HE STEALS FROM THE RICH AND GIVES TO THE PO':

Big, Not Easy: How Sean Payton's daring play-calling won the New Orleans Saints their first Super Bowl. (Josh Levin, Feb. 8, 2010, Slate)

[N]ew Orleans' second half comeback wasn't solely the product of momentum or an audacious onside kick. The Saints won for the reason they usually win: Drew Brees' scary accuracy. After the 2008 season, a show called Sport Science asked Brees to throw a football at an archery target 10 times; he hit the bull's-eye on all 10 throws.

ISN'T DIVING A SUMMER OLYMPIC EVENT?:

Obama's rating plunges underwater for first time in new poll as just 44% give him their approval (Michael Mcauliff, 2/08/10, NY Daily News)

President Obama's job approval rating has taken another dive, putting him underwater for the first time in the latest Marist poll.

Just 44% of the country approve of the work Obama is doing, while 47% don't like what they see. [...]

Forty-seven percent of voters say Obama has not lived up to their expectations, with just 42% saying he has.

A narrow plurality - 38% - think Obama's change has been bad, and 37% think it's been good.

TARGET RICH ENVIRONMENT:

John Murtha dies, special election looms (Chris Cillizza, 2/08/10, Washington Post)

According to state law, the governor has ten days once the vacancy is officially declared to decide on the date for the special election, which can come no sooner than 60 days following that proclamation.

That likely means the special election will be held on May 18, which is the date already set for federal primaries around the state. (Special elections costs the state huge sums of money and it's likely that Gov. Ed Rendell will choose to go with an already established election day to save some cash.)

Murtha's passing comes at a tenuous time for House Democrats as they seek to convince some of their older members to re-up for another term in the face of what looks to be a difficult national political environment for the party. [...]

Without Murtha in the 12th district, however, the special election will be seriously contested. Murtha's district is the only one in the country won by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) in 2004 and by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2008, according to Republican sources, and that trend line coupled with the volatile national environment for Democrats ensures Republicans will heavily target the contest.

WHICH RAISES AN OBVIOUS QUESTION...:

Sarah Palin's Storm at the Tea Party: Why haven't responsible Republicans spoken out against her? (Fred Kaplan, Feb. 8, 2010, Slate)

If there is a terrorist attack on the United States in the next few years, we could deal with it more confidently, and respond more effectively, if the president were able to rally a spirit of national unity. George W. Bush was given a chance to do this after Sept. 11 and, despite some initial fumbling, rose well to the occasion, at least for a few months.

But if the Republican Party's most popular aspirant declares that the sitting president doesn't know we're at war, isn't even a commander-in-chief (and crowds roar at this charge with approval), then Obama would have a much harder time repairing a wounded nation.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Monday the Obama administration had dropped "war on terror" from its lexicon, rhetoric former President George W. Bush used to justify many of his actions.

"The [Obama] administration has stopped using the phrase and I think that speaks for itself. Obviously," Clinton told reporters...

WELL, IT IS CHANGE...:

Poll: Special interests more influential under Obama (Stephen Dinan, 2/08/10, Washington Times)

The poll, paid for by groups looking to curb the Supreme Court's recent campaign finance ruling, found that majorities of both Republicans and Democrats say special interests have increased their influence since the president took office, and they say Mr. Obama has not done enough to fight back.

"People think special interests are dominant," said Stan Greenberg, a leading Democratic pollster who worked with Republican pollster Mark McKinnon.

PRINT THE STEREOTYPE:

Amid drug war, Mexico less deadly than decade ago (ALEXANDRA OLSON, 2/08/10, Associated Press)

Mexico City's homicide rate today is about on par with Los Angeles and is less than a third of that for Washington, D.C. [...]

"What we hear is, 'Oh the drug war! The dead people on the streets, and the policeman losing his head,'" said Tobias Schluter, 34, a civil engineer from Berlin having a beer at a cafe behind Mexico City's 16th-century cathedral. "But we don't see it. We haven't heard a gunshot or anything."

Mexico's homicide rate has fallen steadily from a high in 1997 of 17 per 100,000 people to 14 per 100,000 in 2009, a year marked by an unprecedented spate of drug slayings concentrated in a few states and cities, Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna said. The national rate hit a low of 10 per 100,000 people in 2007, according to government figures compiled by the independent Citizens' Institute for Crime Studies.

By comparison, Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala have homicide rates of between 40 and 60 per 100,000 people, according to recent government statistics. Colombia was close behind with a rate of 33 in 2008. Brazil's was 24 in 2006, the last year when national figures were available.

Mexico City's rate was about 9 per 100,000 in 2008, while Washington, D.C. was more than 30 that year.

