit increase, thus proving the old adage: if you name your company something really stupid and unattractive, and you keep adding stupid words on it, you will never, ever, go broke.

-Conde Nast is shutting down Portfolio magazine. I think it's kind of funny that this is the first time the Economist has mentioned a magazine being cancelled, considering that there's a dead one about every seventeen minutes.

-The European Commission isn't waiting for a global agreement, they're looking to go ahead and regulate hedge funds and private equity funds on their own. No word yet on what the European Commission will do when all those funds just say "Fuck you very much" and bail out for Antigua.

Leaders

-First up, here's why the world is sort of ready for a pandemic, if it happens: because we've been freaked out about a potential Asian bird flu for the last ten years. Like, maybe you, me and granny haven't been freaking about Asian bird flu, but scientists have, and they were taking names and getting ready. While there's been a late stage scramble to cover ass when it turned out to be Miss Piggy related by way of Mexico, things are still cooking with kerosene. Oh, and 30,000 people die in America every year from regular flu. That won't be changing, no matter how this plays out. And if a pandemic doesn't officially happen with swine flu, that just means the eventual pandemic will be a different disease.

-Editorial number 701 about why the Economist hates Silvio Berlusconi. This one is funny because it includes advice for Berlusconi. Does the Economist really think that the dude is going to take advice from them? I'm not saying he shouldn't, hell yeah, take advice, I don't give a fuck. But seriously, if all you do is burn some dude at every window of opportunity, don't expect him to flip the listening switch somewhere down the line.

-One more time, because I never get tired of this shit: Jacob Zuma told people he took a shower to prevent catching AIDS from a family friend he's just finished having sex with. (And in some corners, that wasn't "having sex", it was rape.) He's the president of South Africa. Like...that's the guy in charge of a country that has a serious AIDS problem. Guilty or no, corrupt or not, I can't fathom why the fuck you elect somebody that stupid. I mean, sure, it was a fair election by all reports, so I guess I'm saying that the majority of South African voters completely screwed themselves--but what other excuse is there? I'll just hope they don't know he said and believed that.

-There's going to be a week where I have to knuckle down and write one of these little sarcasm junkets about the new British tax shit that the Economist is burning Gordon Brown in effigy for coming up with. This isn't that week: you can read about it here. It seems fucking stupid, but hey: it's taxes. When don't they seem fucking stupid?

-This Pakistan assault on the Taliban--do they mean it? Like for real mean it? Like, forever-ever? The Economist wants to believe they do, but when they have to write about it for three pages, they eventually just kind of say "Okay, no, probably not."

Letters

-You know who should really not write letters? Prissy fucking jackals who work at CBS. Even if Gil Schwartz didn't come across like a goddamn tool with his "CBS is doing fine, we had some good ratings" letter that concludes with a cheeky "at least we aren't a faggy magazine" bullshit, even if Schwartz had written some kind of majestic piece of letter-writing magic, he's still the whore that works for the same network that broadcasts CSI Miami.

United States

-Most Americans still like their President, which is a story I think you knew about before the Economist wrote about it. Again. I'm just struck how few pictures there are of the dude smoking, which he apparently still does? Not because I care or think that's bad, I'm just surprised that people who don't like him don't try to get those pictures out there more often. Liberals hate smokers almost as much as they like killing unborn children.

-Okay, I don't really think that. I just wanted to upset you.

-I find it oddly touching how the Economist still believes--as Barack Obama does--that the Doha trade agreements can be resurrected. I've been clear about how I feel about them, I think they definitely should--I just also think it's completely fucking unlikely, like win-the-lottery unlikely. Quite charming stuff, that optimism.

-You know how you know a slow news week at the Economist? Whenever they have an article on weiner dog racing. That's the first sign.

-Hey, the postal service is going to try to shut down one more day of the week. Nobody writes letters anymore. (One of these sentences contained possible new information. The other has been true longer than you've been alive.)

-Arlen Specter becoming a Democrat has just as much to do with Arlen Specter wanting to be re-elected Senator as it does with how little he loves the Republican party, according to Lexington. Other than that, this is another one of those articles about how conservatives are getting sick of being represented by Rush Limbaugh, but still defining "sick of" in a way that negates them doing anything about it.

