Truck and Barter

Funniest Sentence I Heard Yesterday

I presume you're a Marxist...

Photo of the Day

US Marines and Maldivian Defense Forces enjoying a traditional dance;

Meet The Maldives

The Music Band from Seattle

Ibn Battuta in the Maldives

From The Travels of Ibn Battuta - A Virtual Tour with the 14th Century Traveler;

The Maldive Islands were important in medieval times for their exports: coconut fiber used to make ropes and cowrie shells which were used as currency (money) in Malaysia and in parts of Africa. About the middle of the twelfth century the people of Maldives converted from Buddhism to Islam when a pious Muslim from north Africa rid the land of a terrible demon. (The demon had demanded a young virgin each month - and the Muslim hero offered to take the place of the girl. Before the sacrifice, he recited the Koran throughout the night, and the demon could do nothing out of fear of the Sacred Word.) These islands rise only a few feet above the surface of the sea and stretch for about 475 miles like a white pearl necklace.

Ibn Battuta had not planned to spend much time here as he arrived at the capital, Male. But the rulers happened to be looking for a chief judge, someone who knew Arabic and the laws of the Koran. The rulers were delighted to find a visitor that fit their requirements. They sent Ibn Battuta slave girls, pearls, and gold jewelry to convince him to stay. They even made it impossible for him to arrange to leave by ship - so like it or not, he stayed. He agreed to remain there with some conditions, however: he would not go about Male on foot, but be carried in a litter or ride on horseback, just like the king or queen! He even took another wife after staying there less than two months, a noblewoman related to the queen. It seems as though Ibn Battuta was playing politics. He was now part of the royal family and the most important judge.

He set about his duties as a judge with enthusiasm and tried with all his might to establish the rule of strict Muslim law and change local customs. He ordered that any man who failed to attend Friday prayer was to be whipped and publicly disgraced. Thieves had their right hands cut off, and he ordered women who went "topless" to cover up. "I strove to put an end to this practice and commanded the women to wear clothes; but I could not get it done."

He took three more wives who also had powerful social connections, and seems to brag: "After I had become connected by marriage ... the [governor] and the people feared me, for they felt themselves to be weak."

And so he began to make enemies, especially the governor. After nasty arguments and political plots, Ibn Battuta decided to leave after almost nine months in the islands. He quit his job as qadi, but he really would have been fired. He took three of his wives with him, but he divorced them all after a short time. One of them was pregnant. He stayed on another island, and there he married two more women, and divorced them, too. He tells us about marriage and divorce in the Maldives at the time:

"It is easy to marry in these islands because of the smallness of the dowries and the pleasures of society which the women offer... When the ships put in, the crew marry; when they intend to leave they divorce their wives. This is a kind of temporary marriage. The women of these islands never leave their country."

Later, he even thought about going back to the Maldive Islands and taking over under the support of an army commander in southern India. But that was not to be.

An Exorcism Maldives Style

A disturbing video of an exorcism in the Maldives (not recommended for everyone)- I previously mentioned about it in an earlier post.

Black Opium Energy Drink banned

Some news headlines from Maldives;

Importing, selling Black Opium Energy Drink banned in Maldives

The National Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) has yesterday banned the import and selling of the Black Opium Energy Drink in Maldives.

The NCB said in a statement that although there were no traces of any narcotic drugs in the drink, the NCB believed that the name of the brand and the phrases used in promotions and advertisement for the product encouraged people to abuse its namesake drug.

Maldivians becoming congenital liars

Taxi rides: Do we really need it?;

One of the taxis heading from west to east slowed down and I climbed into it. The driver was familiar and I struck a conversation with him regarding the difficulty of getting taxis in this two-square-kilometer island.

“There are over a 100,000 people here and 600-plus taxis ain’t just enough,” argued my taxi driver friend who I will call Mohamed.

“It would have been easier to get taxis if people called up taxis only for necessary rides,” he said.

He went on to say that as most Maldivians are “lazy”, they would rather take a taxi “to go to a place on the next street” and that if some people had their way, “they would rather have us taxis stop right in front of their rooms!”

Some 300 criminals are on the loose in the capital

Why I Don't Like "Happiness Research"

Surveys in general suffer from the fact that self-reported data is always seriously problematic. And that's even when asked questions with demonstrably true or false answers, such as "What is your income?" But couple surveys with the fuzzy-edged notion of "satisfaction" or "happiness", and you get this (with the added bonus of a small sample size):

South Korean gangsters get more satisfaction from their line of work than the police, according to a survey published on Tuesday in local dailies.

The article even suggests satisfaction is correlated with income (gangsters make more than the police, natch), which isn't what other places are telling us.

For more on the topic, see Wilkinson.

Some Are More Equal Than Others

I'm shocked. SHOCKED! PETA -- that is, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals -- apparently has differing standards for which animals are worthy of those ethics. Lowest on the list? Animals raised as food stock.

In the wake of the Denver blizzards, hundreds of thousands of animals have been left stranded to die of starvation or freezing. PETA has refused (as of this writing) to do anything to help out. Not that PETA's set up as emergency relief, of course, but this appears particularly callow given the typical rhetoric that comes from these people.

Why are the suddenly stranded cattle less worthy of rescue than the chickens raised for your plate? My wild guess is that the blizzard achieves the same goal as the Holocaust on Your Plate campaign: they both hurt the sellers of meat. I know, I know, it's crazy to think a public organization has a political goal aside from it's stated altruistic vision -- and it seems to have truly caught some people off-guard -- but it seems possible in this case. As it did when there was a wish for foot-and-mouth disease.

Reputation Effects in Driving

I'm not sure what overall effect it might have, since the punishment mechanism seems a bit nonexistant -- save for being able to send a postcard indicating the recipient has been "wired" -- but if you run across a bad driver and have chance to record the license plate, try feeding it to PlateWire. In their own words:

PlateWire is a public repository and electronic forum of drivers by drivers. Using a drivers license plate, commuters can communicate their thoughts and feelings in regards to driving on today's roadways. Report and flag bad drivers, award good drivers, and even flirt with cute drivers.

Ok, so that last bit strikes me as a bit cloying (and ripe with potential for abuse), but I like the idea of a user-generated driving quality database. While the level of frustration (rage? of each driver is completely subjective, it might help to know not only where the most frustrating drivers are, but where you would find the most frustrated ones as well.

Assorted and Interesting

Are The Big Four Econ Errors Biases?
A bird's eye view of econometrics
Is democracy good for the poor?
Numbers Guy on Armenian Genocide
The importance of a good analogy
Political Price Cycles in Gasoline Markets?
Wading in waste
Downshifting and Reversion in Forecasts

I Want It Now!The Curious Economics Of Temptation By Tim Harford
The Exceptionally Entrepreneurial Society
For Better or For Worse: Entrepreneurs, Families, and Inequality
Does America need a draft to win the war on terror?
Why understanding economics is hard
St Lucia best in Caribbean for Doing Business
God made Indonesia for free trade

Economics: The Invisible Hand of the Market
Dasgupta on the Stern Review
A Cool Calculus of Global Warming by Joseph E. Stiglitz
A call to arms- Anthony Giddens
Should Congress Raise the Federal Minimum Wage?—Posner
Iraq in Fragments (from the latest Foreign Exchange show)

Fed Chairman’s Daybook
A giant's strength is valuable - if not used like a giant by John Kay
Ivy League Investors by Robert Schiller
Globalization Makes an Easy Scapegoat by Robert Samuelson
Making fine distinctions in understanding hereditability of attitudes
What We Learn When We Learn Economics

Why Oh Why Can’t We Have Better Economists?
Can foreign aid work?
Uninsurable
Are Husbands really like potatoes?
Settling the New Continent by David Warsh
Syntax and flow

Getting it Wrong by David Friedman
Was Friedman a "Great Conservative Partisan"?
Milton Friedman: The Methodology of Positive Economics
Friedman On Growth Measurements and Immigration
The fading of Friedman by Paul Ormerod

European Cities Do Away with Traffic Signs
Secrets of the Cave Paintings
How I learnt to walk tall at 5ft 5in
The Paradox of Military Technology
Velvet Revolution in Iran?
Less Faith, More Reason by Steven Pinker
Mahfouz’s grave, Arab liberalism’s deathbed
Free Speech, Israel, and Jewish Illiberalism
The Myth of Thomas Szasz
Mirror, Mirror
Evidence that psychology, like biology, is conserved between human and nonhuman species augurs a shake-up for science and society
Conspicuous Proliferation
Just their type
Our appetite for literary gossip is insatiable, but great writers aren’t mere fly-by-night celebs, argues Bryan Appleyard
Bush, Maliki, and Lots of Questions
What is a Civil War?
Henry Kissinger says what he means, whatever that means

Markets in Everything – God Helmet

If you’re interested in a short cut to spiritual experiences, neurobiologist Michael Persinger has devised a wired helmet that he says induces religious experiences in those who wear it.