IF THIS WERE TRUE, I'D BE DAVID DUNN:

Drinking beer could help prevent weak bones : A new study claims that certain types of beer are a rich source of dietary silicon, and can help prevent osteoporosis (Press Association, 8 February 2010, The Guardian)

The experts said beer was a major source of dietary silicon – roughly half of the silicon in beer can be readily absorbed by the body.

Charles Bamforth, lead author of the study, said: "Beers containing high levels of malted barley and hops are richest in silicon.

"Wheat contains less silicon than barley because it is the husk of the barley that is rich in this element.

"While most of the silicon remains in the husk during brewing, significant quantities of silicon nonetheless are extracted into wort and much of this survives into beer."

Dr Claire Bowring, from the National Osteoporosis Society, said: "These findings mirror results from previous studies which concluded that moderate alcohol consumption could be beneficial to bones."

SO WHY DO THEY ALL LOVE THE METRIC SYSTEM?:

Is the world really poorer without Bo?:The death of tribal languages is sometimes a good thing, revealing the itchy dynamism of human society. (Tim Black, 2/08/10, Spiked)

he death of a language is also a frequently occurring fact of human history, and by no means an undesirable one. As human societies have developed and expanded, as interaction between once isolated peoples has increased, so particular cultures and particular languages have given way to increasingly universal languages. This isn’t just a polite way of talking of bloody conquest either. As one commentator put it: ‘Often people choose to move to the city for work and therefore speak traditional languages less and less. It therefore becomes natural not to teach them to their children.’ In fact, while there might currently be just under 7,000 languages spoken globally, 80 per cent of the world’s population speak just 83 of them.

Yet despite what looks like a progressive development – an overcoming of Babylonian partiality, a movement towards a common language – many in the West today tend to think differently. In the words of Stephen Corry, the director of the tribal peoples’ campaign group Survival International, ‘With the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory. Boa’s loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands.’

Views like Corry’s are far from unusual today. BBC News accompanied its report of Boa Snr’s death with a feature entitled ‘The tragedy of dying languages’. Asserting that with language death, we are losing a ‘significant portion of humanity’s intellectual wealth’, the BBC reporter challenges Western complacency: ‘What hubris allows us, cocooned comfortably in our cyber-world, to think that we have nothing to learn from people who a generation ago were hunter-gatherers?’

In fact, over the past couple of decades, the angst-ridden focus on ‘the tragedy of dying languages’ has become an international concern.

Comments

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NOTHING COSTS MORE...:

Free London Evening Standard readership surges (New Statesman, 08 February 2010)

The London Evening Standard's readership has increased from 556,000 in April to 1.37m in September, according to the National Readership Survey (NRS).

The NRS figures showed that 76.7 per cent of ABC1 readers read the Standard, with increasing readership among the young. In the 15-44 year olds segment, the readership has grown from 56.7 to 62 per cent.

The readership reportedly increased after the paper declared that it was going free on 12 October and boosted its distribution to 600,000 copies.

The paper reportedly increased its advertising rates while promising certain targets, as it went free. The paper has exceeded the targets, according to the Standard's managing director Andrew Mullins.

MAYBE THEY OVERESTIMATE THEMSELVES BECAUSE THEY BELIEVE THE rEALISTS?:

Why China is stoking war of words with US: Beijing’s belligerence is a diversionary tactic. There’s nothing like nationalist outrage to sweeten unpopular economic reform (Bill Emmott, 2/08/10, Times of London)

For the past two decades the country’s official policy has been to keep its head down in international affairs, in line with a dictum of Deng Xiaoping, its great leader of the 1980s: “keep a low profile and hide your claws”, he said, while focusing on building up your strength. That was a good description of Chinese policy in the 1990s and for much of this decade. But it now looks out of date.

One tempting explanation is Chinese confidence. China has been the big winner from the global economic crisis, runs this argument. Not only did it survive the crisis without suffering social unrest, it has seen its growth rebound strongly — indeed, back into double digits during the most recent quarter. Its huge fiscal stimulus package and expansion of lending by state-owned banks has been much lauded. It was popular in Davos last week to claim that China is in the vanguard of a revival of state-led capitalism, with the Beijing model being increasingly admired by other emerging economies.

This interpretation is tempting for any American or European who feels weak and self-critical about their region’s power and prospects. It is certainly true that China is increasingly viewed with awe by others, even if many countries (notably India) also fear or resent it. It is also true that many Chinese feel that their country is on a roll.

But there is another explanation. If you look more closely, China’s economy starts to look much less strong. The huge increase in money supply and bank lending that revived its GDP growth is bound to lead to inflation — and is already doing so. If its apparent strength is to be sustained, China needs to find a new model, a new source of growth, now that reliance on exports to the US and Europe looks like a thing of the past. For even a state-run banking system cannot continue to boost lending by 35 per cent a year indefinitely without causing problems.

