-The Pakistani government "dismissed" that New York Times article that said the US is considering doing even more of those robot plane bombing runs across the Afghani border. So, yeah. I wasn't aware that part of fact-checking articles about unsettling US military decisions was checking to see if Pakistan believed the article or not.
-If you're going to film North Korea across the border, be prepared for the North Koreans to detain you anyway.
-Huh, looks like people have forgotten September 11th, as a Gallup poll shows that American support for the war has dropped to 42%, the lowest ever. C'mon people. Revenge takes time, haven't you ever read that French book they made a Guy Pearce movie about? The one about the sandwich?
-New Mexico is totally done with the death penalty, which means that I bet a lot of people are going to get killed in New Mexico, because the death penalty is a totally awesome crime deterrent. Seriously, I would kill like four people right now if it wasn't for the death penalty.
-Russia plans to spend $140 billion on new weapons. Last time I read something about the Russian military, it sounded like they were more in need of boots and radios, but whatever. Guns and missiles are fun too.
-That Josef Fritzl guy--the dude who raped his daughter and kept her in a weird basement construction for years, along with his rape-produced children--pled guilty. Interestingly enough, there is absolutely no punishment in existence, nor will there ever be, that will ever satisfy any sane person. Hopefully, Hell is sort of like they make it seem in horror movies.
-A trade of one Israeli sergeant for 450 Hamas prisoners fell through. Wrap your brain around that. Wrapped? Okay, now give me a dollar.
-Hey, Economist. You already told us last week that the shoe-thrower got three years in prison. Seriously, if you aren't going to add new information, don't repeat the same blurb. Magazine is long enough.
-And writing a blurb about how a whole group of Canadians showed up and threw shoes at a conference center where George W. Bush was speaking doesn't make it okay.
-Is kind of funny though.
-I guess it's sort of a step-up in cancer causing industries to go from Big Tobacco to a mining company. At the same time, how the fuck do you sleep at night, Jan du Plessis?
-50 out of Lindt & Sprungli's 80 American chocolate stores are closing. I can't imagine this is a big blow to anybody except their employees, but then again, I'm not a grossly obese person who eats chocolate when sad.
-Finally, and I'm not sure where to put this, but it was interesting and you won't find it on the website. There are four multiple page advertisements in this week's Economist. Ad placement in the Economist is almost always one-pagers, so the site of so many spreads is pretty unusual. One of them is a real headscratcher--it's a two page ad made to look like an article, and it's about how Thailand's new Prime Minister is totally kickass at fighting Intellectual Property piracy. It's not a good imitation of an Economist article--font and layout are all wrong--but it's the first time they've run one of these, as much as my memory serves. Not a good sign for the magazine, although it still holds true that the Economist is able to depend on actual sales more than advertising dollars.
-Will the world never tire of homages to New Yorker covers? Oh well. One doesn't turn to the Economist for their cutting-edge graphic choices--they still haven't done anything cover-wise as nice as last year's agitprop cover portraying Vladimir Putin as a technicolor Lenin in control of the Dire Straits tank brigade. Anyway: China. They are the world's manufacturer, their economic choices have a major impact on the world, and yet they're beholden less to global agreement--as they always carve their own terms into everything--and they're enjoying their time in the sun, a time that may or may not last as long as they think it will, but will probably be longer than some American economists would prefer. The funny thing about hearing American blowback towards China is that it skirts the one minor quibble that the Economist is more than willing to discuss: that America seems to view China as a competitor, whereas the rest of the world is more concerned about the fact that one major global economic superpower was already problematic enough. As the Economist puts it, and as the discussion should probably focus, it's not so much that China may matter more than America--it's that nobody else besides the two seem to matter much at all.