Another helmet called Shakti – claimed to be better than the above one (price $220)

Related;
Shakti and the Koren Helmet - which is more effective?
God on the Brain - questions and answers
The God Experiments
This IsYour Brain on God
God moves in mysterious waves
Visions or Partial-Complex Seizures?
The Significance of Ellen White's Head Injury
Neuroscience - the New Philosophy
Neuroethics (podcast)

Sex and Statistics

In the Chimp world;

“In contrast to humans, the researchers found, male chimps find older females more desirable, approaching them more often to mate, fighting more with other males over them and mating with them far more frequently than with younger females. That is true even for higher-ranking male chimps, which have more choice of mates. The findings confirm the earlier results of other researchers.

"Multiple lines of evidence indicate that unlike humans, female chimpanzees become more sexually attractive with age," the researchers report in the Nov. 21 issue of the journal Current Biology. "This study demonstrates that male chimpanzees do not merely disdain young females, but actively prefer older mothers to younger mothers."

In the Human world;

Braving "robbing the cradle" jokes, almost one-third of women between ages 40 and 69 are dating younger men (defined as 10 or more years younger). According to a recent AARP poll, one-sixth of women in their 50s, in fact, prefer men in their 40s…

But what about the notion that men are "hard-wired" to seek a smooth-faced, curvy receptacle for reproduction and thus are drawn to younger women? "Humans are relatively flexible species," Michael R. Cunningham, Ph.D., a psychologist in the department of communications at the University of Louisville, tells WebMD. "Factors other than biological can be attractive. You can override a lot of biology in pursuit of other goals."

Interestingly, Cunningham did an unpublished study of 60 women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, who were shown pictures of men aged to those decades. "The women," he says, "were more interested in men their own age or older."

As for the men, he says: "I guess it could be nice not to hang around a ditz with no knowledge of music or something like that."

In the blue-eyed world;

Blue-eyed men prefer blue-eyed women, apparently because eye color can help reveal whether their partner has been faithful, researchers said on Monday.

“Before you request a paternity test, spend a few minutes looking at your child’s eye color,” Bruno Laeng and colleagues at the University of Tromso in Norway said in the study.

Thanks to Mahalanobis

Related;
If you've got it, flaunt it (P.S. You've got it):
Lake Wobegon effect
Is there a universal positivity bias in attributions? A meta-analytic review of individual, developmental, and cultural differences in the self-serving attributional bias

“Researchers have suggested the presence of a self-serving attributional bias, with people making more internal, stable, and global attributions for positive events than for negative events. This study examined the magnitude, ubiquity, and adaptiveness of this bias. The authors conducted a meta-analysis of 266 studies, yielding 503 independent effect sizes. The average d was 0.96, indicating a large bias. The bias was present in nearly all samples. There were significant age differences, with children and older adults displaying the largest biases. Asian samples displayed significantly smaller biases (d = 0.30) than U.S. (d = 1.05) or Western (d = 0.70) samples. Psychopathology was associated with a significantly attenuated bias (d = 0.48) compared with samples without psychopathology (d = 1.28) and community samples (d = 1.08). The bias was smallest for samples with depression (0.21), anxiety (0.46), and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (0.55). Findings confirm that the self-serving attributional bias is pervasive in the general population but demonstrates significant variability across age, culture, and psychopathology.”

Can Google bring democracy to Arabs?

Technology never ceases to amaze me;

“Since Bahrain’s government blocked the Google Earth website earlier this year for its intrusion into private homes and royal palaces, Googling their island kingdom has become a national pastime for many Bahrainis.

The site allows internet users to view satellite images of the world in varying degrees of detail. When Google updated its images of Bahrain to higher definition, cyber-activists seized on the view it gave of estates and private islands belonging to the ruling al-Khalifa family to highlight the inequity of land distribution in the tiny Gulf kingdom.

A senior government official told the Financial Times that Google Earth had allowed the public to pry into private homes and ogle people’s motor yachts and swimming pools. But he acknowledged that the government’s three-day attempt to block the site had proved counterproductive.

It gave instant publicity to Google Earth and contributed to growing sophistication among Bahrainis in circumventing web censorship.

It also provided more ammunition to democracy activists ahead of parliamentary elections this Saturday, the second since King Hamad bin Issa al-Khalifa began introducing limited political reforms in 2001. “

Via FP blog.

Related;
Mahmood’s Den
Bahrainis use Google Earth to spy on royals' palaces

Turkey Fact of the Day

“Take the results of a new poll by Tesev, a think-tank which studies society and religion: the number of Turks who put their Muslim identity first has risen to 45% from 36% in 1999; but over the same period the number of people who favoured sharia law dropped from 21% to 9%.”
- From The Economist, The pope's controversial trip to Turkey

Related;
Allure of Islam Signals a Shift Within Turkey

A Real Liberal Under Attack in Turkey for Defending Freedom

“Kemalist secularism is not well understood by Americans and Europeans. As Atilla put it some years ago (about ten, I think) at a seminar I organized for him at the Cato Institute, “People say that you have separation of church and state in America and we have separation of mosque and church and state in Turkey. In America, that means freedom of religion. In Turkey, it means freedom from religion. There is a great difference between the two.” Private property, contract, and limited government should create the framework for people to decide on their own, through voluntary cooperation, whether and how to build a mosque, a church, a synagogue, or anything else. Such decisions should not be made by state officials.”

The Pope, The Condescending, and Closet-Intolerance

Podcasts- Intelligent Design, God and Style

Intelligent Design

Richard Dawkins and God

Dawkins debate about Altruism

Virginia Postrel on Style

Nature and Religion
Marine scientist Walter Stark, a pioneer of coral reef research who believes the modern view of nature is religious. It holds that nature is pure and perfect, while humans are separate and soiled. He argues that urban Australians' view of nature is problem-obsessed, because problems offer magnificent opportunities to politicians, academics, the media, and of course professional activists

A new branch of moral philosophy

Nick Drayson is a zoologist and a spinner of yarns. His outrageous book, Confessing a Murder, explains the stunning coincidence of Wallace and Darwin 'discovering' natural selection. Now he is in search of platypus memorabilia for the National Museum in Canberra.

Moral Minds: The Evolution of Human Morality

Sex, Drugs and Economics

Note; A lot of these podcasts are available for limited time, so download now.

Guide to Flirting

An interesting article from the latest edition of The Economist; Flirting-Don't misunderestimate yourself;

“Dr Hill showed heterosexual men and women photographs of people. She asked them to rate both how attractive those of their own sex would be to the opposite sex, and how attractive the members of the opposite sex were. She then compared the scores for the former with the scores for the latter, seen from the other side. Men thought that the men they were shown were more attractive to women than they really were, and women thought the same of the women.

Dr Hill had predicted this outcome, thanks to error-management theory—the idea that when people (or, indeed, other animals) make errors of judgment, they tend to make the error that is least costly. The notion was first proposed by Martie Haselton and David Buss, two of Dr Hill's colleagues, to explain a puzzling quirk in male psychology.

As studies show, and many women will attest, men tend to misinterpret innocent friendliness as a sign that women are sexually interested in them. Dr Haselton and Dr Buss reasoned that men who are trying to decide if a woman is interested sexually can err in one of two ways. They can mistakenly believe that she is not interested, in which case they will not bother trying to have sex with her; or they can mistakenly believe she is interested, try, and be rejected. From an evolutionary standpoint, trying and being rejected comes at little cost, except for hurt feelings. Not trying at all, by contrast, may mean the loss of an opportunity to, among other things, spread one's DNA.”

Related;

Interview with Martie Haselton (podcast)

Study links women's fashion sense to ovulation

Looking Good-Our obsession with physical appearance may not be so shallow, after all;

“A Polish researcher named Grazyna Jasienska recently designed an experiment to determine whether symmetrical women have higher levels of the key reproductive hormone estradiol. In the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, her team reports the results. They compared the left and right ring fingers of 183 Polish women between the ages of 24 and 36. Women whose fingers differed in length by more than two millimeters formed the asymmetrical group. Their average estradiol levels were 13 percent lower than the symmetrical group average.

When the scientists screened out rural women, whose economic status and harder lives could skew their hormone levels, the difference in average hormone levels between symmetrical and asymmetrical urban women rose to 28 percent.

Marquardt's work has an artistic spin to it. Like Euclid, Leonardo da Vinci and Le Corbusier before him, the doctor became fascinated with the possibility that beauty itself could be quantified. His instincts told him that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. "I didn't find that to be true," he explains in an interview. "Guys seem to agree. They may argue over whether they prefer Michelle Pfeiffer or Kim Basinger, but you never hear anyone say Roseanne Barr." He had always been mathematically inclined, so, beginning in the early 1970s, Marquardt set out to compile the measurements of beautiful faces. He focused on people who were paid for being attractive -- movie stars and face models. His colleagues scoffed: "Every doctor I talked to told me I was nuts," he recalls.”