That is why a popular debate in the markets concerns whether China is experiencing an asset bubble and whether there is a risk of its growth collapsing in the same way as Japan’s did in 1990.

rEASON VS REALITY:

Why are liberals so condescending? (Gerard Alexander, February 7, 2010, Washington Post)

Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.

It's an odd time for liberals to feel smug. But even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation -- as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a "Bolshevik plot" -- and the country's failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. "We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are," the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).

This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government -- and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever. [...]

This attitude comes in the form of four major narratives about who conservatives are and how they think and function.

The first is the "vast right-wing conspiracy," a narrative made famous by Hillary Rodham Clinton but hardly limited to her. This vision maintains that conservatives win elections and policy debates not because they triumph in the open battle of ideas but because they deploy brilliant and sinister campaign tactics. A dense network of professional political strategists such as Karl Rove, think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and industry groups allegedly manipulate information and mislead the public. Democratic strategist Rob Stein crafted a celebrated PowerPoint presentation during George W. Bush's presidency that traced conservative success to such organizational factors.

This liberal vision emphasizes the dissemination of ideologically driven views from sympathetic media such as the Fox News Channel. For example, Chris Mooney's book "The Republican War on Science" argues that policy debates in the scientific arena are distorted by conservatives who disregard evidence and reflect the biases of industry-backed Republican politicians or of evangelicals aimlessly shielding the world from modernity. In this interpretation, conservative arguments are invariably false and deployed only cynically. Evidence of the costs of cap-and-trade carbon rationing is waved away as corporate propaganda; arguments against health-care reform are written off as hype orchestrated by insurance companies.

THE ONLY SAFE-HAVEN:

Treasury Bulls Expect Yield to Peak at 4% (MARK GONGLOFF, 2/08/10, WSJ)

At the start of the year, the consensus was that long-term U.S. Treasury debt would be the dud investment of 2010. Just weeks later, some investors are beginning to reconsider.

With Greece in turmoil and threatening to spread its woes throughout Europe, Treasurys are again benefiting from their safe-haven status. Treasury debt prices surged this past week, pushing their interest rates, or yields, lower.

MORE OF A TANDEM MOVER:

New Delhi looks to play facilitator in Indian Ocean region (Rajat Pandit, 2/08/10, TNN)

With Sukhoi-30 MKI fighters generating sonic booms over the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago on Sunday, even as the 3,500-km Agni-III missile created fireworks off the Orissa coast, India sent a strong strategic message across Bay of Bengal that it is ready to play the role of a security facilitator in the larger Indian Ocean Region (IOR).

India might not want to be seen as a regional supercop in the IOR, nor as the prime mover of a naval military bloc in the Asia-Pacific region . But yes, it has legitimate security concerns in the IOR, which falls in its strategic backyard, especially with China making strategic maritime moves in the region.

PAKISTAN IS A COG TO THE EXTENT...:

India-Pakistan thaw key to Afghan peace (Siddharth Srivastava , 2/09/10, Asia Times)

Washington's focus has shifted to the western frontiers of Pakistan, where al-Qaeda and the Taliban are thought to have their biggest base, and the US is keen for simmering India-Pakistan relations to cool.

This would enable a redeployment of the massive Pakistani troop presence on its eastern borders with India to the Afghan front, possibly paving the way for a reduced American military presence in Afghanistan. However, it is unclear if the proposed India-Pakistan talks have come at the prodding of Washington.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani said in a recent interview that the peace process should be resumed and not be held hostage to fallout from the Mumbai attack. Islamabad has indicated that is it amenable to using Indian evidence against the plotters of the attack, and has accepted that the small boats used were launched from Karachi.

There are larger geopolitical factors in play, particularly America's involvement in Afghanistan.

India's offer of talks can be seen in the context of global powers endorsing in London last month a US-backed Afghan plan to seek reconciliation with the Taliban. Pakistan is expected to play a big role in this, especially in persuading the fundamentalist group to come to the negotiating table.

Pakistan will continue to remain a crucial cog in America's "war on terror'' and be a continued recipient of increased military aid. For now, Islamabad has also managed to keep out the influence of India in brokering any deal with the Taliban.

Delhi wants to have a say in Afghanistan, a role that Pakistan has kept for itself until now, with the backing of some Muslim majority nations.