-The pope--and I'm only mildly embarrassed to admit I didn't hear about this nonsense until just recently--ran his very human mouth in places where some people were willing to question whether that whole "infallible" thing made any sense whatsoever, and it turned into a nice little comedy of dumbassery. First up, he said that condoms can't help with the spread of AIDS--he said it in fucking Africa, nice one--and suggested (rather strongly) that the solution to the epidemic was good old chastity, abstinence and "correct behavior." Around the same time, the news came out that the Catholic Church had excommunicated some Brazilian doctors who had performed an abortion on a 9-year old girl. She was pregnant with twins, the product of being Raped By Her Catholic Dad. Oh, and then they kicked the girl's mom out of the church. (The rapist dad got to stay!) When they started getting static for the decision, they issued "regrets" that it had been decided so hastily. Eventually they agreed to criticize the decision as well. The article doesn't specify if they've done anything beyond this, and you know what? Google it for yourself if you want to know how this plays out. I don't need to hear whatever nonsense arguments and debate goes into the discussion of whether or not nine year old girls, raped by their father, get to go to some fucking scumbag church for nine year old daughter rapers. Fuck everybody involved in this piece of shit tragedy.
-The Economist is going to come down on one side of the AIG bonus scandal, that's clear: that politicians shouldn't be allowed to change the basic nature of legal contracts. I understand the sentiment, but right about now, the sentiment of the mob--that anybody who is getting a "bonus" while working for companies that are afloat solely because of public taxpayer funding--makes a heck of a lot more ground-level sense. While it still seems unlikely that America will go the current route so popular in France, nobody expected France to be doing that shit either about 9 months ago. (Well, maybe they did, but God knows I don't keep up with what people say about France.) There's some decent meat to the other Economist point here though--if there's nothing Barack Obama can do to legally get the money back, than it's going to make a lot of people question whether the President has enough power. I think you can ask the American military how they feel about a President who is given free reign to do as he wants over the chortling masses of Congress.
-Hey, it's time for another blood-heavy crash of Internet start-ups, this one being companies based around advertising dollars. I wonder how reliable the predictions are, as I've started to become a little suspicious of the quality of the Economist's tech-reporting sector--the last quarterly, the one from a few weeks back, was outdated at least a month before publication--but maybe that's just me, and I'm reading too much into the fact that any section that tries to pretend that a bunch of new businesses going under can be attributable to root causes besides the continuing global economic crisis. Either way, fuck Myspace, Twitter and Facebook: if you guys start begging for hand-outs, I'm going to shit down my own throat.
Letters
-In the Economist's continuing saga of trying to shape my limited understanding of the residents of San Francisco by publishing the irritating letters of what I pray are a minority of the citizenry, Clive McCarthy firmly lands in the court of Smug, an area wherein I will embrace no competition. You're a smart-ass, Mr. McCarthy. But you aren't my fucking smartass. Shut the hell up about your recycling program.
-Hey, because America's homeowners don't already have enough to consider suicide about, the Economist feels the need to remind you that being stuck in a house you can't pay for means you can't Tom Joad up to head for the greener pastures of picking strawberries in a pasture. How pleasant of them. Let us all close our eyes and hope that anybody who lost their job is also a bad person who kicks infants and quotes Law And Order: SVU. God forbid they be somebody who can skateboard in a wind tunnel.
-Is Gavin Newsom a serious contender for California's next governor? He just might be. Now, if you're anything like me, you've read the last few articles about California's economy, and you're probably thinking that you'd have to be crazy to want to govern that state. Well, Newsom may be crazy--but according to this article, he's totally fucking hot.
-Is Obama backtracking on his pledge to reach across the aisle by utilizing his still potent online and national approval rating? Is he shitting on Republicans? Oh god, this story has to be an exaggeration, there's just no way that could be true.
-The "smart grid", which is one of those completely obvious and yet rarely talked about programs to help America attain some level of energy efficiency on a level beyond buying an expensive air conditioner may finally get back in the running, and this article is a damn good piece about why it would be awesome if more people gave a fuck. Sure, electrical smart grids, the kind that can integrate all those fanciful new technologies while improving the delivery of the old ones, that's not a very exciting story. But hey, the only reason we aren't dead from fucking polio and rickets is because scientists were willing to put off reading Charles Dickens and doing opium to focus on boring shit. That's an ad campaign for you, free of charge: "Boring Shit: It Makes A Difference."