Our minds are not what we think

From FT a case of patient with Cotard syndrome;

"She was completely preoccupied with the thought that she was dead," he recalls. "She kept saying that she'd died two weeks before and was worried about whether my office was heaven or not."

The young scientist realised that Liz was suffering from a rare and strange condition known as Cotard syndrome, which for the sake of brevity I'll define as the delusion that one is dead. The condition was named after the French psychiatrist Jules Cotard who wrote about some classic cases in the late 1800s. He called it delire des negations and described a host of other symptoms including feelings of guilt, denial of body parts and even, paradoxically for someone who thinks they are dead, thoughts about suicide….

Roughly 100 cases of Cotard delusion have been reported in the medical literature, which certainly makes it rare, although not as rare as some other strange delusions, such as the single case of a man with "perceptual delusional bicephaly". He believed he had two heads and was admitted to hospital suffering gunshot wounds from where he'd tried to shoot one off….

Eventually he did get through, and posed a series of questions to assess an aspect of her personality known as her attributional style. Broadly speaking, this measures a person's tendency to attribute events in their lives to themselves (internal attribution) or to other people or luck (external).

He asked Liz a standard set of questions, presenting her with a range of scenarios - for example, a friend sending her a postcard - and asking her to think about the most likely cause of that event, whether it be herself, other people or chance.

The results showed that Liz had a significantly higher number of internal attributions than usual. This was interesting because it relates to one of the prevailing theories about what happens to patients with Cotard delusion. Scientists think that patients with Cotard syndrome have suffered some kind of disruption to the brain wiring for recognising faces. "The idea is that there are two elements to the visual recognition system," McKay explained to me over the phone last week from his new office at Australia's Charles Sturt University. The first element does the pattern-matching business of recognising a face, the second provides the more emotional buzz of familiarity…”

Via Mind Hacks

Related;

Looking Good-Our obsession with physical appearance may not be so shallow, after all
On Consciousness Evolved by VS Ramachandran
Moral Sense Test

Podcasts

Moral Minds: The Evolution of Human Morality
Incest, infanticide, honour killings - different cultures have different rules of justice. But are we all born with a moral instinct - an innate ability to judge what is right and wrong? Could morality be like language - a universal, unconscious grammar common to all human cultures? Eminent evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser and philosopher Richard Joyce take on these controversial questions in impressive new tomes, and to critical acclaim. But could their evolutionary arguments undermine the social authority of morality? Is biology the new 'religion'? Guests include Marc Hauser and Richard Joyce

Mindfulness
The 'holy grail' of meditation techniques is mindfulness. But what is it, exactly? And why has the medical profession suddenly appropriated this age-old technique devised by yogis and Buddhist monks? Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn, is the world leader in this field. We also hear from 'the guru of calm', Paul Wilson. Having published scores of books on Calm (Little Book of Calm, Instant Calm etc) Wilson is convinced it's a technique he learned in the Queensland outback

A new branch of moral philosophy
Neuroethics is a new field. It concerns the ethics of the science of the mind and the ethical questions that arise out of our growing knowledge of the way in which the mind works. Before the year 2000 there was little need for the term but rapid advances in the sciences of mind, and the rise of pressing ethical issues surrounding them, mean that we cannot any longer remain without the term or the field to which it refers.

The elimination of iodine deficiency as a cause of brain damage

A Child's Spirit
Encounter ponders the subject of spiritual development in children, and also considers how forces at play in the wider world can shape, and often thwart, children's spiritual lives

Note; Podcasts above are from Radio National and are available for limited time...so download now.

Cost Benefit of Bikini Waxes

Tim Harford has put online a recent column of Dear Economist not available on the FT site.

Dear Economist, Bikini waxes: boyfriends seem to like the results, but they hurt. What would you say were the costs and benefits? Yours, Sylvia, via email

Related; Cost Benefit of Circumcision

The budget of the insurgents revealed

NYT reports on the financing of the insurgency in Iraq;

“The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded.

The report, obtained by The New York Times, estimates that groups responsible for many insurgent and terrorist attacks are raising $70 million to $200 million a year from illegal activities. It says $25 million to $100 million of that comes from oil smuggling and other criminal activity involving the state-owned oil industry, aided by “corrupt and complicit” Iraqi officials.

As much as $36 million a year comes from ransoms paid for hundreds of kidnap victims, the report says. It estimates that unnamed foreign governments — previously identified by American officials as including France and Italy — paid $30 million in ransom last year…

The group’s estimate of the financing for the insurgency, even taking the higher figure of $200 million, underscores the David and Goliath nature of the war. American, Iraqi and other coalition forces are fighting an array of shadowy Sunni and Shiite groups that can draw on huge armories left over from Mr. Hussein’s days, and benefit from the willingness of many insurgents to fight with little or no pay. If the $200 million a year estimate is close to the mark, it amounts to less than what it costs the Pentagon, with an $8 billion monthly budget for Iraq, to sustain the American war effort here for a single day.

But other estimates suggest the sums involved could be far higher. The oil ministry in Baghdad, for example, estimated earlier this year that 10 percent to 30 percent of the $4 billion to $5 billion in fuel imported for public consumption in 2005 was smuggled back out of the country for resale. At that time, the finance minister estimated that close to half of all smuggling profits was going to insurgents. If true, that would be $200 million or more from fuel smuggling alone.”

Related;
In Search of the Fixers
Iraqi women increasingly targeted in violence
Ferocity of Iraq attacks leaves US troops helpless
Sunni leader must stop bloodshed, says Sadr
Iran: America Destroyed All Our Enemies in the Region

Quotes of the Day

“You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilized value. You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilized men and women,”… “You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world, Mr. Putin, will reverberate in your ears for the rest of your life.”
- Alexander Litvinenko

"Meanwhile, as far as I know, in the medical report of British doctors, there is no indication that this was an unnatural death. There is none. That means, there is no reason for discussion of that kind.”
- President Putin

Informed advice for anyone contemplating homicide (podcast)
If you are really keen to murder a spouse, which chemical element would you choose? Arsenic is SO last year. Mercury is so - well, mercurial. Cambridge chemist John Emsley offers informed advice for anyone contemplating homicide who would like to show a little flair and impress the team from CSI. He’s the author of the book, The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison.

Related;
Kremlin denies poisoned spy claim
Anna Politkovskaya: Putin's Russia
Putin's 'rape joke' played down
Putin: Once A KGB Thug, Always A KGB Thug
London Riddle: A Russian Spy, a Lethal Dose
Litvinenko is no heroic defector
Alexander Litvinenko's Last Statement
Miscellaneous Links

More on Milton Friedman

David Friedman, son of Milton Friedman notes the geographical diversity of comments for condolences about his father on his blog. One thing I noticed was that there was not a single Arab country and only three were Muslim nations. I don’t know whether this means anything about the state of mindset about the people of these countries.

Related;
Milton Friedman and the Social Responsibility of Business
Milton Friedman: A Tribute
The Draft: Charles Rangel, Milton Friedman, and William Meckling
Milton Friedman's Wisdom and the Impending London Olympics

Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Augusto Pinochet, and Hu Jintao: Authoritarian Liberalism vs. Liberal Authoritarianism

The other Milton Friedman by Cal Thomas
The Other Milton Friedman: A Conservative With a Social Welfare Program by Robert Frank

Milton Friedman-A heavyweight champ, at five foot two
From the archive-A Tract for the Times;
"Writing in the preface to a later edition, Milton Friedman recalled that his book's views “were so far out of the mainstream that it was not reviewed by any major national publication... though it was reviewed by the London Economist and by the major professional journals.” More than 400,000 copies of “Capitalism and Freedom” were sold in the 18 years after it was first published."

A proposal to make Sunni Arabs happy

Two Princeton professors Shivaji Sondhi and Michael Cook, have a guest column at Econbrowser on a suggestion to improve the stake of the Sunnis in Iraq;

“The problem from the start has been the stake of the Sunni Arabs. This was entirely predictable, as no minority used to a disproportionate share of power gives up this privilege easily-- the relative deprivation simply excites too many fears. One only has to look at nearby Lebanon for an example…

To this end we propose that the United States make a financial commitment to Iraq which takes the form of ensuring that its Sunni provinces get oil revenues proportional to their share of the population over the next decade or possibly more. Initially, it should take the form of simply funneling an amount equal to the Sunni share directly to these provinces. This would at the same time increase the size of the national pie, which would help to appease the Shia and the Kurds, and might also reduce the tension over Kirkuk. In later years the commitment would transition into an insurance policy.

What would be a rough upper bound on such a commitment? To date Iraq has produced a maximum of 3.7 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil. This was back in 1979, and the country hasn't actually produced more than 3.5 million bpd since 1990. It is quite unlikely that either figure will be exceeded anytime soon. Taking the 1979 figure and a profit of $50 per barrel, we are talking about revenues of approximately $67 billion a year. Of this we may estimate the share of the Sunni majority provinces at about 20 per cent, or $14 billion. Today their share of the 2 million bpd production is closer to $7 billion."