WELL, HE IS FINALLY FORCING BIPARTISANSHIP...:

Democratic Climate Revolt: A bipartisan effort to stop the EPA's anticarbon crusade. (WSJ, 2/07/10)

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is busy writing new rules that would let her drive a tax-and-regulation bulldozer through the U.S. economy under laws never meant to apply to greenhouse gases. Ms. Jackson is expected to issue new anticarbon regulations for cars and trucks next month before moving on to power plants and other industries.

This is all too much for Missouri's Ike Skelton and Minnesota's Collin Peterson, the Chairmen of the House Armed Services and Agriculture Committees, respectively. Along with Missouri Republican Jo Ann Emerson, they are pushing a two-page bill that would amend the Clean Air Act to restore Congress's original intent and strip CO2 and other greenhouse gases from the statutory language.

This is bipartisanship we can believe in. Such legislation would vaporize the EPA's "endangerment finding" for carbon and thus require the Administration to use democratic debate and persuasion if it really wants to reshape the energy markets and impose huge new costs on American consumers. What a thought.

PORK CHOPPED:

PIIGS no longer flying (Kurt Brouwer, 2/05/10, Fundmastery Blog)

Earlier, I wrote about the national debt troubles of Greece and Portugal (see, National debt crisis in Greece & Portugal). In doing some reading on this issue, I came across this story, which struck me as an example of political correctness gone a bit mad. Caution: this is a ‘not so serious’ post. Here’s the background: Greece and Portugal have been grouped in an acronym, PIIGS, which stands for Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece & Spain. Though I don’t think I’ve used PIIGS in any post, it has been fairly common. This and other acronyms stem largely from the fact that bond traders communicate in shorthand so things get reduced to acronyms — BRICs, MAVINS and so on.

Apparently, one dismal soul at Barclay’s Capital took offense to the use of PIIGS to refer to those Mediterranean countries and banned the use internally.

Bloomberg wrote a piece on this with the awesome headline, ‘At Barclay’s Capital, PiiGS No Longer Fly.’ Unfortunately, another dismal soul at Bloomberg must have taken offense and updated the online headline in the piece it to this [emphasis added]:

Swine Acronym Ordered Out of Barclay’s Reports (Bloomberg, Feb. 5, 2010, Alexis Xydias, Rita Nazareth and Lynn Thomasson)

FORCING THE CONTRADICTIONS (via Jim Yates):

Corporation Says It Will Run for Congress (CATHERINE RAMPELL, 2/02/10, NY Times: Economix)

Following the Supreme Court decision implicitly granting corporations the right to free speech (by determining that political spending is a kind of speech), a corporation has decided to take what it believes to be “democracy’s next step”: It is running for Congress.

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST:

NY Gov. Paterson meets with lawmakers over future (MICHAEL GORMLEY, 2/07/10, Associated Press)

Gov. David Paterson met privately with key Democratic leaders about his re-election plans as questions swirl around the state capitol about a variety of unproven accusations involving the Democratic governor's personal conduct. [...]

A Democrat close to the situation, though, said the meetings included discussions about whether Paterson would resign or announce he will not run. The Democrat spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

One recent New York Post article about the accusations drew a denial by Paterson's spokeswoman and a strong rebuke by the superintendent of state police.

WHAT'S THE ONLY THING BETTER THAN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA?:

The size of nations (Andrew Leigh, 8 February 2010, Online Opinion)

n The Size of Nations, Alberto Alesina (Harvard) and Enrico Spolaore (Tufts) present a theory of country size that is as simple as it is powerful. In determining how big countries should be (and therefore how many countries there are in the world), they argue that there are two opposing forces. For economic reasons, nations should be big. For political reasons, countries should be small.

Economics favours large nations because it means more of us share the costs of running the central bank, paying for embassies, and maintaining an air force. And because commerce is easier within borders than across them, businesses are more likely to prosper in a big nation than a small one.

But politics drives towards smaller nations because large nations are hard to control. Smaller nations are more homogenous on several dimensions. Incomes tend to be more equally distributed, there is less ethnic and racial tension, and people are more likely to share a common language and religion. It’s a lot easier to find common ground when you’re the President of Costa Rica than if you happen to be President of the United States.

Sure, you say, but why are countries these days breaking up quicker than a Hollywood marriage?

The answer is that the two great forces of the post-war era - globalisation and democratisation - both favour smaller nations. Globalisation does it by making secession more attractive. In 1950, when average tariffs were around 40 per cent, regions paid a large price for going it alone. Now that the average tariff is around 5 per cent, breaking up is easier to do.

Democratisation raises the pressure to split off because it gives voice to regional interests.

THERE'S NOTHING LESS RADICAL THESE DAYS THAN THE THIRD WAY:

Rep. Ryan proposes radical solution to budget problem (Ezra Klein, 2/07/10, Washington Post)

[Rep. Paul D.] Ryan's budget is a radical document that takes current policy and rolls a live grenade underneath it. Social Security? Ryan's adds private accounts. Medicaid? Ryan privatizes it. Medicare? Same thing. Health care? Ryan repeals the subsidy for employer-provided insurance, replacing it with a tax credit.

