The World Last Week
-Shouldn't it be a bigger news story that Muqtada al-Sadr called for a truce and yet there were still 79 of his gunmen available to be killed? It wasn't too long ago that Sadr's word, and rule, was purported to carry a massive amount of weight. That sort of disloyalty is a pretty severe turn of events. At this stage though, it could still be a fluke.
-It's completely ridiculous to turn the killing of Aden Hashi Ayro into such a big deal, which is what the American press seems to want to do with it. The death of an al-Qaeda leader is news, yes, but considering that it was in Somalia, a place that has turned into a fertile breeding ground for every major terrorist organization in the world, it's nothing to get excited about. It's disgusting what's happened to the civilians of Somalia since Bill Clinton pulled out--America may never have succeeded there, but the Somalian people deserve better than to watch their country become a feeding trough for the thugs and warlords of the world.
-It seems odd that Austria would announce that they're going to launch a campaign to "improve the country's image" after a 73-year-old man gets busted for keeping his daughter in a basement for 24 years while using her to breed seven more children. I mean, go for improving your image, but the obvious announcement they should have made first is that they took that 73-year-old and lynched him in the fucking street. Bam, image approval achieved.
-Mars buys Wrigley, and nobody is quite sure how much they should care.
Leaders
-Lot of stuff that merits more research about China. Mostly though, it's certainly an interesting turn of events that the Chinese government seems to think they can control the mob they've unleashed. Xenophobic complaints aside, the Chinese people who are right now screaming for the head of George Clooney brought to them on a plate of Coca Cola could very easily start to go after the government that keeps fucking them out of their land and giving them shit jobs in exchange. It's also pretty brilliant that the Anglo-Saxon world is content to farm all it's manufacturing to China and then complain about Chinese pollution. Maybe you should just stop buying so many fucking purses, you hypocritical fucking bicyclists.
-Someday, some politician is going to explain to people, in the simplest terms possible, that giving huge farm subsidies to corporate farming conglomerates is part of the reason that cops don't get paid much and schoolchildren don't have enough teachers. Until that day comes, the corporate farming conglomerates are second only to the airlines in what makes up the real welfare state. Low income single mothers have nothing on CAPS and Delta. Disgusting.
-The most fascinating non-dead people story this year, outside of whatever goes down between China and the Dalai Lama, is going to be what comes out of the supermarket trust-busting maneuvers in Britian. Americans should pay close attention to this case--it could turn out to be the biggest cartel fuck-up-all-consumers since Enron. Maybe even bigger.
Letters
-No surprise here--all letters to the Economist are the more boring than even the most graph-addled advertisements. It's irritating how many wanna be pundit dipshits in America write in to this magazine. Hey fuck you, me!
Briefing Sarkozy's France
-Nobody needs this much information on Sarkozy. All we need is the same sentence, repeated over and over again: "Squandered potential." They can insert a dialog box on the side that says something about how labor unions in France have no interest in the future of the country, and maybe a little note about the ineffectual nature of the obnoxious student protesting out of France's university system. (46% of undergraduates drop out in the first year? That's a number to be proud of.) Maybe they'd enjoy college more if they weren't outside every other week complaining about things that might ensure they'll have a fucking job when they get their degree in historical botany. If it was war or sexism they were en masse about, than they'd at least be deserving of respect. Oh well. It's not like Sarkozy was the second coming of Eddie & The Cruisers.
United States
-With hindsight, Hilary Clinton signed her death warrant prior to this weeks loss when she said, at a fucking baseball stadium "We're going to knock balls out of the country's park for the home team, which is America." That's some mouth diarrhea, courtesy of old mutton lips. Following up on that little piece of magic, she used a poem about the Holocaust to lament the loss of steel and auto company jobs. Classy!
-Thanks to the Economist for mentioning the one thing that nobody brings up about gas prices with all the nonsensical fantasies about curtailing the petrol tax for the summer: higher gas prices make people buy less oil, and even George Bush acknowledges that America's addiction to gas has to be broken. If you're really into hating terrorist, maybe you should try carpooling, douchemaster.
-The murder of Sean Bell was a horrific tragedy, but how, exactly, is making police academy recruits spend four days at the Apollo theater listening to Al Sharpton helping to prevent future mistakes? What's he telling them that takes four days? Hell, the Doha trade talks don't take four days.
-Lexington's column about Jeremiah Wright is fine, sure, but in the end the best way to deal with this sort of stuff is just to ignore it and move on. You can't debate this kind of stuff--it's a total end-sum game. Freedom of speech-ify it, move the fuck on.
The Americas
-It's always a wild card, the Americas section. This time, it's all about transportation. Canada will make your electric cars, but you can't drive them. Of course, if you're a South American drug runner, you can build your own submarine. (This is a concept that merits examination on more cop shows. God I miss The Wire already.)
Asia
-This section is a bit of a drag this week--some stuff about Japan's disgustingly common acceptance of suicide and more about the specific nature of the pollution that's incensing so much of China's population. On top of that, the Malaysian government might finally change parties, after 51 years! (Yeah, I don't know if that's good or not either.)