Related;
Iraq's white-collar crime by Juan Cole
Iraq Force Shift Studied
Don't Punt on The Troops Issue by Fareed Zakaria
Iraq: over 3,700 civilians killed in October
Iraq snapshot
Violence in Iraq: A Data-Driven Approach
Iraq Kurdistan Book Drive

Iraq: Dujail Trial Fundamentally Flawed
“The proceedings in the Dujail trial were fundamentally unfair. The tribunal squandered an important opportunity to deliver credible justice to the people of Iraq. And its imposition of the death penalty after an unfair trial is indefensible”
(Human Rights Watch Report)

Podcast of the Day- First genocide of the 20th Century?

One million people were killed in the Armenian genocide in 1915. It was the first genocide of the twentieth century, and in many ways set horrific template for all the genocides that came after it - including the Holocaust. The Armenian genocide has been in the news a bit lately because the French National Assembly and Senate have passed a bill that makes denying the Armenian genocide a crime.

Taner Akcam argues that issue of the genocide is inextricably linked to the idea of modern Turkey, and says that if Turkey is going to make it as a democracy it must start facing up to its past. Akcam is part of a small group or Turkish scholars who are starting to challenge the Turkish governments' account of the genocide - and he is the first specialist to actually use the politically and morally charged word "genocide' to describe the killings. The release of his book in Turkey earlier this month was met with irate criticism in the mainstream Turkish press. Listen to the podcast (from Radio National).
Related; Genocide?

The price of delaying democratic reform?

Jonathan at The Head Heeb has interesting analysis of recent riots in Tonga;

“It looks like Tonga will finally have its democracy, but at staggering economic and social cost. And the price of withholding democratic reform for so long may in fact be even greater than it first appears; during the past three years of turmoil, Tongans have become used to revolutionary protest, and the effect on national politics and governmental legitimacy may remain with the country for a long time.”

Related;
Trouble in Tonga (Radio National Podcast)
NYT new blog The Lede has more on the Tonga riots
Information hub on the Kingdom of Tonga
Country profile: Tonga

This and That

Some articles worth reading;

The Great Liberator- Lawrence Summers on Freidman
On Milton Friedman's Ideas—BECKER
Milton Friedman's Case- Arnold Kling

The Young Economist by Lizbeth Scordo
Three Things You Don't Know About Aids In Africa by Emily Oster
Methodology Matters by Edward L. Glaeser
Economics focus- Third thoughts on foreign capital

How last century's money wars may lead to healthcare, pension reform
Managing Change; Is the Penny Worth Keeping?
The Flintstone EffectTracing wealth back to the Stone Age by Joel Waldfogel
My Boss Is 65 and Pregnant; How fertility advances could allow women to take over the boardroom By Tim Harford

The New Baby Boomers by Francois Bourguignon
The Zigzag of Politics- David Warsh
DEAL SWEETENERS- James Surowiecki
More Things Economists Don't Say

Patriots vs. Redskins
Beyond Insurance: Weighing the Benefits of Driving vs. the Total Costs of Driving- VARIAN
Want world peace? Support free trade. By Donald J. Boudreaux
The Undercover Economist: Round numbers By Tim Harford

Who's Counting: Which 'Experts' Make Better Political Predictions?
Grading the Pollsters
Why the successful prefer being average to extreme
America’s Anti-Environmentalists

It's time for truth in property taxation
The Social Responsibility in Teaching Sociobiology
Tracing the divine obsession; Also known as `the game of games,' chess has seduced kings and queens, beggars and madmen for 1,500 years.
When Legal Meets Marketing

How the Web Prevents Rape
Murphy’s law
What did Descartes really know?

The unwritten rules of proxemics

A fascinating article in NYT talks about role of personal space and its implications;

“Communications scholars began studying personal space and people’s perception of it decades ago, in a field known as proxemics. But with the population in the United States climbing above 300 million, urban corridors becoming denser and people with wealth searching for new ways to separate themselves from the masses, interest in the issue of personal space — that invisible force field around your body — is intensifying….

But whether people have become more protective of their personal space is difficult to say. Studies show people tend to adapt, even in cities, which are likely to grow ever more crowded based on population projections.

Yet studies involving airlines show the desire to have some space to oneself is among the top passenger requests. In a survey in April from TripAdvisor, a travel Web site, travelers said that if they had to pay for certain amenities, they would rather have larger seats and more legroom than massages and premium food. And a current advertisement for Eos Airlines, which flies between New York and London, is promoting the fact that it offers passengers “21 square feet of personal space.”

While people may crave space, they rarely realize how entrenched proxemics are. Scholars can predict which areas of an elevator are likely to fill up first and which urinal a man will choose. They know people will stare at the lighted floor numbers in elevators, not one another...

They know commuters will hold newspapers in front of them to read, yes, but also to shield themselves from strangers. And they know college students will unconsciously choose to sit in the same row, if not the same seat, each class.

“If you videotape people at a library table, it’s very clear what seat somebody will take,” Dr. Archer said, adding that one of the corner seats will go first, followed by the chair diagonally opposite because that is farthest away. “If you break those rules, it’s fascinating,” he said. “People will pile up books as if to make a wall — glare.”

Edward T. Hall, an anthropologist and the father of proxemics, even put numbers to the unspoken rules. He defined the invisible zones around us and attributed a range of distance to each one: intimate distance (6 to 18 inches); personal distance (18 inches to 4 feet); social distance (4 to 12 feet); and public distance (about 12 feet or more). …

“In the U.S., it’s very closely linked to ideals of individuals,” said Kathryn Sorrells, an associate professor of communication studies at California State University, Northridge, who is writing a book, “Globalizing Intercultural Communications.” “There’s an idea that you have the right to this space,” she said, noting that it was born of a culture that prizes independence, privacy and capitalism. …

Paco Underhill, the author of “Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping” and the chief executive of Envirosell, a research and consulting company whose client list includes Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Starbucks and McDonald’s, discovered that most consumers will walk away from whatever they are looking at in a store if a customer inadvertently brushes against their backside, disturbing his or her personal space.

And so, what may seem like a minor behavioral tic can help department stores determine how far apart to place racks of clothes, bistro owners figure out how to configure the bar area and college campuses to design residence halls."

Related;

Some of researchers cited in the article; Robert Krauss, David B. Givens, Kathryn Sorrells, Nick Yee, Paco Underhill

Do we need traffic lights?

Marketing New Zealand- From fantasy worlds to food

Swarming the shelves-
"Another recent study on the power of social influence indicates that sales could, indeed, be boosted in this way. Matthew Salganik of Columbia University in New York and his colleagues have described creating an artificial music market in which some 14,000 people downloaded previously unknown songs. The researchers found that when people could see the songs ranked by how many times they had been downloaded, they followed the crowd. When the songs were not ordered by rank, but the number of times they had been downloaded was displayed, the effect of social influence was still there but was less pronounced. People thus follow the herd when it is easy for them to do so."

Five minutes with Nick Yee

Swarm Intelligence

Podcasts;

Trends and Products: Alternate Reality
This week a look into how and why places like You Tube and My Space could suddenly - seemingly out of the blue - be billion dollar sensations. There is a new cultural phenomenon called Alternate Reality, according to University of Sydney's Christy Dena. She explains all

The smell of architecture
Architecture has traditionally favoured sight above all over senses.
So what place is there for the sense of smell in our relationship with the built environment?

Trends and Products: the impact of pdf files
Kevin Kelly writes about the way technology is changing our lives. Today he talks to By Design about the impact of the pdf file, and the way in which information is being digitised. What effect is this having on our day-to-day lives?

Creative prison: design can change behaviour
Do you think that architecture can change behaviour and can influence character? Who knows for sure, but British architect Will Alsop believes good design can change lives for the better.

Trends and Products: ethical fashion

Madness in Bollywood Movies

Seems like an interesting study;

“OBJECTIVE: To study the portrayal of mental illness (especially psychosis) in Hindi films since 1950 and to study the influence of prevalent social, political and economic factors on each portrayal. METHOD: Using two encyclopedias and one source book, films that had mental illness affecting one of the protagonists were identified. The social, economic and political factors were identified using history texts. RESULTS: In the 1960s after India became a Republic, the political climate was one of idealism and as a result the portrayal of mental illness was gentle, more international in its outlook, and used psychoanalytic techniques. In the 1970s and 1980s, as a result of increased political and bureaucratic corruption and an unstable political climate, the portrayals became harder and psychopaths were portrayed more often. In the 1980s, the trend continued with female psychopaths, and avenging women emerged as a major force because the political and judicial systems were seen as impotent in delivering justice. In the 1990s, following economic liberalization, the women were seen and used as possessions in society and the cinema, and portrayals of stalking and morbid jealousy increased. CONCLUSION: Hindi films since the 1950s appear to have been influenced by changing cultural norms which in turn affected the way mental illness is portrayed.”