The boyish Ryan is a conservative darling and the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, but there's nothing conservative about this document. It does not respect, much less preserve, the status quo. But then, that's a point in Ryan's favor. The status quo does not deserve our respect. It is unsustainable. Left unchecked, it will bankrupt our country. On that, Ryan's radicalism is welcome, and all too rare. The size of his proposal is shocking, but it is proportionate to the size of our problem: According to the Congressional Budget Office, which examined a simplified version of his proposal, it would wipe out our projected long-term deficits.

Facing up to how he does this is a worthwhile exercise in understanding our budget problem. It's not the privatization that does it. His proposal to add optional private accounts to Social Security actually increases the program's cost, which is a good reminder that Social Security plays little role in our long-term deficits. Similarly, his proposal to privatize Medicare increases costs. As the CBO points out, Medicare negotiates lower prices than private providers and is run more efficiently. "Beneficiaries would therefore face higher premiums in the private market for a package of benefits similar to that currently provided by Medicare," the wonks conclude.

Ryan saves his money after he privatizes the programs. Under his proposal, seniors stop getting Medicare, which is both government-run and pays for any procedures that can be shown to help improve their condition. Instead, the seniors get a voucher to buy private insurance, and that voucher grows more slowly than medical costs. That means the coverage that voucher buys is going to grow more slowly than medical costs. Seniors will be in the same position the rest of us are in: Either you can afford the coverage and care you need through savings or subsidies or both, or . . . you can't.

That, at least, is what the CBO is scoring. Ryan's hopes are different. "You compartmentalize the programs," he tells me. "Don't do that." In his telling, his proposal unleashes market forces by pulling people out of Medicare, out of Medicaid and out of the employer-based market. He envisions insurance exchanges and better information on quality and cost. Combine that many consumers with that much money and that much transparency, and it'll have to reform itself into something we can afford. "This sector isn't immune from free-market principles," he says.

HAS SHE BROKEN THE NEWS TO HER BOSS?:

US foreign policy has not made breakthroughs (Daniel Dombey, February 7 2010, Financial Times)

Barack Obama’s foreign policy of engagement has yet to make any breakthroughs and the US president’s second year in office is set to be tested by an intransigent Iran and North Korea, top administration officials have acknowledged. [...]

“I am fairly realistic about foreign policy, and countries don’t just give up what they view as their interests in order to make nice with you,” [Hillary Clinton] told CNN.

FAITH BEING THE GIVEAWAY:

Public loses faith in climate change science after leaked emails scandal: Surveys show increase in number of people who believe claims are exaggerated (Jo Adetunji, 2/07/10, guardian.co.uk)

A BBC poll, which surveyed 1,000 people, revealed that 25% of adults did not believe in global warming – a rise of 8% since a similar poll in November – and the percentage of those who thought climate change was a reality fell to 75%. Of those who believed, one in three felt climate change had been exaggerated. Only 26% of people thought climate change was "established as largely manmade".

Robert Watson, the chief scientific adviser for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said the results were "very disappointing". "The fact that there has been a very significant drop in the number of people that believe that we humans are changing the Earth's climate is serious," he told the BBC.

BOXING HAITI:

Haiti's Hidden Treasures (WILL FRIEDWALD, 2/04/10, WSJ)

Decades before last month's tragic earthquake, Haiti was in the news because of an upheaval of an entirely different kind. The republic had been occupied by American troops for 19 years. But after a series of bloody massacres and insurrections, the U.S. Marines were withdrawn in 1934. Two years later, an American named Alan Lomax landed in Haiti not with weapons but with a portable recording device. He'd been commissioned by the Library of Congress to document Haiti's ethnomusic traditions.

Encouraged by the writer Zora Neale Hurston (who sings on three tracks), Lomax recorded local music in Haiti for four months. During that period, the 21-year-old scholar and historian captured roughly 50 hours of sound recordings that were then buried in a U.S. government vault for more than seven decades, never seeing the light of day. Until now. "Alan Lomax in Haiti," 10 discs and a copiously illustrated and annotated booklet, have recently been released by Harte Recordings in conjunction with the Lomax Estate and the Library of Congress. (The price of the box set has just been reduced, with a portion of sales going directly to local disaster-relief organizations in Haiti. For more details go to thehaitibox.blogspot.com)

IS IT STILL GENOCIDE IF YOU'RE KILLING YOUR OWN PEOPLE?:

In North Korea, angry crowds and rising prices spur power plays: North Korea fired its chief financial planner in wake of a currency revaluation that sparked public anger, according to reports in South Korean media. One outlet reported that crowds were besieging marketplaces as prices rise. (Donald Kirk, February 4, 2010, CS Monitor)

Good Friends, an aid organization here that disseminates information from sources in the North, reports an angry crowd in one provincial center shouting, “Households who can afford barely one meal a day are increasing,” and “Will you starve us to death?”