The Americas

-We've touched on this before, haven't we, Economist? That Latin American economies are probably going to weather the economic crisis well? I really think we have. I'm content to read about it again, but I don't know that it deserves to be the major article for the section.

-That ex-bishop who became Paraguay's president has a few paternity claims laid against him, the worst of which could have been avoided if he just paid his fucking alimony. Who does this guy think he is, Ol' Dirty Bastard? Look, pal: you're the president of Paraguay. You're not Ol' Dirty Bastard.

-More troubles in Mexico completely unrelated to swine flu or drug gangs. (Well, peripherally related to drug gangs.) In 2006, Felipe Calderon started using the military to back up his weak police force to deal with the drug gangs, and he's now bearing the bitter fruit of that tree: violent abuse of power on the part of the military. As is the norm with quite a few countries, soldiers are tried in military courts, which means that they don't end up getting punished as frequently or harshly as regular citizens. It's not widespread, at least, not yet, and the civilian population has been up against the gangs for so long that they seem willing to tolerate it for now. The question of "how long" they will turn a blind eye won't be answered quite yet.

Asia

-Hey, here's two quick trivia questions for you:

1) How are things going in Myanmar now that were hitting up on a full year later?

Things are going poorly

2) How are things going in Sri Lanka now that the conflict is entering month two of the "end of the conflict?"

Things are going poorly.

Kisses!

-Chinese film director Lu Chuan has been getting death threats for the release of his upsetting film about the 1937 Japanese attack on Nanjing. Not because the film depicts the Japanese as doing awful, horrible shit--which yes, they totally did--but because there's one Japanese character in the movie is presented sympathetically. (That's ONE character.) I don't even know what you call this story. Progress? Upsetting? Factual?

Middle East & Africa

-Nigeria is trying to "rebrand" itself for the second time to being known as "Nigeria: Good People, Great Nation", after the last phrase "Nigeria: Heart of Africa" didn't take. I hope the new one works, because there's no way but down when the best you come up with is "Good People". Maybe add a question mark?

Europe

-Canada has turned out to be a decent location for persecuted Roma to find asylum in, and there couldn't be a better time--the Czech Republic seems to have abandoned any desire to rectify the continuing scourge of racist rhetoric begun by their former deputy prime minister, leaving at least 80,000 Roma to live in ghettos, the majority of which came about in the last ten years. It's nice that they can escape to greener pastures. But it would be preferable that "escape" wasn't anyone's best option.

Britain

-Are they ever going to catch the guys who helped set up the London bombings? No, they are not.

-The Gurkas versus Britain, with the power of Johanna Lumley by their side. As the subtitle to the article puts it, "Guess who won?" You, dear reader, I will not make you guess. The Gurkas won. Because the Gurkhas are awesome.

International

Look, if you want to write about Muslims in Britain and South Asia, that's totally fine. But don't put that shit in the International section. It belongs in the Britain or Asia section. I shouldn't have to tell you this. I forgot how to tie my shoes this morning.

Business

-Whereas usually the Face Value column throws down with established business types either on the verge of massive success or potential failure, this week it's about Shai Agassi, a really slick salesman type for a company called Better Place. While they admit that Agassi has very little history behind him, the Economist makes the bold claim that he's "the best salesman in the technology industry after Steve Jobs". Really? What's he selling? Better Place is Agassi's start-up firm intent on building a massive, global network of "charging points" for electic cars as well as battery-exchange stations. Here's my ignorant, Idiot answer: he's selling a dream. If he's right, and Better Place is the right company for it--which apparently is something that Agassi can convince anyone of--he'll get a legend to match his hype. If he's wrong? Maybe Neon Neon will make an album about him in a few decades. Way I see it right now, there's no way to tell, and this profile read like free advertising.

-I don't much give a shit about William Morris, but I always liked Endeavor. Talent agencies mergers are usually only interesting in the horrible stories they provide for tell-all books, so it'll be a while before we find out whether we've got another Michael Ovitz situation on our hands, but hey: monolithic talent agencies. Crazy shit always comes out of that.