Via Mind Hacks; Lights, camera, madness - Bollywood style

Related;
A pat on the back for `Lage Raho Munnabhai'
Insanity in films
Indian author and film-maker Ruchir Joshi interview

Afghanistan Drug Control- GAO’s views

A recent report from GAO; Afghanistan Drug Control: Despite Improved Efforts, Deteriorating Security Threatens Success of U.S. Goals

“The prevalence of opium poppy cultivation and drug trafficking in Afghanistan imperils the stability of its government and threatens to turn the conflict-ridden nation once again into a safe haven for traffickers and terrorists. To combat the drug trade, the U.S. government developed a counternarcotics strategy consisting of five pillars--alternative livelihoods, elimination and eradication, interdiction, law enforcement and justice, and public information. The Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2005 directed GAO to examine the use of all fiscal year 2005 funds administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Department of State (State) for Afghan counternarcotics programs. To comply with this mandate, we examined progress under each counternarcotics pillar, challenges faced, and efforts to ensure that funds were used for intended purposes. To address these objectives, GAO reviewed pertinent USAID and State documents and met with cognizant U.S. and international officials in Washington, D.C., and Afghanistan. GAO makes no recommendations in this report. USAID, State, Department of Defense, and Department of Justice were provided a draft of this report, but did not provide formal comments.”

Related;
Afghanistan’s Other War
Afghanistan- on the road to a narco-state?

Podcast of the Day- Ponzi’s Scheme

Ponzi's Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend
“Before Charles Ponzi (1882-1949) sailed from Italy to the shores of America in 1903, his father assured him that the streets were really paved with gold and that Ponzi would be able to get a piece. Mitchell Zuckoff, Professor of Journalism at Boston University and former reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist for the Boston Globe, observes in his engaging and fast-paced biography, Ponzi learned as soon as he disembarked that though the streets were often cobblestone, he could still make a fortune in a culture caught in the throes of the Gilded Age. Learn about Ponzi's mercurial rise and fall as he conjured up one get-rich-quick scheme after another. Zuckoff reveals how the Boston Post uncovered this 'robbing Peter to pay Paul' system (as it was then known), and how Ponzi's life unraveled.”

Related;
Pyramid Scheme Warning (this post had generated some lively comments)

THE PERFECT MARK; How a Massachusetts psychotherapist fell for a Nigerian e-mail scam

Charles Ponzi, we hardly know ye

Common Fraud Schemes

Five Rules for telling a Joke

- Pick your moments. It's easiest to tell a joke when everyone's relaxed and enjoying themselves. Telling a joke to relieve tension is a high-risk strategy, but potentially hilarious. Besides, there'll be other funerals.

- Know where you're going - the punchline - before you start

- Don't be tempted to over-elaborate. Eddie Izzard makes it look easy, but remember that one man's surreal flight of fancy is another man's rambling, incoherent humiliation.

- Project a demeanour of relaxed confidence - it gives your listener permission to laugh. You can try deadpan, but social joke-telling usually requires the teller to laugh too.

- Enjoy it. If your entire self-esteem is resting on whether people laugh at your joke, then you're doing it for the wrong reasons. On the other hand, you are showing signs of the borderline personality disorder that characterises all the best comedians, so perhaps you should consider telling jokes for a living.

Via Mind Hacks- How to be funny

Related;
Is this the perfect comedy face?

The Naked Jape: Uncovering the Hidden World of Jokes by Jimmy Carr, Lucy Greeves

An Arab role model

Profile of a role model for Arab women;

“Every day and night, I think about how the girls need to change,” Sheika Lubna said emphatically. “Ultimately, I am out there for them.”…

As a woman who challenged all the societal rules in the 1970s, working her way up the ranks as a computer engineer, then a chief executive and a government minister, she has sought to prove to women here that they, too, must begin assuming a greater role in public life.
Her family is the ruling family of the emirate of Sharjah, the emirate neighboring Dubai; her uncle is the ruler. As royalty, she faced even more traditional demands than most. Moreover, she never really needed to work, and if she chose to, she could have opted for a low-key job in a ceremonial role or as a bureaucrat.

She chose the hard way, however. When other women were staying home in the late 1970s, Sheika Lubna left for California to study computer engineering, becoming one of the first Emirati women to travel abroad for study.

But Arab religious sheikhs seem interested in explaining other things.

Related;

Dubai Swats Pests Ogling Beach Beauties;

"Indeed, for the estimated 500,000 foreign workers here, most from the Indian subcontinent, the chance to spot a woman in a bikini may be hard to pass up.

They typically live in a Dickensian world of squalor, working 12-hour shifts six days a week, often denied their wages of about $150 per month for months at a time. Most of them secure work by taking out loans from recruiting agencies at home to get here, forcing most to stay on for years without seeing their families and loved ones. The workmen have become prevalent in Dubai’s public parks and beaches as their numbers have swelled, and because of the lechery-on-the-beach factor, they are especially noticeable at this time of year.

They tend to beachcomb in groups, their camera-equipped cellphones always at the ready. Many do not know how to swim; some enter the water wearing their traditional robes, made of thin white cloth that becomes transparent when wet — and reveals far more of their anatomy than most beachgoers want to see. Incidents of physical harm to women are rare, though the police have arrested flashers and men committing lewd acts in public."

Macaca Op-Ed

S.R. Sidarth has an op-ed in Washington Post;

“After Allen's remarks, my heritage suddenly became a matter of widespread interest. I am proud to be a second-generation Indian American and a practicing Hindu. My parents were born and raised in India and immigrated here more than 25 years ago; I have known no home other than Northern Virginia. The hairstyle inflicted upon me by two friends late one night also became newsworthy; for the record, it was intended to be a mullet and has since grown out to nearly the appropriate length.

The larger question that this experience brings up is: How far has society progressed on the issues of race and openness? By 2050, according to most projections, the United States will be a minority-majority nation. But the fact that Allen believed I was an immigrant, when in fact I am a native Virginian, underlines the problems our society still faces.”

Related;
“There are 1.7 million Americans of Indian ancestry. They are the fastest growing ethnic group in this country. Their income is 54% higher than the national average, and 1 in 9 is a millionaire.”
-Foreign Exchange show

Cost-Benefit of Sex

The benefits of sex according to this article;

“In one of the most credible studies correlating overall health with sexual frequency, Queens University in Belfast tracked the mortality of about 1,000 middle-aged men over the course of a decade. The study was designed to compare persons of comparable circumstances, age and health. Its findings, published in 1997 in the British Medical Journal, were that men who reported the highest frequency of orgasm enjoyed a death rate half that of the laggards. Other studies (some rigorous, some less so) purport to show that having sex even a few times a week has an associative or causal relationship with the following:

- Improved sense of smell:….
- Reduced risk of heart disease: …
- Weight loss, overall fitness: Sex, if nothing else, is exercise. A vigorous bout burns some 200 calories--about the same as running 15 minutes on a treadmill or playing a spirited game of squash. The pulse rate, in a person aroused, rises from about 70 beats per minute to 150, the same as that of an athlete putting forth maximum effort. British researchers have determined that the equivalent of six Big Macs can be worked off by having sex three times a week for a year. Muscular contractions during intercourse work the pelvis, thighs, buttocks, arms, neck and thorax. Sex also boosts production of testosterone, which leads to stronger bones and muscles. Men's Health magazine has gone so far as to call the bed the single greatest piece of exercise equipment ever invented.

-Reduced depression: …
- Pain-relief: …
- Less-frequent colds and flu: …
- Better bladder control: …
- Better teeth: Seminal plasma contains zinc, calcium and other minerals shown to retard tooth decay. Since this is a family Web site, we will omit discussion of the mineral delivery system. Suffice it to say that it could be a far richer, more complex and more satisfying experience than squeezing a tube of Crest--even Tartar Control Crest. Researchers have noted, parenthetically, that sexual etiquette usually demands the brushing of one's teeth before and/or after intimacy, which, by itself, would help promote better oral hygiene.
- A happier prostate?

Costs? I leave up to the reader. Shouldn’t government be subsidizing it then?

Known Known

Slate recycles the poetry of Rumsfeld;

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

The Situation
Things will not be necessarily continuous.
The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous
Ought not to be characterized as a pause.
There will be some things that people will see.
There will be some things that people won't see.
And life goes on.
—Oct. 12, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing

Related
Google and Known Unknowns

Economists and Integrity

Two economists who recently lost part of their titles;

Andrei Shleifer ’82 isn’t the only Harvard economics professor to have been stripped of his endowed title after allegedly getting his hands dirty.

Martin L. Weitzman, the Harvard faculty member accused of stealing horse manure from a Rockport, Mass., farm in April 2005, has also recently lost his title as the Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Economics.