The mounting shortages evoke memories of the famine of the 1990s, in which 2 million people are estimated to have died from starvation and disease. Daily NK, another organization here that puts out reports based on source inside North Korea, reported “an explosion in the number of casualties resulting from popular resentment at harsh regulations of market activities.”

SCIENCE IS THE LONG WAY ROUND TO REVELATION:

TO BE ANTI-MORAL IS TO BE UNMALE:

The Problem With Pro-Choice Men: Why do male pro-lifers speak their minds while pro-choice guys stay silent? Hugh Ryan on the fight's glaring gender divide—and why men are turning against abortion rights in droves. (Hugh Ryan, 2/05/10, Daily Beast)

This weekend, Tim Tebow, the Florida Gators quarterback, will star in a contentious anti-abortion Super Bowl ad sponsored by the conservative Christian group, Focus on the Family. The ad comes just over a week after another man, Scott Roeder, was found guilty of the murder of Dr. George Tiller, one of the only doctors in the country providing legal and safe third-trimester abortions.

As usual, it seems men have a lot to say about the things women shouldn’t do. Indeed, the pro-life camp seems to have little trouble finding men who will stump for it loudly and forcefully. Mel Gibson, Ben Stein, and Jonathan Taylor Thomas have all lent their voices to the anti-abortion movement, to say nothing of more radically religious actors like Stephen Baldwin and Kirk Cameron. Male professional athletes have also been willing to speak out against abortion—besides Tebow, Washington Redskins cornerback Darrell Green and three-time Super Bowl winner Chad Hennings have both done so. In 1989, six members of the New York Giants Super Bowl-winning team went so far as to make a video called Champions for Life for the anti-abortion group, American Life League.

When male celebrities talk about abortion, they’re usually saying that it should be illegal. The pro-life side of the debate has far outpaced the pro-choice side in lining up strong men’s voices. The Tebow ad threw this into relief, and in response, Planned Parenthood Federation has crafted its own video featuring former professional athletes Al Joyner and Sean James.

But in a way, the spot only seems to highlight how far behind in the gender game the pro-choice side is.

NOTHING COSTS MORE...:

Fusion at core of power dream (Tamsin Carlisle, February 06. 2010, The National)

Nuclear fusion holds the promise of virtually limitless energy supplies from a fuel source available to everyone, without the carbon emissions of combustion, the intermittency problems and huge land requirements of most renewable energy sources, and with fewer safety and security issues and much less radioactive waste than fission-fired atomic power.

Nuclear fusion releases 10 million times as much energy per unit mass as burning petrol. If it could be harnessed on earth, it would solve the planet’s energy problems.

That “if”, however, is huge. Despite decades of high-priced tinkering, no one has yet produced a sustainable fusion reaction by a method yielding more energy than it took to produce.

“Nuclear fusion as currently understood occurs only in the core of stars, in nuclear weapons, in high-temperature plasmas or in inertially confined high-energy collisions,” states a recent analysis report by the US Defence Intelligence Agency.

By all indications, a so-called practical fusion reactor is still a far-off figment of futurists’ imaginations. Even so, the vision refuses to fade.

That is why the EU, US, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea and India are collaborating to develop the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in the south of France at a projected cost of €12.8 billion (Dh64.34bn). The ITER website says the world’s biggest fusion machine should start test operations in 2018 and could inject power into the grid “as early as 2040”.

“Iter” means road in Latin, but the ITER project is not the only possible path to commercial fusion power. Here is an inventory of some potential routes to clean energy’s holy grail...

THE rEALISTS ALWAYS THINK HELPING OUR ENEMIES HELPS US:

Is India's neighbourhood set to get even more dangerous? (Indrani Bagchi, 6 February 2010 , TOI Crest)

The Afghanistan conference in London last week was a shocker for Indian mandarins who had hoped to muscle in and get a larger say in Afghan policy given the money and effort New Delhi has put into the reconstruction efforts. But what happened was that India got blindsided by the British swallowing the Pakistani line that Islamabad could deliver peace by negotiating a deal with the Taliban. Shivshankar Menon, the new national security adviser, along with foreign secretary Nirupama Rao, is leading a massive review of India's own Af-Pak policy, which will determine not just India's approach to Afghanistan, but also craft out a new policy of engagement with Pakistan. The announcement on Thursday of resumption of foreign secretary-level talks between New Delhi and Islamabad is a movement in that direction.