-Why are Microsoft, Google and Apple weathering the storm so well? The man-on-the-street answer would probably be "because of the Internet, I think", but the truth is way more old school. It's because they, unlike the rest of America's biggest non-financial corporations, held onto money like they were keeping it in a mattress. Cash on hand, bitches.

-UPS, DHL, TNT and FedEx were all making their way into China, kicking ass, providing good jobs and firing up local entrepreneurs--of which China has never had enough--until the Chinese government decided that it was time to look after their old monopoly, China Post. Thanks to a recent, confusing law, China Post is once again the only company in the country allowed to handle domestic document delivery. That effectively destroys all those local entrepreneurs, the vagaries of the law will force all the non-Post companies into a strangled Kafka-esque "registration" system, and once again, China has made it that much less attractive to the companies of the world. Oh, and one more thing: China Post needed the help because the Chinese people hate the service, since it loses letters and is slow as fuck. Good one, guys. 

Finance and Economics

-You've always been able to use the internet for high quality pornograpy, but now it can meet another need as well: you too can become a knee-breaking loan shark. That's right! If you live in California, you can buy a piece of somebody's car, consumer or small business loan, thanks to the just SEC registered website Prosper. Why fuck around with the piddling shit though? DebtX sells commercial property loans. I swear to God, I'm counting the minutes until some teenager makes millions doing this. You know that's next.

-Here's a recap article on one of Wall Street's more irritating legacies: how the worst of the non-incarcerated finance types have no problem jumping into new jobs. All your favorites are here: Dick Fuld, Chuck Prince, Alan Schwatz and John Thain.

-If the Federal Reserve were a big company, it would be a big company we are all real proud of, because it's pulling in some fantastic profits. It's not, so we're just kind of like "look at this surprising turn of events."

-You know how there's a tendency to start getting a little irritated at shareholders in crashed companies when its revealed how little their involvement was prior to meltdown? How we all wish it could be easier to just adopt a sort of knee-jerk "blame the thieves" mentality, despite it being historically and intellectually accurate that part of being a shareholder in a company-especially when it's a large one, even more so when its collapse could ruin your life--means taking on the responsibility of paying attention to what that companies doing, and how it's doing it? Yeah, that's a debate and discussion you can have when you're talking about people. But when you're talking about a huge portion of an entire fucking country--like Italy--and you're dealing witha  bunch of city councils failing in their due diligence as they lost millions of dollars in derivatives...well, that's when you get Italy seizing $634 million from banks. And while that's definitely something that's nice to cheer for, since the banks did fuck up, it doesn't change the truth, which is that when you start investing the money of the people who elected you, you really should know What In The Fuck You Are Investing It In.

Science and Technology

-While it will be a while before we get to see the actual finished results, it's probably going to be pretty fucking cool--in that way that real life makes adult men feel like little boys--when the American military figures out their new "seabasing" technology, where they make little baby block floating islands connected by electric bridges. They're still at work on some crazy ass robot Tetris program that will automate the moving of containers, but when it's done, there's going to be a computer system that looks at a gigantic collection of shipping containers and knows the least possible moves to get to the one that's full of tanks. (As is the standard with this type of work, there's going to be some pretty interesting trickle-down consumer based technology, but what might be more important, which the article doesn't go into in any detail, is how that technology will impact industrial port management. While stacking at ports isn't as tight as it will be on a seabase, this program could drastically change the amount of space required for storage: less space, reliable technology? That's bad news for a unionized job that's already suffering a lot.) It also gives me the chance to show Sobotka some love for the second week in a row.

-Hey, if you look at your spouse's yearbook photo and they aren't smiling? Get ready for your marraige to end in divorce. Science doesn't lie!

-I know you love using that antibacterial gel. You love it because you hate bacteria, I get that. But seriously dude: what you love, and what concrete needs? They aren't the same thing. Let concrete have some bacteria.

-Over two million people have watched the Youtube video fo a dancing parrot named Snowball. Some of those people were bored scientists, and their interest was peaked enough to start a "can animals dance" study. Normally, this is where I'd point out my whole "Who gives a shit, go cure cancer" and "I better not be paying for this" claim, but considering how many people are out of work right now, they can have a pass. After all, they do have to sit around and watch Youtube videos of dancing birds all day, and apparently the most popular video is soundtracked by the Backstreet Boys. That's not an easy gig.

