-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.
-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.
-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.
-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.
-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.
-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.
-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!
-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.
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