-Surprise! Zimbabwean talks ended, nothing changed, Mugabe last seen eating human flesh outside local Denny's.
-Obama didn't get a boost in his numbers by going on a world tour, but I'd argue that maybe that wasn't the goal. Oh, who am I kidding. Of course it was. Whoops!
-Turkey didn't ban the Justice and Development Party. Do you know what this means? I do! But I probably won't remember.
-10,000 people showed up to protest the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, which is sort of disgusting. Then again, it turned into a mild riot, and some people got the sorely deserved shitkicking they deserve. I'm all for freedom of speech, right to congregate, the whole nine yards. I'm also totally in support of beating the unholy hell out of whatever type of asshole wants to protest in support of a genocidal maniac.
-Ecuador is officially kicking the United States out of their country--no more anti-drug flights will be taking off or landing at their airports, making Ecuador another in the line of countries that is starting to realize that the war on drugs is a big fucking joke.
-The Vatican is letting a bishop resign to focus on the job of being Paraguay's president, which is sort of a change, considering what a bang-up job Catholics did for helping out South America during that previous time period starting about 60 years ago and lasting until this past July. Liberation Theology might have used your support back when they were stringing up every Christian they could find. Thanks though!
-Siemens now leads the world in impressive corporate maneuvers, as they are suing 11 members of their executive board for breaching their responsibilities. I don't recall the last time something this saucy went down.
Leaders
-Did you know that the Economist compared the Communist Chinese government to the Nazi's back when the IOC was figuring out who should get the Olympics? Yeah, neither did I. Well, they did, they aren't sorry, and here's an article about why our British reporters think that the Olympics have brought nothing but bad news to the Chinese. Now here's an article about how the Chinese is sponsoring a group of government-organized vigilantes, and they wear t-shirts with the slogan "Good luck Beijing" as they wander around meting out Communist street justice. (That's a good name for a band, Communist Street Justice.) The vigilante article also deals a little with all the various websites international journalists won't be able to access, along with three that China will get to play with once again: the BBC, Wikipedia and Playboy. Playboy has a website?
-Here's the scoop on the Freddie Maac and Frannie Mae bailout, which can serve as the future model for when you want to complain about repulsive government corporate decisions. While I pretty much agree that something had to be done for Freddie & Fannie, I doubt anybody could convince me they should get money with no strings attached, no consequences for shareholders, and their vast lobbying firm still intact.
-One of the odd little stances that the Economist has always had (or at least as long as I've been reading it) is that they see no moral or intellectual problem with steroid use in sport. They just flat out don't care. As far as their argument goes, gene therapy, blood doping and old school beef injections aren't going away so hey, why not embrace bacne and shrunken genitals? The way they put it makes sense, I guess, but it just smacks as being a bit naive.
Letters
-You know how David Denby and other non-Dark Knight loving critics got all kinds of wacko death threats and infantile insults hurled at them for not liking Christopher Nolan's super-hero flick? Well, if the Economist was a movie critic, then being nice about EU enlargement is their Dark Knight smackdown, and Achal Prakash is a whiny motherfucker who needs to relax and go watch a Braves game.
United States
-Hey, it's focus on swing state time! This time up is Ohio, one of those random states that, through no fault of anyone's but God, happens to be split down the middle into almost even amounts of Democrats and Republicans. Why can't more places be like New York and Georgia? Reliably locked into one party, regardless of politic, reason or value? It's almost like what people in Ohio think matters. Disgusting!
-Maybe someday people will realize that it was a lowly county inspector name Bill Bobbitt saved the life of their children, or even their own, when he decided to combat the growing problem of West Nile virus-carrying mosquitoes in empty California pools. Unlikely. He doesn't seem to be doing it for he acclaim. Did you know their was a growing West Nile problem in Cali? If you didn't, it might be because of this dude, and his magic fish.