Books and Arts

-You'll never convince me to drop forty-five bucks to read about the capitol of Lithuania when a review includes the line "The most poignant chapter is on cemeteries past and present". Besides the implication that the book is packed to the brim with depressing ass chapters ("most poignant", not "only poignant" is the tell), the next sentence goes for the gut: mass graves! Victims of the NKVD! Of the Nazis! The defeat of Napoleon's Grand Armee! Brother, I ain't got that kind of time, and my eyes ain't got that kind of tears.

-Jeez, why don't you blow Thatcher a little bit harder next time. I think there's still some juice where her heart was supposed to be.

-Although not every American living in Paris during the Nazi occupation was totally awesome, Sumner Jackson was. Helping American and British military men escape from the very beginning, and continuing all the way until he was arrested near the final days, he ended up dead when the British bombed the prison ship he was on, five days prior to German surrender. Americans In Paris covers them all, good and bad--from the fucking kowtowers to the lesbian owner of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, and while it's not on the books for American release just yet, it will make it here eventually. I'm game.

-Is Rupert Goold a great director with a nose for publicity, or is he a publicity whore with a hang-around-theaters hobby? The Economist seems to want to split the difference, but his work seems solid to me. Still, he should get over himself when it comes to talking about his hair. Nobody gives a shit about your hair, dude.

Obituary: Samuel Beer

-In the annals of fascinating lives, I wouldn't imagine there's too many college professors with tales of toe-curling excitement. Samuel Beer sounds like an exception. Considering his age--he was 97 when he died a few weeks ago--this obituary is probably one that the Economist had on file for a while, and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that's because some of his former students now haunt the Economist's hunting grounds. Speechwriter for Franklin Roosevelt, a bronze star won in Normandy, and a job asking defeated Germans what it took to be "a good Nazi"--this was what paved the way for him to end up teaching at Harvard. Apparently he was still at the top of his game last year, as the description of an improptu speech describes. Interesting stuff, this one.

All art from The Economist, unless we're talking about: That dude vaccinating that rooster is totally trying to save your life, he works here, Better Place picture comes from their site, that Thai woman is a loan shark, the guys with her are her "hard boys", and I don't give a shit about crediting her, publicity photo of Chris Bauer from HBO, and that picture of Rupert Goold's amazing locks belongs to Tristan Fuge.

Economist Versus Idiot: Sri Lanka Would Trade For The Pig-Flu, No Question

The World Last Week

-Jacob Zuma followed up last year's rape trial--where he was accused of not taking no for an answer even when it was given to him by a family friend he knew to be HIV positive--by getting elected president of South Africa. The alleged rape was deemed consensual sex, but no one has come forth with a good explanation for Zuma's follow-up comment, where he said that he took a post-coital shower to keep himself safe from HIV. Yes, what you just read was real.

-Oh, and to the surprise of no one, an internal Israeli army investigation into the Gaza Strip assault concluded by saying that they did a pretty good job. So you can shut up about those bombed schools now, you silly billy.

-You gotta kind of wonder why 20 European United Nations representatives even made a point of showing up at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Geneva speech on racism if they were just going to walk out, youtube style. Plane tickets to Geneva are expensive, and it isn't like you couldn't predict his behavior beforehand.

-While we already know why Barack Obama released the torture memos, everybody is still wondering why Dick Cheney thought it was a good idea. He claimed that the memos would show how useful torture is, once again proving that Dick Cheney is sort of a creepy freak.

-The EPA got to rule that carbon dioxide (along with some other greenhouse gases) are officially considered pollutants. The only problem now is that there aren't any specific resolutions about reducing these pollutants, which is going to do a bang up job of making the EPA look pretty useless. Doubtful that was the goal.

-North and South Korea's first mutual meeting in over a year didn't last as long as an episode of the Real Housewives of Orange County. Hell, it didn't last as long as a Family Guy re-run. Nice planet, you crazy fuckers.

-Fidel Castro called Barack Obama a liar. Barack Obama has yet to respond, although he realizes he should probably hurry, since Fidel Castro is pretty much only alive due to the magic of embalming fluid.