-Texans fight rattlesnakes, and the Economist felt the need to write about it. Don't read this story, it's stupid.
-Lexington's article this week is about how awesome Michelle Obama is, and how it sucks that...well, somebody, is forcing/making/allowing her to wander around and give pointless speeches and show off her arms on magazine covers. (Did you know that a lot of people think she has awesome arms, and that they write about this a lot? I guess you read InStyle and the Oprah magazine then. Good for you?) I'm not really sure what to add to this--sure, it would be awesome if she did more serious talks, I guess. I'm sorry, is this a real column? She's not a child. If she wants to do Vogue covers and give puff piece interviews, whatever, it's her call. Lindsay Lohan should stop driving too, jesus, we're not these people's mom. Who cares?
The Americas
-Mexico was given the right to impose "retaliatory tariffs" on the United States after NAFTA agreed that the whole Mexican trucks aren't allowed to cross the US border thing was in total violation of the NAFTA agreements. That was back in 2001. Mexico chose to play nice and work with George Bush, which is how they came up with the pilot program that allowed some Mexican trucks to make their delivery, thus forgoing the solution that the US government--under the guidance of the Teamsters--had come up with: Mexican trucks unload at the border, have their shit checked for customs, reload, cross the border, and immediately unload again, going onto an American truck. (If this sounds like it's not efficient, or that it isn't environmentally friendly, you're right, it is neither.) This week, Obama scrapped the pilot program completely. Mexico--after 8 years of being nice about the fact that even the pilot program was a carrot designed to keep them happy after an open violation of NAFTA regulation--finally brought the tariff hammer down, imposing tariffs of up to 45% of various American imports. They focused specifically on items that are important to multiple American states, but not the staple products that are necessary to the Mexican people. Game point?
-Can you get fired just for hanging out with Fidel Castro? Not if you're Sean Penn, but hey, Sean Penn isn't the foreign minister of Chile. Well, he's not the foreign minister of Chile yet. That dude is a freak.
Asia
-Worth checking out this Pakistan story, although it's certainly overshadowed now by this weeks horrible suicide bombing. It's all "first-rate political theatre" all the time, with Nawaz Sharif coming up with a movie of the week level event to please the screaming hordes. I think we can all start counting the remaining minutes that Asif Zardari is going to remain president, if we haven't already.
-Macau is being really mean to Hong Kong tourists. Yeah, I know. No really. I know.
-Still reeling from those horrible wildfires, Australia now has to deal with an oil spill that has eviscerated the tourist-based income of some of the world's best beaches. The clean-up "is unlikely to be finished until Easter." Wait, Easter isn't that far away. Not that this isn't bad, fuck, looks terrible. But we're talking Easter 09, right? That's weeks from now.
-Thailand is attempting to keep quiet their new "force Burmese migrant workers out of the country" initative, but the Economist, who missed the memo that told most news organizations to quit paying attention to Myanmar, publishes it anyway. While spotlighting shitbags means you still end up reading about shitbags, hey, that's why it's called medicine. Because it makes you gag. (Okay, it's probably because of some Latin cognate, and c'mon. Latin?)
-Three pages on Iran's coming election, and whoa baby, this is one of those three page articles, alright. Fucking thing is practically a "briefing", one of those opening stories that follows the Leaders section. I ain't complaining, no, it's informative as all hell, and it got me thinking that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei must be contributing through proxy to these sorts of articles--not necessarily this one--but it certainly seems like you're hearing a lot more of his voice than was usual a few years back, doesn't it? Still, it lacks in the one department all Iran-focused articles seem to lately, which is more sober analysis of how Ahmadinejad is viewed within Iran. Understandable, since most people here associate Ahmadinejad with his road trips and his aggressive speech-making, but the clear difference in the way the Iranian population views the guy as opposed to the rest of the world is a lot more valuable than yet another laundry list of his nonsensical bullshit. There's some in here, and it's meaty, but it just makes me hungry for more.