Pakistan has pushed hard to remain in the driver's seat on Afghan policy. And, at least for now, it appears to be winning by hard-selling the line that without the involvement of the ISI, re-integration will remain a non-starter. That was evident first at the Istanbul Af-Pak meeting leading up to the January 28 London conference , where Pakistan insisted India be kept out of the talks, and even a feeble attempt by Karzai to get India to the table was brushed off. India fretted and fumed impotently, but found itself completely dealt out of the game by Pakistan and the UK leading the charge, letting Karzai announce that he was going to draw his brothers back into the tent, and requesting the Saudis to mediate a 'reintegration and reconciliation' with the Taliban.

This was only formalizing a process that had started in 2009, when the Taliban leadership had met with the Afghan government in the desert kingdom . These meetings broke the ice, even quietly blessed by US special envoy to Af-Pak , Richard Holbrooke. After the London
conference, Saudi envoy to India Faisal Tarab told Crest in a carefully worded comment, "We are ready to mediate with the Taliban, but we will not talk to terrorists.'' Saudi King Abdullah has just met Karzai and the outcome of that conversation could determine the success or otherwise of the proposed venture.

For India, global approval of the reconciliation process implies Pakistan, with its ISI and army, is likely to take a leading role. As Holbrooke told MK Narayanan, who was till recently NSA, and Nirupama Rao quietly during his last visit a couple of weeks ago, Pakistan has worked itself into a paranoia about India's presence in Afghanistan; India would have to be removed from all decision-making on Afghanistan, they insisted. As London showed, Islamabad got its way.

For the US and UK, even though India's assistance programme punches all the right buttons, India had to be sacrificed . Therefore, when British foreign secretary David Miliband was asked about India's role, he hummed and hawed saying "by and by" . In London, India insisted on putting in phrases like the process should be "Afghan-led'' and "transparent and inclusive'' - words to prevent the British and Pakistanis from controlling it. But as every diplomat understands, these are words than cannot , and indeed, will not be enforced.

The Pakistani demand has been succinctly laid out by Munir Akram, one of its top diplomats: "Pakistan's cooperation should be offered only in exchange for tangible and immediate US support for Pakistan's national objectives: an end to Indian-Afghan interference in Baluchistan and FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas); a Kashmir solution; a military balance between Pakistan and India; parity with India on nuclear issues; transfer of equipment and technology for counter-terrorism ; unconditional defense and economic assistance; free trade access.''

THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET ABOUT THE PRC...:

The Real Chinese Threat: The Quadrennial Defense Review's treatment of China isn't just dull -- it's tone deaf. (Matthew Yglesias | February 4, 2010, American Prospect)

Pretty much everyone agrees that China is the only nation with any chance of challenging American military superiority in the foreseeable future. So it's awfully strange that the Department of Defense's new Quadrennial Defense Review has little to say about the country. Explicit discussion is mostly limited to a single paragraph atop page 60, which begins with the banal observation that "China's growing presence and influence in regional and global economic and security affairs is one of the most consequential aspects of the evolving strategic landscape in the Asia-Pacific region and globally." The Defense Department then reaches the banal conclusion that our two countries "should sustain open channels of communication to discuss disagreements in order to manage and ultimately reduce the risks of conflict that are inherent in any relationship as broad and complex as that shared by these two nations."

Dull, dull stuff.

MORE:
Dazzled by Asia: When will China lead the world? Don’t hold your breath. (Joshua Kurlantzick, February 7, 2010 , Boston Globe)

[T]here are many good reasons to think that Asia’s rise may turn out to be an illusion. Asia’s growth has built-in stumbling blocks. Demographics, for one. Because of its One Child policy, China’s population is aging rapidly: According to one comprehensive study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, by 2040 China will have at least 400 million elderly, most of whom will have no retirement pensions. This aging poses a severe challenge, since China may not have enough working-age people to support its elderly. In other words, says CSIS, China will grow old before it grows rich, a disastrous combination. Other Asian powers also are aging rapidly - Japan’s population likely will fall from around 130 million today to 90 million in 2055 - or, due to traditional preferences for male children, have a dangerous sex imbalance in which there are far more men than women. This is a scenario likely to destabilize a country, since, at other periods in history when many men could not marry, the unmarried hordes turned to crime or political violence.