David Warsh has an interesting column on the issue. He concludes;

“There is, indeed, a common thread running through both incidents: a rather startling arrogance; in each case a Harvard professor acted as though he were entitled to take whatever he wanted, regardless of the law. Granted, there is not much moral equivalence between a $900 quarrel in a small town, on the one hand, and, on the other, an unrepentant betrayal of an adoptive country, an alma mater, hundreds of employees and a raft of friends (which also cost Harvard well over $30 million and much reputational capital). Applying the same penalty to the perpetrator of a misdemeanor as to a man who smuggled Soviet-style values into the highest levels of government and education in the United States might seem to send no more weighty a message to the Harvard faculty than, Don't get our name in the newspapers by breaking the law. But perhaps it is too early to say.

Small gestures, cunningly contrived, can have big effects. The price of not doing the right thing is going up as well.”

What is Harvard teaching its students? Mankiw, please explain?

Related;
On the Subject of Hypocrisy: The Shleifer Affair

Truth and Truthfulness (podcast)
Philosophers and theologians explore ideas about truth and truthfulness.

Podcasts

“Some people will never learn anything because they understand everything too soon”
- Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope
So how did Pope manage to transform himself from a crippled outsider into a major cultural and moral authority? How did he shape our ideas about what a “modern author” is? Does his work still have resonances today or is it too firmly embedded in the politics, cultural life and rivalries of the period?

The Baghdad Billions- Part 1 (The first year of reconstruction) and Part 2 (Failure of the US aid programme)

Gun control - a new study has found the 1996 gun buy-back had no effect on firearm deaths.

Whistleblowers and the law

Do we have to die?

The Science Show versus God
This week Richard Dawkins' remarkable book The God Delusion is released in Australia. Dawkins, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford says he hopes that reading his book will make believers doubt their faith. He explains why he is so convinced, through the weight of scientific evidence, that atheism is the more valid viewpoint. Two winners of the Templeton Prize, given for building bridges between spiritual values and science, Professors John Barrow from Cambridge and Paul Davies now in Arizona give alternative views

Stem Cell Research
The history of the science of stem cell research - what are stem cells and when and how were they discovered.

The curse of the Western world: a history of obesity

North Korea
On Rear Vision this week a look at the history of North Korea and in particular the history of the relationship between North Korea and the United States of America

Harry Messel
One of Australia's most famous physicists tells of a childhood in Canada where he excelled at school, did two degrees simultaneously at university, and came to live in Australia. His pioneering work here has to be heard to be believed.

High blood pressure medication
A recent Australian study looked at medication for high blood pressure and the implications of patients' adherence or non-adherence to their doctor's prescription of these types of drugs

Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall talks about her 40 years of work with chimpanzees in Tanzania, and the relationship between chimpanzee behaviour and human behaviour.

Home Fronts: Indonesia
Terry Lane examines the political influence of Islamist values, the impact of radical organisations on Indonesian society and the democratisation of Indonesian institutions, in the fifth program of this six part series

Tobacco and Culture: First Nation Peoples face the Challenge
Sucking on cigarettes. It's a public health nightmare for the world's indigenous peoples. Maori women have the word's highest rates of lung cancer. Smoking rates haven't dropped in 15 years amongst Aboriginal Australians. But, for Native Americans native tobacco still has sacred, ceremonial value.

Paracelsus
He became known as the Luther of Medicine for his reformist medical practices, but Paracelsus, who was born in Switzerland in 1493, was also a religious man. His belief that the body was actually empowered by God had implications for his theories of healing.

Not all breast-feeding is equal

Is breast-feeding worth it;

“Let’s be honest: if the only adverse consequence of not nursing is that babies get a few more colds, we could leave the decision making to the parents. The real question is whether there are dangerous or potentially long-term damaging illnesses (such as ear infections that lead to hearing loss) for babies who aren’t nursed versus babies who are. And how long (or how much) should a baby be nursed in order to keep his or her risk down?

One of the big problems in trying to assess this question is that not all nursing is equal. There are mothers who nurse exclusively, mothers who use expressed breast milk (delivered in bottles), mothers who freeze milk, or use pasteurized (donated) milk, or use some breast milk and some formula, and a combination of all of the above.

Then there are the babies, some of whom are premature, or have low birth weight, or have other health issues that could make nursing harder; there are some babies who are nursed until they are four-years old, and others who nurse until they are six-weeks old.

Finally, we must add a complicating factor that it’s virtually impossible to carry out the gold standard of research on this issue – a randomized controlled study in which mothers are randomly assigned whether to nurse or not. Our observational power may also be limited; at least in principle, because women (and families) who nurse are not the same as those who don’t, making any comparison of the outcomes extremely difficult.”

For a lay person’s guide to how economists think about such issues read, Trade-Offs: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning and Social Issues by Harold Winter.

Here’s a review of the book at Newmark’s Door.

Why it’s better to be a Women

Thirty reasons why it’s better to be a women. On top is that they got off the Titanic first. Would it be the case today, I wonder? Read the following piece by Fareed Zakaria;

“Of the many differences between the movie "Titanic" and history, one in particular is telling. In the movie, as the ship is sinking the first-class passengers (all third-class human beings) scramble to climb into the small number of life-boats. Only the determination of the hardy seamen -- who use guns to keep the grasping men at bay -- gets the women and children into the boats.

In fact, according to survivors' accounts, the "women and children first" convention was observed with almost no dissension, particularly among the upper classes. The statistics make this plain. In first class, every child was saved, as were all but five (of 144) women, three of whom chose to die with their husbands. By contrast, 70 percent of the men perished. In second class, 80 percent of the women were saved but 90 percent of the men drowned.

The men on the first-class list of the Titanic virtually made up the Forbes 400 of the time. John Jacob Astor, reputedly the richest man of his day, is said to have fought his way to a boat, put his wife in it and then stepped back and waved her goodbye. Benjamin Guggenheim similarly refused to take a seat, saying: "Tell my wife . . . I played the game out straight and to the end. No woman shall be left aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward." In other words, some of the most powerful men in the world adhered to an unwritten code of honor -- even though it meant certain death for them. The movie makers altered the story for good reason: no one would believe it today.”

Using Cognitive Neuroscience to become a Millionaire?

Winner of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?, Ogi Ogas explains how he used techniques of congintive neuroscience to win the quiz the show;

"I used priming on my $16,000 question: "This past spring, which country first published inflammatory cartoons of the prophet Mohammed?" I did not know the answer. But I did know I had a long conversation with my friend Gena about the cartoons. So I chatted with Meredith about Gena. I tried to remember where we discussed the cartoons and the way Gena flutters his hands. As I pictured how he rolls his eyes to express disdain, Gena's remark popped into my mind: "What else would you expect from Denmark?" …

Another cognitive process essential for winning on Millionaire is intuition, or more precisely, knowing how to make decisions based on intuition. What if you have a feeling about an answer? What should you do with your hunch? Folk wisdom holds that on standardized tests you should go with your first impulse. Research tends to support this idea: a first impulse is more often correct than a second, revised decision. But what if $250,000 is at stake? "More often correct" does not seem certain enough to serve as a basis for a decision. How can you evaluate the true likelihood of a hunch being accurate?...

But I didn't hesitate when I got my $500,000 question: "Who was the only Beatle to never appear on a Jerry Lewis telethon?" I had no clue whatsoever. I quickly Switched-the-Question. But my substitute question was almost as obscure: "When Bayer marketed heroin to consumers in the late nineteenth century, it was promoted as a remedy for what ailment?"

I used my last lifeline, the 50/50, reducing the choices to "Stuffy head" and "Persistent cough." I tried using priming and intuition, struggling to recall Victorian-era American opium-addicts, but I got nowhere.

I desperately wanted a shot at the million, so I considered another cognitive capacity explored in my department: theory of mind, the ability to imagine other people's perspectives. I contemplated the show's writers themselves, imagining them sitting at their keyboards composing three fake but credible answers. "Stuffy head" struck me as resembling the kind of manufactured distraction I might come up with."

Via Mind Hacks

Related;

Teach your brain to stretch time
Brain on Fire

Podcasts

The Private Life of a Brain Surgeon
Katrina Firlik's business is brains. Carving into the 'flesh of the soul' is her day job. The first woman admitted into one of the most prestigious neurosurgery programs, she's just penned an insider's account of her world. Part mechanic - part scientist, her intimate encounters of diseased and damaged brains offer a unique, and grisly, lens onto our most mysterious and wondrous organ.

Reclaiming imagination: art, psychosis and the creative mind

Placenta Brain: the cognitive burden of pregnancy?

The Perfect Anonymizer?

Will this be the end of internet censorship;

“A modified version of Mozilla Firefox that lets users browse the web anonymously has been released.

The Torpark browser can be stored on and run from a flash USB memory stick, which can effectively turn a PC into an anonymous terminal.