Middle East and Africa
-A lot of interesting stuff here, obviously Mugabe and Zimbabwe takes the lead. Near the end though, that's the real nasty business. The Congo is currently trying to make the growing plight of rape and sexual torture more of an issue--as always, this is stuff that is too gruesome for even the "it bleeds, it leads" tactics of American media, and it doesn't help that the United Nations likes to dick around with only a few African tragedies at a time. Not that Darfur shouldn't remain an issue, but seriously, here's a passage from the article:
"UN reports tell of gang rapes, leaving victims with appaling phsyical and psychological injuries; rapes committed in front of families or whole communities; male relatives forced at gunpoint to rape their own daughters, mothers or sisters; women used as sex slaves forced to eat excrement or the flesh of murdered relatives. Some women victims have been murdered by bullets fired from a gun barrel shoved into their vagina. Some men, says a worker for UNICEF, have been forced to simulate having sex in holes dug in the ground, with razor blades stuck inside."
Now, I don't want to know, or read, or hear about that either. But right now, the Congolese NGOS are at such a loss for how to fight this epic problem that they're hoping just to "draw attention to the plight of civilians." They aren't even at the point where they're asking for money. Just some attention. Nice world. Thanks, God!
Europe
-Maybe it's just the aftermath of dealing with the Congo article and the ensuing research it inspired in this reader, but I don't give a shit at all about German general referendum politics, Rome's new mayor, or the non-stop masturbation that is the European Union and their goddamn whining bullshit. There's a reason why Russia likes to shit all over the EU, and it's part and parcel of their nattering old lady behavior. Reading about the EU negotiations is like watching an elderly community that decided to fire the staff and dose all the residents with methamphetamines. Sure, they're moving pretty fast. But what are they accomplishing?
-Luckily, Bagehot's column brings us back to what matters: if you want to be elected mayor of a town in England, you can wear your monkey suit from your days as football mascot. Ahh, Britain. Always pushing for the world's respect.
International (Why does this section exist)
-As always with the Economist, what seems like it should still be a front page story with everybody else is still only being mentioned here. (I think. I watch a lot of Hell's Kitchen with the rest of my time, so maybe everybody else is talking about the fact that possible nuclear weapons factory in Syria was blown up without warning by the Israeli air force, and that's it might have even caught America completely in the dark when they did so.) In other words...creepy shit, courtesy of North Korea's plan to make the world a much worse place than it was five minutes ago. The thing that makes North Korea a bit more unsettling than the craziest terrorist is that North Korea doesn't seem to have any type of motive or goal in mind. Kim Jong Il just likes fucking shit up. At least Osama has some kind of fucked up agenda for what he wants in the end.
Business
-The ongoing death of newspapers, report number 94562. Please retire the nickname "Grey Lady" for the NY Times. If somebody actually used it in conversation in earshot, I think I would start crying. Thankfully, there's no knee-jerk naive optimism here. Newspapers are dying. To make it worse, one of the few that isn't is being saved by Rupert Murdoch. Black = white, and cats and dogs? Living together.
Briefing, Finance And Economics, Science And Technology
-More anti-trust stuff, that's great, the remainder is pretty impenetrable. Still curious as to why Buttonwood gets treated like the columnist that nobody cares about.
Books and Arts
-As always, the worst section of the newspaper (hey, that's what they call it.) The Economist should really stick to reviewing finance and political books. Their fiction reviews are tiresome and stupid, and even though they usually ignore movies, for some reason they gave a positive nod to that dreck of a flick that Morgan Spurlock put out. That's the seventh sign, right there. Puke.
-Obituary
-Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, huh? Always pisses this reader off when we haven't heard of the person being obited. They only do one a week, and they skip a few weeks a year, so when you haven't heard of the one dead person of the week that the Economist focuses on, it's always an embarrassing reflection of the low level of education here in the Brooklyn office. No two ways about it. In the mildest form of defense we've got, he was a hardcore Catholic Archbishop, and that's one area that is about as interesting as replacing the loofah with a cheese grater. Still--goddamn it. Better luck next week.
Next week's cover is of Obama--obviously the tragic turn of events in Myanmar occurred after art details were in, but that will certainly be rectified with the following issue. Articles are probably online as well, but that's sort of like Christmas peeking. Expect more genius maneuvers--on their part, not ours.
Before the doctor gave me an Ambien prescription, The Economist was how I got to sleep. You've just made that magazine a thousand times more interesting. This had better be an ongoing series.
Posted by: Sharif | 2008.05.09 at 09:25
Holy crap, this is an awesome post. I second the call for this to be a continuing feature.
I always feel horribly uninformed when it comes to international news (and most domestic stuff too, but fuck, the important stories, like Jeremiah Wright's latest diatribe or Miley Cyrus' naked back are all but inescapable). That shit in the Congo is fucked up; I feel dirty for reading it, like it was from some sort of exploitative horror porn, but it's real, man. Why the fuck isn't anybody doing anything about it? Oh yeah, nobody cares about Africa. God, people have messed up priorities (I say as I go back to reading about Geo-Force or some stupid shit like that).
On a more positive note, I agree about the need for less use of oil, but it's tough in the US; we've basically structured most of the country so that everybody has to drive for an hour a day just to go to work. When the real crisis hits, we're going to be fucked. And getting rid of an 18-cent gas tax for a couple months isn't going to do much. I had been thinking of trying to organize a carpool-facilitation service at my office, so now I think I'll have to do something like that, just out of a sense of trying to do something, anything.
On a final note, douchemaster is a great word. I'll have to try to work it into conversation. When it comes to semi-offensive neologisms, you're my main source.
Posted by: Matthew J. Brady | 2008.05.13 at 13:51