-The guy that Hugo Chavez beat for the Venezuelan presidency, Manuel Rosales, is trying to get political asylum in Peru due to corruption charges back home.

-Once again the reality of the British war on terrorism turns out to be nowhere near as awesome as the fictional one where Adam Carter fucking DESTROYS, as the local police had to admit that the 12 guys they arrested for being part of a "very, very big" plot turned out not to have real evidence, the kind where one might hang a hat. And no, I haven't seen the latest season.

-Oracle ought Sun, making my only blog-related stock prediction one that would have made you a shitload of money if you'd taken me up on it and then flipped it the day after. Don't worry, I didn't either.

-It turns out that Avastin--a highly-touted cancer treatment--isn't as awesome as many had hoped.

-Hey, Delta and United aren't doing well. Or the New York Times. Boston Globe. Mizuho. UBS. Morgan Stanley. Deutsche Telekom. Yahoo.

-Apple though, they're doing fine. I really hope it isn't because of the 16th wave of those commercials with Justin Long, who is definitely going to be on trial for war crimes at some point. That guy is septic.

-Missed you too.

Leaders

-In case the cover doesn't tell the story, here's the Economist with a nice long article about how the current turn-around in stock markets and share prices may be a mirage. Now, considering this issue is a week old--which means both the swine flu and insane suicide bomb attacks in Iraq aren't taken into account--it's a bit of a late one, but the general point is worth mulling over. The ability to make the sort of hard budgetary steps to bring about real fiscal repair in both the housing market as well as dealing with non-populist reforms so far has been due to general concern (which is admittedly read as fear by many) that the economy needs drastic assistance. Flipping, 180 style, and saying that the job is done may be popular, but it certainly could make the problem far worse. (As always, the Economist points to the recent Japanese history, with its "lost decade", for example.)

-Without getting too much into the detail as why, the second full page leader is about how much the Economist hates Gordon Brown's budget. This one is a steam-up-the-glasses tear down. They aren't even trying to hide hating the guy anymore.

-Although thousands of Sri Lankans have escaped from the warzone, after realizing that neither the Tamil Tigers nor the Sri Lankan government Gave A Shit At All about not killing people in what was officially termed a "no-fire zone", there are still thousands trapped behind, and they are being used as human shields in a conflict that will soon end. At this point, it's a malignant fucking fantasy for those with no moral code whatsoever to pretend that anyone--a foul mouthed blogger, the news media, or even the civilian population of Sri Lanka itself--will ever find out how badly these last few months have treated those innocent people caught between the two sides. All we know now is all we'll ever know: human beings, broken, tortured, blown to shreds, exterminated, dead. Personally, I'd like to believe that the economic crisis is why no one paid attention. Realistically: I don't think anybody would have cared anyway.

-Now that Barack Obama has been nice to Cuba and Venezuela, the Economist thinks Brazil should be tougher with them. Dude, that doesn't even make sense, you're all like "c'mere go away". So confusing! 

-Is there a secret cyberwar already in progress? The Economist thinks there might be, but that it's more likely that the story is being "leaked" in such a way to spark up support for some new budgetary line items in a time when few are going to pull for a costly new government project regarding a problem none see evidence of. Still, if you're going to pull off fear-mongering, saying that Chinese and Russian cyberspies could take control of America's electrical grid is the way to do it. My limbs: they are all akimbo.

Letters

-While some irritating nerds wrote in this week, it would be disingenuous to pretend that there were any letters that mattered after the first printed one, from John Lott, who completely eviscerated the Economist's bad statistics on where Mexican drug-gangs get their automatic weapons from. As Lott pointed out, the statistic repeated by the Economist--that "nearly all" of the weapons seized from drug gangs are traced to America--ignores that the reason for that rests in the ease of tracing American weaponry, often marked with serial numbers and the "Made In The USA" phrase. The black market has no such compunction. While the Economist doesn't issue an apology or correction, there's no discussion to be had. They fucked up, and Lott called them out.

United States

-The overall gist of this article on Tim Geithner is pretty simple: if he does a good job, people are still going to question whether he made the right choices, and if he does a bad job....well, you know. People will do what they do. (And since it's about the Treasury Department, it will probably be ignorant yammering, because about three people in the country understand what the Treasury can and can't do, and none of those people work in cable news.) Still, I feel a little bit like there's a general theme underneath this article that strikes a little too close to "just trust him". Really guys?