Looming political unrest also threatens Asia’s rise. China alone already faces some 90,000 annual “mass incidents,” the name given by Chinese security forces to protests, and this number is likely to grow as income inequality soars and environmental problems add more stresses to society. India, too, faces severe threats. The Naxalites, Maoists operating mostly in eastern India who attack large landowners, businesses, police, and other local officials, have caused the death of at least 800 people last year alone, and have destabilized large portions of eastern India. Other Asian states, too, face looming unrest, from the ongoing insurgency in southern Thailand to the rising racial and religious conflicts in Malaysia.

Also, despite predictions that Asia will eventually integrate, building a European Union-like organization, the region actually seems to be coming apart. Asia has not tamed the menace of nationalism, which Europe and North America largely have put in the past, albeit after two bloody world wars. Even as China and India have cooperated on climate change, on many other issues they are at each other’s throats. Over the past year, both countries have fortified their common border in the Himalayas, claiming overlapping pieces of territory. Meanwhile, Japan is constantly seeking ways to blunt Chinese military power. People in many Asian nations have extremely negative views of their neighbors - even though they maintain positive images of the United States.

More broadly, few Asian leaders have any idea what values, ideas, or histories should hold Asia together. “The argument of an Asian century is fundamentally flawed in that Asia is a Western concept, one that is not widely agreed upon [in Asia],” says Devin Stewart, a Japan specialist at the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs.

Even as Asia’s miracle seems, on closer inspection, less miraculous, America’s decline has been vastly overstated. To become a global superpower requires economic, political, and military might, and on the last two counts, the United States remains leagues ahead of any Asian rival. Despite boosting defense budgets by 20 percent annually, Asian powers like India, China, or Indonesia will not rival the US military for decades, if ever - only the Pentagon could launch a war in a place like Afghanistan, so far from its homeland. When a tsunami struck South and Southeast Asia five years ago, the region’s nations, including Indonesia, Thailand, and India, had to rely on the US Navy to coordinate relief efforts.

America also has other advantages that will be nearly impossible to remove. With Asian nations still squabbling amongst themselves, many look to the United States as a neutral power broker, a role America plays around the world. German writer and scholar Joseph Joffe calls the United States today the “default power”: No one in the world trusts anyone else to play the global hegemon, so it still falls to Washington.

Even in the economic realm, the United States remains strong. As Zakaria admits, the United States accounted for 32 percent of global output in 1913, 26 percent in 1960, and 26 percent in 2007, remarkably consistent figures. The United States remains atop nearly every ranking of economies according to openness and innovation. While Asia’s centrally planned economies can build infrastructure without worrying about public opposition - China has built impressive networks of airports and highways - they are less successful at nurturing world-beating companies, which thrive on risk-taking and hands-off government. Compared to Intel, Google, or Apple, China’s major companies still are state-linked behemoths that do little innovation of their own. The leading corporations in most other Asian nations (with the exception of Japan and South Korea) also are either giant state-linked firms or trading companies that invest little in innovation. And censorship or tight government controls alienate the most innovative firms - Google is now threatening to pull out of China entirely.

As Asia throws up barriers to immigration, in the United States immigration helps ensure long-term economic vitality. Chinese and Indian immigrants accounted for almost one-quarter of all companies in Silicon Valley, according to research by AnnaLee Saxenian at the University of California-Berkeley. According to the most comprehensive global ranking of universities, compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, American schools, powered by immigrants and flush with cash, dominate the top 100, with Harvard ranked first. Asia has no schools in the top 10.

Most important, the United States is a champion of an idea that has global appeal, and Asia is not. During the opposition protests in Iran, demonstrators look to the United States, not China or Indonesia or even India, to make a statement. In a reversal of the Iranian regime’s rhetoric, some protestors even chant “Death to China” because of Beijing’s support for the repressive government in Tehran. As long as protestors in places like Iran, or Burma or Ukraine, call out for the American president, and not China’s leader or India’s prime minister, the United States will remain the preeminent power.

To be the global hegemon requires military, economic, and political might, but it also means offering a vision for the world. As Mahbubani admits, during Britain’s imperial period, elites in places like Malaya, India, or the Caribbean wanted to study in England, or read British authors and philosophers, because they believed that the ideas Britain had imparted - the rule of law, the Westminster political system, an idea of fair play, a meritocratic civil service, evidence-based scientific exploration - had merit for the entire world. Even men and women who, ultimately, became some of the biggest thorns in Britain’s side, like Jawarhal Nehru, cherished their British studies and their links to British culture.

So, too, since World War II the United States has been, for many foreign publics, the nation looked up to in this way.

CHANGE IS BAD:

-VIDEO: The last horse fishermen of Belgium: Oostduinkerke on the West Flanders coast is the only place in the world where you will still see the 500-year-old tradition of fishermen trawling for shrimp on horseback. (Alex Healey and Cosimo Bizzarri, 4 February 2010, guardian.co.uk)