-I'd have to second the Economist's description of Mount Rushmore as "absurd." I wish they'd give me the name of the writer who described it as "incongruous and ridiculous as keeping a cow in the rotunda of the capitol building." Anyway, it was built on the stolen land of some American Indians. Doesn't that just kind of mean everywhere?
-Lexington gives the political obituary of Senator Ted Stevens career, which has finally come to the sort of miserable ending it probably should have hit years ago. Just to make sure that nobody gets too excited though, Charlemagne ends his column by pointing out that Ted Stevens has been replaced as chairman of the Appropriations Committee by Robert Byrd, a 90-year-old Democrat from West Virginia. Now, I don't want to make anybody think I'm an ageist or anything, but let me be blunt: if the best possible candidate for the Senate in West Virginia is really someone who is NINETY FUCKING YEARS OLD, then I'm going to shove my nutsack in one of those blenders that can destroy an iPhone. My dad just bought one, and I've got plenty of free time.
The Americas
-Raul Castro has decided that he's not going to make any more grand pronouncements of change in Cuba, and The Economist seems (if I'm reading between the lines correctly) to think that's a bad thing. I've got no more faith in Raul Castro then the next guy, but his claim that change will have to wait, as "We cannot spend more than what we have" sounds, I don't know, exactly like what one would want a leader of a poor country ridden with corruption to say. It's certainly preferable to a straight up lie.
-Tasers don't kill people, heart conditions and drug and alcohol abuse do. If tasers happen to be used on drunks or junkies and they die, that's totally on them. Wait, really? At least Canada is thinking about figuring this out before they hand out more stun-guns.
Asia
-Are some of India's Muslims finally starting to form official jihad based terrorist organizations, or is the Indian Mujahideen a front for another group based out of Pakistan? The Economist, and the Indian government are both cautious in their assessments. Either way, the violence and terrorism that have started showing up in recent weeks (19 bomb blasts on July 26th alone, killing 51) is fearsome stuff--maybe even more so because of the lack of direct evidence proving the existence of the aforementioned group that took credit.
-President Lee Myung-Bak, who was able to fight off 84% of public opinion, the majority of his cabinet, all for the sake of American beef, has now turned his sights on the journalists and trade-unions. He want to make it illegal to "post disinformation" on the internet. I'll join in on the fun. President Lee Myung-Bak killed Nicole Brown Simpson. There you go.
-Take note: Afghan soldiers are rapidly becoming badasses, and the men who train them are proud to pat them on the head and give them some more money to have cool shit to kill other people with. I realize that's supposed to be good news, but don't we remember what happened the last time another country got involved in Afghanistan and spent a bunch of time and money making sure they were on the cutting edge of killing people? You know, that shit from a few years ago.
Middle East and Africa
-You know, there's a type of bottled water you can buy that's called "Tap'd NY" which is prominently labeled as "Purified New York City Tap Water." Really, and it costs as much as Smartwater. Did you know that? Isn't that kind of weird? I bought some. Oh, Ehud Olmert, prime minister of Israel has officially announced he's stepping down, because he's a bribe-taking thief.
-Well, here's a story that doesn't bode well for the near future of peace negotiations--Palestinians are killing other Palestinians. It's Fatah versus Hamas, in one of those fights that means a shitload to them and yet causes the rest of the world to kind of drop their jaw and go "b-b-but...hey. wait-no...look, just stop it! Stop doing that!" Look, I want to take what goes on in that area of the world seriously as much as the next whining American with no real stake other than concern for common humanity, but god damn, sometimes it just makes you fucking tired, you know? Who wins in a fight between Hamas and Fatah?
-You know, as much as American fraternities and weird British orgy clubs get shit for being havens of binge drinking and date rape, at least they don't call themselves "Campus Cults" and turn into roving death squads that kill professors and kidnap the family members of school officials. So they can get good grades. This is in Nigeria, and I'm totally being fucking serious.