-If you don't happen to be in New York City on a slow news day for the Post--i.e., a day where A-Rod isn't talking about steroids or a woman isn't being attacked by a chimpanzee--than you probably aren't aware of how incredibly slow the World Trade Center building project is. Here's an article on it, if you care, which you don't, because hey: no one does. And this? Still funny.

-While most talks of secession in the US have of late been surrounding Chuck Norris and his offer to become the President of the Republic of Texas, Californians have started pushing it so hard that a ballot measure may end up back on the ticket. Like Tupac and Biggie before them, this one is totally a West Coast/East Coast thing based mostly around farming, and the East Coast of California is where they grow all the food and don't want gay people to get married. (And yes, that's a stereotype, and I'm sure there are anti-gays in San Francisco just as much as there's Nation reading chai drinkers in the East, but right now? It's all about the mindless, stupid arguments between people who should remember that California might want to figure out that whole massive shortfall in their constructed-by-rodents budget.)

-Oprah Winfrey's trip to that "new Hooverville" in Sacramento? The one where television producers made it seem like the 150 or so people living in tents and makeshift shelters were there because of the collapsing economy? Yeah, it wasn't true. They were mostly mentally disturbed people, and the tent city "had actually been around for close to a decade."

-If you're interested in reading about a puff piece business profile on Larry Levine's Wall Street Prison Consultants, a firm created to help teach white-collar criminals "how to survive prison", check this out. (If you've watched Oz, it sounds like you can save your dollars, as most of the advice is pretty obvious. I do like that businessmen have to pay somebody to know that changing the channel when other people are watching something is a no-no. When I was in jail, I knew better then to tell a guy who outweighed me by 150 pounds of pure muscle that I wasn't interested in the edited version of I Come In Peace. I guess Wall Street bankers are just fucking morons.)

-Obama's release of the torture memos aside, Lexington questions whether or not he really is as anti-security as he's being painted right now. After all, his solictor-general still believes that some Guantanamo inmates will need to be held "indefinitely", and Obama himself has yet to rule out that whole "rendition" thing, where they send people to other countries for "interrogation", which we're still calling it, even though now we know it's just a mash-up of gross and useless. Lexington carves a pretty hard line with the whole thing: Obama should shut down rendition, and he should ensure, with consequences, that the whole torture thing is over and done with. It's not just crybabies complaining: torture doesn't achieve the goals it sets out too on any kind of reliable basis. As an aside--and this is me, to be clear--it's been proven over and over and over and over again that what is necessary to actual interrogations of Muslim extemists has pretty basic fundamentals: more people in the military and security services who can speak languages besides English and Spanglish, an intelligent and comprehensive understanding of the negotiations of Sharia, and a timeframe that allows for the building of a relationship. The evidence for the bombing of the USS Cole wasn't found through torture, it was born out of the negotiations between a Muslim FBI agent and a captured member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Those two engaged in religious debates for two weeks, and the FBI guy broke the motherfucker with actual, grown-up argument--no hands, no Jack Bauer. That's how this shit is supposed to work, and, when it's run by people who know what they're doing? 

That's how it does fucking work. So yeah, while it's fun and easy to decry these memos--which they certainly should be--never forget this: until the guy's stuck doing the job are replaced by smart people who went to college and held off on their dreams of being the world's coolest hipster and learned Arabic while studying the Koran, the job is going to be handed to whatever scared 22 year old it can be handed too. It's not enough to "be against" torture.

In other words?

حتى رجل

The Americaa

-Obama's whirlwind Latin American tour gets an article. Included are the whole "how things went in Mexico prior to that pig-flu thing", which pretty much boils down to more American acknowledgement of its responsibility towards the country it gets a shit load of illegal drugs from, and a 'tsk' towards a Democratic administration that seems uninterested in taking serious steps towards dealing with the current trade problems. After that, there's a quick nod for Obama's trip to meet Hugo Chavez--who was quoted as telling Obama "I want to be your friend", once again playing the doughy sweetheart part that no longer even pretends to fit him. Except for the doughy part. Oh, and no word on whether Chavez called Obama an "ignoramus" again.