Hacktivismo - an eclectic bunch of lawyers, artists, hackers and human rights activists - has created the modified portable web browser.

On its website the group claims to be "committed to developing technologies in support of the highest standards of human rights."

Explaining the motivation behind Torpack, Hacktivismo founder Oxblood Ruffin said: "We live in a time where acquisition technologies are cherry picking and collating every aspect of our online lives - so it seems that it's a browser attempting to redress that supposed imbalance."

No installation is required to run Torpark but the two folders generated from its free download website have to stay together for the browser to run.

Working in conjunction with The Onion Router (TOR) network, the tool anonymises a user's connection through encryption and constantly changing net addresses. This makes it incredibly difficult for ISPs to track an individuals web-related activity and location.”

I haven’t tried it- let us hear from those who have used it.

Podcast of the Day- God in the Genome

First watch this video- the inner workings a cell (via Boing Boing).

For some like Dr. Francis Collins, Head of the Human Genome Project, and Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, this reinforces the belief in God. Dr Francis S. Collins argues that both scientific and spiritual "truth" are valid and fit together harmoniously and one can at the same time accept modern scientific theories, such as evolution with the belief in God. Listen to the podcast.

Compare with Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dannet views on the topic.

Related;
MeaningofLife.tv
Excerpt: "The Language of God"
Let There Be Light
Scientists on Religion ; Theist and materialist ponder the place of humanity in the universe

Podcast of the Day, The Mind-Body Problem Down Under

Mind. Brain. Are they the same thing, or is the mind something special? The conundrum has perplexed us for centuries. Descartes' split the two - into a spiritual, soul-like mind and fleshly, material brain. But in 1956 a group of 'renegade' Oxford graduates Down Under, now international stars in philosophy, launched a challenge. Consciousness and the brain were united, and any talk of mental spooks and ghosts in the machine was out...almost. Now in their 80s, David Armstrong and Jack Smart join Natasha Mitchell and others to reminisce on taking Descartes to task. Listen to the podcast or see the transcript. (Radio National Australia)

Related;
Dennett changes his mind
THE PATH TO POINCARÉ
STEREOTYPES AND FACTS
Fact-checking ``The Female Brain."

“Unfortunately, this is just one of several cases in recent books on sex and neuroscience where striking numbers turn out to be without apparent empirical support. On page 36 of ``The Female Brain," Brizendine writes that ``Girls speak faster on average-250 words per minute versus 125 for typical males." In support of this assertion, her endnotes cite Bruce P. Ryan, ``Speaking rate, conversational speech acts, interruption, and linguistic complexity of 20 pre-school stuttering and non-stuttering children and their mothers," Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 14(1), pp. 25-51 (2000). Alas, in Ryan's paper, you won't find the 250 vs. 125 numbers, and in fact, he gives no data at all that breaks down speaking rates by sex.”

Niall Ferguson on Radical Islam

“The great category error of our time is to equate radical Islamism with fascism. If you actually read what Osama bin Laden says, it's clearly Lenin plus the Koran. It's internationalist, revolutionary, and anticapitalist-rhetoric far more of the left than of the right. And radical Islamism is good at recruiting within our society, within western society generally. In western Europe, to an extent people underestimate here, the appeal of radical Islamism extends beyond Muslim communities.”

- Interview at Boston Globe

Related;

Radical Islam in Pakistan; For years there has been debate over Pakistan's role in international terrorism. What is the link between Islamic extremism and Pakistan and when and how did it emerge?

The American Muslim Dilemma

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Hurting U.S. Terror Fight;

“The war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers may be increasing faster than the United States and its allies can reduce the threat, U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded.

A 30-page National Intelligence Estimate completed in April cites the "centrality" of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the insurgency that has followed, as the leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda. It concludes that, rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, the situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position, according to officials familiar with the classified document.”

Musharaff Quotes

Most recent;

"The intelligence director told me that (Armitage) said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,"' Musharraf said. "I think it was a very rude remark."

Last year he made the controversial comments on rape victims;

"You must understand the environment in Pakistan. This has become a money-making concern," he said. "A lot of people say if you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped."

Related;
Muslim Women — The Untold Story
Afghanistan: On the Brink
Bombing Pakistan back to the Stone Age
Pakistan criticises Afghan action
Afghan Leader Presses Musharraf
Pakistan rape victim's blog makes waves
Musharraf to pen autobiography
Feminist dimension of the Pakistan Movement;
"No nation can rise to the height of glory unless your women are side by side with you; we are victims of evil customs. It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners. There is no sanction anywhere for the deplorable condition in which our women have to live."- Muhammad Ali Jinnah

The Cost of Living Extremely Well

“Over the past 12 months, our Cost of Living Extremely Well Index (CLEWI) climbed 7%, keeping pace with the Consumer Price Index's 4%”
-Forbes magazine

Related;
Zero Sum Economics
Who Suffers From Inflation?

FasTracKids in China

Chinese society is truly changing;

“Gao Ruxi of Shanghai Jiao Tong University conducted research in 2003 that showed that 15.4 percent of the city’s 17 million people — about 2.6 million — were rich enough to own a house and a vehicle.

Another report, from a Chinese research group called Horizon, estimated that in 2003 there were 569,000 families or individuals in Shanghai with liquid assets of at least $62,500.

FasTracKids, which started in Shanghai in 2004, has since opened two more outlets here and another in Guangzhou, and it is planning a fifth in Hangzhou.

The private program’s after-school sessions are held in brightly decorated classrooms, where fewer than a dozen children, typically 4 or 5 years old, are taught by as many as three teachers. The program emphasizes scientific learning, problem solving and, most attractively for many parents, assertiveness.

“Parents like myself are worrying about China becoming a steadily more competitive society,” said Zhong Yu, 36, a manufacturing supervisor whose wife is a senior accountant with an international firm and whose son 7-year-old son has been enrolled in the junior M.B.A. classes. “Every day we see stories in the newspapers about graduates unable to find good jobs. Education in China is already good in the core subjects, but I want my son to have more creative thinking, because basic knowledge isn’t sufficient anymore.” ….

“Americans respect people who came from nothing and made something of themselves, and they also respect rich people,” Mr. Wang added. “In China, people generally don’t respect rich people, because there is a strong feeling that they are lacking in ethics. These new rich not only want money, they want people to respect them in the future.”

Indeed, some of the newly well-to-do have broadened their quest for respectability, enlisting their children in charity activities at the same time as they push them into classes aimed at getting them ahead.

Shan Lei, 31, a homemaker and former investment specialist whose husband is a shipping executive, said the family had invested $100,000 in a golf-club membership and had introduced her daughter to the sport, along with piano and skating lessons. They also manage to squeeze in charity work with AIDS orphans.

“Golf is played by the upper classes, but I want her to recognize there is social diversity,” said Ms. Lei, who is not related to Rose Lei. “I want her to care for others in the society.”...

Phantoms in the Brain

An interesting study- Brain electrodes conjure up ghostly visions;

“Simple stimulation of the brain can cause the mind to play complex and creepy tricks on itself, neurologists have discovered. They found that, by inserting electrodes into a specific part of the brain, they could induce a patient to sense that an illusory 'shadow person' was lurking behind her and mimicking her movements.

Doctors treating the patient, a 22-year-old woman with epilepsy, found that when they stimulated a brain region called the left temporoparietal junction, the patient sensed the presence of a sinister figure behind her who copied her actions. They suspect that the effect is due to the mind projecting its own movements onto a phantom figure conjured up by the brain, an effect that is seen in some patients with serious psychiatric conditions….”

Via Mind Hacks

Related;
Mind Games; What neuroeconomics tells us about money and the brain.

Multimedia;
In the Family - A Journey through Madness
The Dancing Mind
Death; An exploration of the cultural construction of death: the way it's changed in English-based society from rich Victorian ceremony to the simple ritual of today; the difference in response from culture to culture, i.e. Mexico, Ireland and Australia.
The dream debate
Chris Turney on Time, author of Bones, Rocks and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened

Martin Feldstein on time consistency in fiscal policy

“When I look at the current fiscal situation, in contrast to what we experienced in the '80s when the fiscal deficits were larger and rising, and debt-to-GDP ratios were rising, we're currently at a relatively comfortable level. The federal deficit-to-GDP ratio this year will be under 3 percent, probably low enough that the debt-to-GDP ratio will actually come down.

The problems are not that very far into the future, though, with increases in Social Security and Medicare costs relative to the tax revenue that comes in. The markets seem to be ignoring that, which is a puzzle, but there's nothing about long-term interest rates that suggests that the markets are afraid that Social Security and Medicare are really going to create large fiscal deficits. Now maybe they're right. And maybe the political process will raise taxes or cut benefits. What has to be done is to reform those programs. I wouldn't set my goal in terms of the fiscal deficit. I'd set it in terms of limiting the tax levels that are going to be needed to support them.”