-Can Blaise Compaore go from being a bloody tyrant who came to power in a coup d'etat in Burkino Faso to chilled out statesman? That seems to be the question this article is asking, although one can't ignore the fact that the title "A canny chameleon" speaks a bit of disbelief that this TIGER CHANGED HIS STRIPES OH WORD THATS GAME BITCHES
-Since Dubai has seen a bit of the money faucet go dry, the local government has seen this as a good time to make it official: no fucking on the beach, get the homosexuals and the drag queens out, and, just in case you thought they were being extreme, you can only hold hands with your legitimate spouse. I don't know how that's going to get Brad Pitt to finish building his house there.
-Hmm, you have to go to the article to see this picture. The mayor who seems to have taken over Madagascar--he's how old? He looks like he's about 20 something. He's 34, I know, but seriously. Dude looks like Ben Lyons.
-I guess this "give America's president a bowl of shamrock" is a regular thing, but couldn't they take a picture of it that looks a little less pathetic and strange? I guess it helps the article, which is all about how the Irish people are getting their wages slashed or frozen while they see the taxes go up, but jeepers creepers, that's one lame ass photo op. It looks like Barack Obama is about ready to pants the Irish dude.
-Well, I hope your expecations have been thoroughly raised: wildcat strikes, group protests, sympathy protests, and finally: kidnapping. The French take their economic shutdowns seriously, and the population responded to some survey with 74% in favor of the protestors, and they did this after boss of Sony's French arm was kidnapped and held overnight by his employees, angry at the closing of a factory. I'd say "keep an eye on this one", but hey: you were going to do that anyway.
-Although I don't think anything positive is going to come out of Dmitry Medvedev's recent plea for support from Russia's millionaires, I do think it's an overall positive that he's asking in the first place. Russia's more recent relationship with it's wealthier citizens has been to just take and strongarm, so the idea that they'd be willing to go on television and so openly express a willingness to dialog instead of the last few years tactics of illegality...that's a kind of good news. That's not to say that some of Russia's millionaires got where they are with some kind of magical ethics, but still: the rule of law has to start somewhere, or else it's an entirely useless proposition.
-Although I don't know enough about Dario Franceschini to throw support his way, he does have two points in his favor: 1) He isn't Silvio Berlusconi. 2) When asked if he was a "temporary leader", he snarled "All leaders are temporary. Only Berlusconi thinks he's irreplaceable." Still, he could eat fetal pigs, I don't know shit about the guy. Good article though.
-Charlemagne on the Netherlands, making the grand total of Netherlands-focused Economist articles in 2009 a big old 2, I believe. And the other one was mostly about prostitutes.
Britain
-The entire British section was a bit of a miss for me this week, what with a repetition on the "running out of jobs, welfare is jacked up" kind of stuff that has been covered better in recent weeks, but I thought that Bagehot's column was a pretty interesting, albeit controversy-baiting. It's about the general acceptance of the euphemism "small minority", which gets whipped out a lot in British dialog. You know, how when a Muslim extremist blows up a church, everybody says something like "guy was just a minority, most Muslims are great dudes." Now, the article isn't specifically about Muslims, it's about the phrase itself, and how it's overuse--also in regards to those who drink alcohol in Britain as well as football hooligans--has made constructive debate more difficult. It's conclusions aren't as firmly laid out, as they are more in the sense of "we need to talk more intelligently about complex things", but it's a thinker, that's for sure.
International
-It's nuclear power week! Not in the fake holiday sense, but in the sense of two articles about nuclear power, from the global view. The first is about how nuclear power will have to convince the public that it's safe, that the waste can be dealt with accordingly, and that it isn't going to be managed in such a way that it won't be used as an excuse to stop working towards cleaner forms of power production. The second article is all about the military aspects of nclear power, and who will manage things to make sure that new facilities won't turn into secretive bomb production buildings. Maybe I'm just in a good mood, or maybe I'm dying, but this was actually good reporting and solid writing for the International section, which usually reads like it's been written by a hyperactive teenager.