--It would be nice to say this is a new feature, but god knows that's a level of optimism that only a fool could have when you're dealing with the news. That being said, here's your Global Hero Of The Week: Gustavo Moncayo, who hiked 1000 kilometers across Columbia in hopes that the attention he gained would force the Columbian government to agree to negotiate with the FARC guerrilla army for the release of his son, who the FARC have held captive for the last 11 years. Moncayo made the hike in 2007. Last Thursday the FARC agreed to release the hostage, who is now 30 years old. Oh, and it turns out there aren't as many hostages and kidnap victims as previously thought.

-Did you know that the Economist feels the need to read double meanings into every theme song a political candidate uses at a rally? This week, it's "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" and Michael Ignatieff of Canada. Not a bad article, but enough with the music analysis. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's schtick. oh shit i'm talking about me

-In case you were wondering, this sentence-- "Mr. Correa appears to be uncorrupt"--is the Economist's way of saying that they hate the president of Ecuador. Just so you know. He won re-election a couple of days ago, by the way.

Asia

-While we were on sabbatical, the Economist hired a new weekly columnist! (Buttonwood still doesn't get a full page.) The new guy or gal writes under the name "Banyan", and this week's episode is a classic in the long run of the Economist looking at Kim Jong Il and saying "hey, eat a dick you stupid freak". As Banyan sees it, the six-party talks between South Korea, China, Japan, Russia, North Korea and US should go ahead, whether North Korea participates or not. While that may smack--and it should, because that is the intent--of an overall "we'll decide what's best for you whether you like it or not" attitude, it does seem like the message isn't getting across. Anyway: I already like Banyan more than Buttonwood.

-Cambodia, never a fertile homeland of treating the peasants well, may have a bit of a rebellion on its hands if it goes ahead with an agreement to allow rich Kuwaitis a chance to take the food out of the mouths of the impoverished, whether the Cambodians grow it or not. Nice story, this one. Jeeeezzzus.

-Vietnam knows good and well what mining for bauxite does to the land it's culled from--it destroys it, screws up the water table for generations, and leaves it unusable for a relative eternity. But hey, China wants it, they have money, and it looks like it's up to some old American-beating Vietnamese generals to shut it down. We'll see.

-Two weeks ago, a fishing boat with 47 asylum seekers showed up off the coast off Australia. The boat exploded a few days later. While only a few died, it brought up the continuing problem that Australia still hasn't figured out how to deal with: refugees, how to treat them, and where they can go. At least they shut down those horrifying camps in the meantime.

Middle East and Africa

-Real quick one this week--forty people died in Kenya last week in what seems to be a tribal motivated gang war, the hastily constructed coalition government is squabbling over what to do with Hussein Ali, Death Squad Leader HK (Hunter-Killer), and the next election isn't for two more years. They still haven't resolved any of the issues that made the last election such a horrifying clusterfuck of murder and violence. Wasn't American Idol supposed to do one of their token charity trips to Africa by this point?

Europe

-How bad is the Ukrainian government handing things right now? I don't know, I can't come up with decent metaphors when I look at picures of Viktor Yushchenko. All I think about is that whole poisoned-with-dioxin thing that may or may not be true, but is still totally weird and changed his physical appearance so drastically.

-If only Frank Sobotka had lasted long enough to see his homeland in 2009: Poland, still toughing out the economy better than almost all of its eastern European peers. You'll always have my heart, Chris Bauer, no matter how many times you play child molesters.

-Spain keeps killing whoever runs the ETA, the ETA keeps putting new guys in charge and breaking agreements. Apparently the days of negotiations are over, and the ETA has a fight on its hands. These sort of stories meant a lot more to me back before we saw what happens when governments decide to go the hard way with extremist groups--success or failure, all current methods seem to end up hurting a ton of civilians in the process.

Britain

-Boy, the Economist is really saving the harsh words for their home office this week. First there's the leader about the budget, a tough look at Labour's mismanagement of the education system and the bungled set-up for the way student loans are handled. Bagehot finishes it off by telling the Labour Party to start playing nice if they want to stay in power. Oh well. This is always the one portion of the magazine where you really have to remember that the Economist takes an opinionated stance on the news while they report it. Have a party!