Europe
-The only major water shortage I've ever been through is the annual ones where you get fined for watering your lawn more than twice a week, so I can't imagine what it would be like to live in Nicosia (in Cyprus) right now--you're permitted to have your tap on for a total of six hours over the course of two days. That's it. Well, at least Cyprus is a totally stable place to live besides...oh, what's that? Still divided into Turkish and Greek controlled areas, with the threat of violence constantly overhead? Shucks.
-Man, the EU really needs to figure out their divorce law weirdness. Either that or start a crappy tv show with Susan Dey. If it gets picked up, they can always replace her with Annie Potts.
-Did you know the Romanian language doesn't have a precise word for "accountability?" Not a joke, it totally doesn't. The Economist, oh ye kings of dry wit ye, propose that might be why Daniel Morar, otherwise known as the toughest anti-corruption crusader in Romanian history, is going to be replaced by somebody with a softer touch. Something in the teddy bear, human infant department.
Britain
-In the What The Fuck Just Happened Department, here's a first in a long...ok, to be totally honest, a first time for me completely. Maybe the Economist has done one of these weird fake anecdote stories about a politician before, but I've never seen one. I've seen them in Harper's and the New Yorker--you know, those kind of things where somebody like Steve Martin writes a story about the time Noam Chomsky got in a fistfight with Jack Nicholson over a hot dog. But here? And to be so not funny?
-Some of the IRA guys are still around, but there having trouble. They were able to kill a pizza deliveryman, for no reason other then him trying to protect somebody else back in June, and a shitty home-made bomb failed to kill a couple of police officers in July, otherwise, they're just tired relics being tired relics. It would be nice if MI5 didn't have to fix this one, but it looks like they'll be the ones.
-While it might seem a little over-the-top for Bagehot to call the replacement of Gordon Brown regicide to some, long-time Bagehot readers will recognize that he's just playing the "big words" card. Good column, but it's another re-tread of the playing-to-the-choir "Nobody likes Gordie" article that this publication is so in love with lately. The more I read Bagehot, the more he seems like the RZA of political columns. Sometimes he just phones it in.
International
-There's something to be said for this sort of shotgun approach, wherein the writers take a subject (in this case, the various ways the civilized world deals with the elderly) and then tries to make a larger point about the whole thing, but it's so chock full of generalizations and vagaries that, by the end, you've learned nothing but a smattering of trivia. Hey, wait a second.
-I didn't even know that al-Qaeda had a chief poisoner, and that a bunch of videos of dogs being gassed to death turned up after the fall of the Taliban. He might just be dead from a cross-border missile strike in Pakistan. (Courtesy of some American troops.) I don't really see the value in gassing dogs. That's just me though, maybe you have a masters degree.
Business
-Remember all those articles the Economist wrote about how nobody was really sure what it would mean when Putin turned over the title to Dmitry Medvedev? They were hedging their bets, which was a good call: because Vladimir has brought out the knives (as the cartoon attached to the article shows) and he's going after Mechel, the same way he went after Yukos. Hey, big Russian corporations: watch your ass. Big dog's hungry.
-Who's going to take over when Steve Jobs finally heads off? Maybe somebody from this little article. Hopefully this doesn't mean they'll bring back those hideous purple computers again. Lame. That aside, I like that Jobs is keeping his health status to himself. Everybody knows what pancreatic cancer means--the guy shouldn't have to dole out constant updates.
Finance & Economics
-Do you want to be the one kid on the bus who can talk for a decent five minute stretch about why the Doha round failed again last week? Then you should read this article, and make sure to memorize the numbers on soybeans. Everybody will make fun of you if you get it wrong.
Science and Technology
-Okay, I read the entire article about the Hadron collider. I read it twice. And you know what? That silly youtube rap video is pretty much spot on. Here you go, one more time. By the way, no, you aren't going to die because this thing "creates black holes." I'm sure that neither I, the Economist, or the video will convince you otherwise if you think that, but still. Just throwing it out there. Hadron Collider: not something you should be in fear of.