Business
-Why is the business of food changing so rapidly? Again, like the cover said, because of China. As this article mentions early on, the Chinese have spent the last decade drastically changing the way in which they eat--the list is too long to repeat here, but it's pretty much this: more milk, more olive oil, more poultry, more wheat, more wine and more beef. All of the numbers are strong, and the Economist even mentions they are only focusing on the more important ones. The effect is a global one, and coming at a time when the business of food is also facing the problems of being, well, a business. It's fascinating stuff. Kind of.
-China also showed off something else this week: they denied a non-Chinese acquisition of a local juice company from the Coca-Cola firm. As the article points out, this wasn't the standard "global corporation tries to strong-arm local boys", this was Coca Cola: they've invested a shit ton of money in China, they've been busting thier ass their for years to make themselves welcome in China. Remember all that talk about protectionism? This is part of it, but it's a much bigger part of it than anything else I've read in recent weeks. (That isn't exactly a vote of endorsement. I mostly read archival TV Guides.)
-If that short French article wasn't enough, here's an article that's all about kidnapping your boss when he tries to cut your wages or close your plant. Is it spreading? Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh
-I wonder if it's a good idea to buy stock in Sun Microsystems. IBM seems to want to, and who knows? This could be the moment in your life where you make a decision that changes everything. Or it could be the moment when you lose a couple honey bucks on chasing the dream.
-Ha, i'm sorry, but Tim Armstrong? You must be out of your fucking mind. Who quits working for Google to take over America Online? Being the boss is nice, but that's like breaking up with McDonald's so you can take over a global network of online scat-munching video clips. Seriously, America Fucking Online?
-I always enjoy when the Face Value page serves as a one-page biography of some kind of brainaic entrepreneur. I know, in the back of my mind, that the people who write the Face Value stuff are probalby escapees from the scaly clutches of Reader's Digest, I know it's part because it comes at the end of the Business section and serves as a relaxing break before the heavy lifting of the Finance and Economics section, but goddammit, it's a refreshing read. It's like a cool glass of water, laced with boobs and dolla billz.
-Before the section gets official, the Economist throws up a long, history-heavy breakdown of the current state of General Electric. A solid blue chipper, over a century as part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, possibly brought low by the machinations of an unchecked GE Capital, the finance arm that played the short term game as if there were no long term ramifications. If you can stomach some irritating Harry Potter references--seriously--it's a pretty solid look at the specifics of an economic thunderstorm. Or something, I can't think of good metaphors without better coffee than this swill I'm drinking.
-The focus of complaints about AIG's bonus payments has been on the $57 million or so that's gone to various employees. Understandable, it's ground-level stuff, easy to comprehend--but the Economist points out that $57 million dollars doesn't mean shit compared to the $49.5 billion that's gone to AIG's counterparties, a list that includes various banks and finance corporations who have received their own bailout money already. Let's play the make-up game here: if my brother owes me money, and I take a "bailout" from my mom to cover the money i'm expecting my brother to pay, what happens next? It would make sense for my brother's obligation to have transferred to my mother, right? Well, how about this: instead, my brother gets a second "bailout" from my mom, just so he can pay me back. Thing is, I've already been paid once--now there's two more debts, both payable to my mom, and neither me nor my brother have proved that we have any fucking fiscal clue what we're doing, since this just made things that much more convoluted and fucking stupid than it needed to be in the first place.
-Buttonwood writes about the Swiss, and you can tell, you can just smell it--Buttonwood hates the Swiss. Hates their neutrality, hates their secretative banks, hates their hot chocolate. Hate. Nerdy financial hate, but hate nonetheless.