International

-Okay, none of this really registered this week. That racism conference may have not been a complete waste of time is the first article, the second is a call for reform of international arbitration. Boom goes the boredom: you win again, International squadron.

Business

-The face value column this week is a must-read for anybody who is interested in business bad assery, as it's a profile of the steampunk Sergio Marchionne and how he's going to chainsaw through Chrysler the same way he chain-sawed through Fiat. While I have a hard time believing that anybody short of Frank Castle could make that company profitable, this guy might pull off something interesting. While that still means that a lot of people are going to lose their job--Sergio seems to have been born without an ounce of sentimentality--he might save more than if the company is left to burn. Better than nothing, I'm thinking.

-The Middle East are bringing back trains, now that Lawrence of Arabia isn't around to screw things up. Good for them. Trains are adorable.

-Looks like a French nuclear-energy company spent years spying on Greenpeace. Seriously, somebody got paid to spy on Greenpeace? That's like a job somebody had. Considering their commitment to never shutting up, I can't imagine it's that hard to keep up with where Greenpeace plans to protest by simply friending them on Facebook.

-Okay, this article about DVR's is pretty interesting, and while I just hate, oh hate, to alienate anybody who reads this column, I gotta know: who the fuck ARE you people who tape television shows and still watch the commercials? Don't you understand the purpose of a DVR? Except for those Mother Nature Vitamin Water ads, I like those.

Finance and Economics

-Will the IMF or the World Bank get distracted by dealing with countries and put that whole "help the world's poor" thing on the back burner? Oh geez, this isn't even a hard one.

-When do commercial mortgages--many of which are in the same position as home mortgages--start to mature? Well, they mature at all kinds of different times. Some of them--$594 billion worth--start maturing this year. Real quick: a lot of those loan-to-value rations were intially around 85% to 95% and will be roughly around 60% now, property prices have dropped, at best, by at least 35% and...oh, the banks that do re-financing aren't doing well, I don't know if you heard about that. What's that mean?

Whole new set of problems.

-Here's a moratorium for you: i'm going to keep reading the articles about Dubai, but I'm totally going to stop caring. It's just too Bohemian Grove for me at this point. It's a theme park for the insanely wealthy, and I Don't Give A Shit.

Science and Technology

-Robots, baby, real robots, let's talk about robots. First up, the best thing to do regarding getting robots to see? Give them one eye only. Take a second...yeah, makes sense, right? Takes a lot less work to program a robot to interpret visual stimulus if you don't have to worry about syncing the eyes to each other as well. Robot two? Crazy flying robots, little ones, that can levitate. And no, I don't mean they can levitate in the far-off future, the one where you finally start going to the gym. I mean they got levitating tiny robots right now. Mothers, lock up your daughters: Skynet is right around the corner.

Arts and Entertainment

-Okay, one more of these: hands up if you want to read sixteen years worth of diary entries from the headmaster of Westminster. No, not for free. 

Yeah, that's what I thought. See you in the remainder bin, The Old Boys' Network. I won't care then, either.

-Hey, there's still really good sounding novels coming from American authors! American Rust sounds like a tough one, but the review has me bookmarking. Solid?

-Ivar Kreuger was one of the classiest scandalizers of the century, a guy who showed up and lied his way into fortune and fame, loaned the French government $70 million dollars, and forged Italian treasury bills. Oh, and he was called "The Match King." Why are old school thieves so much more awesome sounding than the sociopaths we have now?

-Sonic Youth played improv music alongside improv modern dance at BAM. Quit lying, you didn't go.

Obituary: Eddie George

-He died a Lord--how he got there was a route taken by few. Thankless years spent working as a British central banker, a job that few (myself included) have the veracity of intellect required to even ponder as a possibility, a man whose description comes soaked, as is the wont of its writer, in admiration, respect and love. I can't admit to coming away from reading this one with a much greater understanding of the vagaries of what this man did, and while I'm sure that he had his flaws, it's touching to see writing so tied up in a barely disguised awe. Whomever it was that wrote this one? Nice job.

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Sorry for the long absence and brief treatment of later sections. Tough horse to get back on. But it's back, for better or worse.