Books and Arts
-New book about the French Revolution! Good news too, it focuses on five revolutions. All of them in France! The Economist says that the book is confusing, and will be very difficult to read if the reader doesn't have a previous grasp on French history. Whatever man, I'm sure this will be a bestseller. Harvard Press is publishing it in the US in September. I doubt I'm the only guy who will be counting the minutes.
-Remember when they came out with Dante's Peak around the same time as the Tommy Lee Jones V. Lava movie? Or when Morgan Freeman was the President in one theater while Bruce Willis was trying not to make out with Ben Affleck in the other� Okay, now pretend those movies were books, and that they weren't about meteors or volcanoes, but that they were about the history of the destruction of Beijing at the hands of the Communist party. Ready? Now ask yourself how fast you can get to Amazon.
-Silliest thing I learned about the Chinese governments response to the earthquake was here, in the first sentences of an article about the shitty art that's on display for people heading to the Olympics: apparently the government commissioned a bunch of artists to create a bunch of large paintings of soldiers saving people from the earthquake. They wanted it up and close to the games, so they can show tourists...what, exactly? Do they really think that the people who are traveling across the globe to see the Olympics is the the type of person most easily swayed by shitty propaganda? It's not like poor Chinese farmers are getting tickets. Whatever, I'm sure there's an obvious reason.
Obituary: Sarah Conlon
-I'd imagine a good many will have some frame of reference for Mrs. Conlon--those who might not know the story of the "Guildford Four" probably have some recollection of the Jim Sheridan film starring Daniel Day-Lewis, In The Name of The Father. Those who don't can get a rough idea of the background of that classic study in legal insanity and wrongful imprisonment, those who only know the movie can discover the same thing I did--that Sarah was a lot more involved in the eventual release of her son then the movie depicts it. (The way I remember it was that there was a lot of shit with the lawyer listening to a tape recording of the dulcet tones of Mr. Day-Lewis.) There's no mention of her fateful meeting with a Father McKinley, and his assistance in building the campaign that eventually freed ten of the eleven--her husband, of course, had died while in jail. All the years with him that the British legal system stole from her never got repaid. Hopefully she can make up for that now.
-Tucker Stone, 2008
Next week in the Economist--more about Russia, maybe something about shark-fishing, which is why you're getting this article early, and you're getting it shorter. What?
I don't think Obama's world tour was about the numbers...at least not the short term ones. Obama's playing the long game, seeing the whole board, like he did in the primary. The cred and goodwill built up during the world tour will be there for him to call on later, when he's doing other things specifically for the short term numbers.
Posted by: Jason Michelitch | 2008.08.07 at 18:14
While I think that's totally possible, I have a hard time imagining Obama doing anything that isn't a calculated decision to focus on immediate goals--his campaign has been a non-stop force of intelligent politiking so far. One of the main differences that he picked up on with this election season, that went ignored by other failed candidates, was not to jack all his faith in long-term campaigning. Hilary, Thompson, Giuliani--they're all the loser examples of what happened to presidential candidates who thought they could win the nomination by focusing on the long game. Obama ended up beating them because he had a focused battle plan and didn't ignore the immediacy of the numbers, of the individual state by state trek. (Oh, and the fact that he can outspeak any politician alive right now.) For me, I can't imagine a guy this calculated and intelligent to have done anything that didn't have some kind of immediate, direct reward for his candidacy. He knows full well that the polls are still splitting things right down the middle between him and McCain, and I doubt he would have taken so much time off to dabble in international hobnobbing if he didn't think it would've broken that number in his favor.
And while, yeah, he'll be able to call upon that goodwill down the line--it's not like he wasn't going to be able to do that anyway. He's been triumphed as the risen Christ by the rest of the world since he put Hilary to bed. Which is fine, I guess, since McCain's response is to ride on a fucking golf cart with George Bush's dad, which made him look like he and a buddy were escaping from an old folks home.
Posted by: Tucker Stone | 2008.08.11 at 09:43