-People in Germany who have money to save are entrusting it to BMW's bank. Wait a second--BMW has a savings bank? Why does a carmaker have a savings bank? I didn't want to know that.
-Third article on microfinance in the last six months. The first time, the Economist didn't like microfinance. The second time, they apologized for the first article, because they decided they liked it. Number three? Let's call it "Microfinance: We're Worried About It".
Science and Technology
-You like incandescent bulbs? Well guess what: they're on the way out, son. Europe will have phased them out by 2012, America by 2014. But what will they replace them with, the world cries, "Oh Jehovah, How Will There Be Light" they say. Candles, bitches.
-Hey, time to rethink that whole dinosaur thing again. Remember when they said that birds came from dinosaurs? Well, maybe dinosaurs had feathers, and maybe dinosaurs came from birds. Maybe T Rex's got a lot less cooler, that's what I'm feeling if this shit is true. Fuck you, science. Stay away from my childhood.
-Water on Mars? Maybe so, maybe so. Some serious photo analysis going doing.
-Guess who is less likely to refuse painful methods of extending life when suffering from a terminal illness? Religious people. I'm not sure why the Economist seems so befuddled by this. Go figure.
Books and Arts
-Let's talk about handles. Oh wait, that's not how you spell his name.
-God, what happened to the section this week? Okay, book about India that isn't that great, book about infrastructure work that isn't great and a diary that might be pretty good, but is still a diary, and is bizarrely opened with the same sort of cheap re-wording thing I do of a sentence that opened the review of a diary from two weeks ago. This is just sad/bad stuff, hell, I'd be happy to see another crappy movie review. Get your shit together Economist, or, as a pal often says: Don't let me down!
Obituary: Ali Bongo
-What happened here? Maybe there's a tonal thing I'm missing because I've never heard of William Oliver Wallace, a famous magician who went by the stage name "Ali Bongo", but why the hell was his obituary written like this? Every sentence in the first paragraph ends with an exclamation point, and the article fails to give specific information like how he died or where the guy was from. (Britain, thanks to Google.) I guess they might have been going for zany or something, as the guy certainly sounds like that's an accurate description of his personality, but it just misses completely and ends up being a really off-putting piece of writing. Weird. Sure sounds like a nice guy though. I guess all that matters is whether he would have liked reading this.
I wonder if rich people would taste better than those of us who are not quite poor. I bet they'd taste like a nice Kobe beef-steak. Succulent and fatty and tender...
Posted by: LurkerWithout | 2009.03.29 at 05:16
Tucker,
If you read Israeli news sites, you would know that the prisoner talks fell apart over a soldier to be named later clause that Israel was insisting on. The proposed deal was:
450 Palestinian prisoners
Alex Rodriguez
6 waiver moves
Israel's waiver position (2 out of 14)
For
Gilad Shalit
Manny Ramirez
Gaza's waiver position (13 out of 14)
One abducted soldier to be named later
I don't know why they insisted on tying the prisoner negotiations to trades in our fantasy baseball league, but as league commissioner, I say anything for peace. Also, don't the Palestinians know that ARod is out for 6 more weeks? And that he is into Kabbalah?
Posted by: 10FootBongz | 2009.03.29 at 20:22
Ahmadinejad is perceived in Iran almost exactly the same way Bush was in the US. The parallels are uncanny, as is the fact they're inevitably overlooked.
Both are loathed by the metropolitan city dwellers who think he's a buffoon and adored by the more conservative hicks who live in the more backwater parts of the country. The latter group make up the majority of the voters, thus proving democracy, (which Iran does have, more or less, despite what you may have heard) isn't always the cure-all solution it's sometimes made out to be.
They also both have retarded looking grins which bring to mind Alfred E Neumann. Frankly it's a shame they didn't try to get on better as I think they would've quickly recognised they were kindred spirits.
Posted by: tam | 2009.03.30 at 02:14
Whoa, what's with those Game of Life tits? Freaky.
Posted by: Matthew J. Brady | 2009.03.31 at 00:14