- Interview with Martin S. Feldstein- latest Region magazine

The Region also has review of Martin Wolf’s Why Globalisation Works
See also this book review-Development's Discontents

Related;
The Nation's Long-Term Fiscal Outlook: September 2006 Update
Budgetblog
A Visual Representation of the US Federal Budget

Maldives to set up Bollywood Studio

“The government plans to open the country’s first professional film studio, officials have announced.

The studio will be located in one of the new resorts currently being constructed in the country. The government hopes the studio will attract the Bollywood film industry to shoot more of their motion pictures in the Maldives.

“We will devote a resort island to the studios so that film units can use it as a single stop for their work. That will spread the good word about Maldives,” said Hussain Shihab, Minister of State for Arts..”

From Minivan News.

Recent economic news;
Opposition Criticises New Tourism Tax
Board of directors sell STO tea plantation

Iranian Economy

All’s not well with the Iranian economy;

“But not all the developments since 2003 have strengthened Iran. Despite the oil price bonanza, Iran's economy is in poor shape. With roughly the same population, its GDP is half that of Turkey. Even the official unemployment figures have risen to 12.4 percent (a massive understatement) under Ahmadinejad and what few jobs have been created are in the public sector. The Tehran stock market lost 25 percent of its value last year and another 12 percent so far this year.

In June, 50 of the country's leading economists wrote an open letter saying that Ahmadinejad's economic policies lacked "expertise and scientific basis." Inflation is officially running at 12 percent, but most economists reckon it to be close to double that level. There are credible reports of large-scale capital flight to Dubai and elsewhere, fueled by Ahmadinejad's fatuous decree to state and private banks to cut their interest rates, whose main impact has been to dry up bank lending.”

Related:
United States, Iran Trade Barbs at UN
The George and Mahmoud show
Iranian minister urges World Bank to back nuclear energy investment
Iranian Economy- Crony Capitalism in Islamist Garb
Recent publications from IMF
Inside Iran
Iran in Maps

Thomas Schelling on the Iran nuclear issue;

“I don’t think the U.S. has a convincing argument against this Iranian charge of nuclear apartheid — especially since we’ve been allies of Israel for many decades knowing they have nuclear weapons. Although, the Iranians should recognize clearly the limits on Israel — even when it had the perfect target for tactical nuclear weapons of Egyptian troops as sitting ducks out in the Sinai desert in 1973, Golda Meir didn’t use them.

I don’t know if there is any way to stop the Iranians from acquiring nuclear weapons. If they do, we should try to persuade them to declare — as the Indians and Pakistanis have done — that they are for deterrence and defense, not for offensive use.

Further, we should assist the Iranians in making sure custody of their weapons are secure in any time of disruption. In the case of a riot in the streets, will the weapons be safe? Who might grab them in case of civil war?

It is important for the Iranians to understand — and have access to — technology like we have in the U.S. that disables bombs if they get into the wrong hands. U.S. weapons, for example, have “permissive action links”— a radio signal code that arms weapons but that will also automatically disarm them it if launched at an unauthorized target.

This will be a big dilemma for the U.S. If the Iranians get weapons, will we be willing to share the technology to ensure the security of their use? That is where the debate is heading.”

Top 100 Music Videos on YouTube

Compliments of Stylus magazine-“With that in mind, we here at Stylus have democratically selected our humble and largely unofficial picks for the 100 best videos ever made, and are presenting them here, fully equipped with YouTube links for your viewing pleasure”

Via Pienso

Angry Arab on Thailand coup

“There was a coup in Thailand. I am jealous. Very jealous. When was the last time we had a coup in the Arab world? Wait. We had one in Mauritania and it was pretty lousy. Never mind. Just day dreaming.”

-Angry Arab

IMF Statement on the Thai coup;

"We are following the situation closely. Thailand's economy is fundamentally strong and financial market reactions have been limited. Regional financial markets have also been little affected thus far.

"On the whole, Asian economies are resilient to external shocks, having strengthened their macroeconomic frameworks, increased exchange rate flexibility, and reduced external vulnerabilities in recent years."

Related;
Thailand in crisis
Like Old Times in Bangkok
Thai coup leader unveils PM plans
Thai king 'endorses coup leader'
Q&A: Thailand's coup impact

Multimedia
Postcard: Thailand Coup (podcast)
Politics of economic reform in Thailand- Tarrin Nimmanahaeminda, Chairman of Siam Pithiwat and former Thai Minister of Finance

Photo of the Day- Aurora Borealis

“In 1620, a Frenchman, Pierre Gassendi, saw the northern lights and named them after the Roman goddess, Aurora. He also added the word 'borealis' for the Roman god of the north wind, Boreas. From that point onwards the lights became known to scientists as the aurora borealis.

Aurora was a Roman deity, counterpart of the Greek mythological Titan goddess of the dawn Eos. Eos would rise from her home at the edge of Oceanus, the sea that surrounded the world, to open the gates for her brother Helios to ride his chariot across the sky each day. Aurora's sister was Selene, the moon. and she had many husbands and one of her sons was Boreas, the north wind. The literal translation of Aurora Borealis is therefore "Dawn of the North wind."

From the website of photographer.

See more pictures at Photographer of the Year 2006 -BBC

See also NYT has a nice collection of photos from Ethiopia’s Christian heritage.

Ideological Amplification

From Cass Sunstein, an interesting study;

“A few years ago, I was involved in some studies that uncovered a funny fact: When Republican-appointed judges sit on three-judge panels with other Republican appointees, they show unusually conservative voting patterns. So too, Democratic-appointed judges on three-judge panels show especially liberal voting patterns when sitting with fellow Democratic appointees. In short, like-minded judges show a pattern if "ideological amplification."

The presence of even one Republican appointee often makes Democratic appointees much more moderate. Republican appointees often become much more moderate when even a single Democratic appointee is there.

We now know that ideological amplification is pervasive on federal courts--that it can be found in numerous areas, including sex discrimination, affirmative action, campaign finance law, disability discrimination, environmental law, labor law, and voting rights.

It turns out that ideological amplification occurs in many domains. It helps to explain "political correctness" on college campuses--and within the Bush administration. In a recent study, we find that liberals in Colorado, after talking to one another, move significantly to the left on affirmative action, global warming, and civil unions for same-sex couples. On those same three issues, conservatives, after talking to each other, move significantly to the right.

It's unclear whether anything can be done about ideological amplification. But it's entirely clear that when private organizations and governments blunder, ideological amplification is often the culprit.”

Related;
Watch his book presentation at AEI-Brookings; Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
Deliberation and Infotopia
Ideological amplification

Religion in America

“God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.”
- President Bush according Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas

“Education on world religions for all our children, in public and private schools, and home schooling.”
-Daniel C. Dennett’s policy proposal (see TED speech below)

The Economist reviews a recent survey of religious attitudes in US;

“WHEN Homer Simpson opted out of church once, staying home to watch football and eat waffle-batter, he dreamed that God peeled off the roof of his house and appeared, furious, in the TV room. According to a new survey, 31% of Americans see God that way. He (always he) is wrathful and ever-watchful; He wants his followers to stop sinning, and thinks government should be promoting Him. In the South, 44% of people go in fear of His lightning bolts.

The survey, by Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion in Waco, Texas, via Gallup, found four broad views of God in America. Homer's Authoritarian God is the most popular. There then follow, in descending order of intrusiveness, Benevolent God (23%, rising to 29% in the Midwest), who still gives orders but will forgive, rather than smite; Critical God (16%, but 21% in the relativist East), who watches the world but does not intervene; and lastly Distant God (24%), a cosmic force without interest in human matters. This God is especially popular in the wide open West, with its huge views of the stars…”

Related;
Jesus Camp
ABC news report on the documentary
The Anti-Christ Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 (History Channel)
See also Rick Warren speech and Daniel Dennet’s response
Podcasts from Center of Inquiry

Death Threats and Game Theory

South Asia correspondent to UK Telegraph writes in his blog about a recent incident involving a death threat to Maldivian dissident in UK;

“British police traced the foul-mouthed email to an address belonging to Husna Latheef, who is the wife of the Maldives Chief of Police, Adam Zahir. Mrs Latheef copped the caution but Mr Moosa (and I’ve no idea if he’s right or not) is convinced Mr Zahir is behind the threat.

The text of the threat is worth repeating for those who missed it, simply because it is so Neanderthal and unpleasant and tells you a fair bit about the people who run the Maldives once they are out of the clutches of their slick UK PR agency, Hill and Knowlton, whose top man once span for Tony Blair.

Try spinning this: “if i ever see u, i will f***ing kill you, you better watch ur f***ing back, id like to see you try and reply back to me u dumb motherf***er. who the f*** do u thnk [sic] you are. i know where u live so u better not go far from ur house in london cos i will f***ing shoot u.”…

Read the rest of the post for his speculation on the strategic reasons for British government sponsoring talks between the government and the opposition in the Maldives and using a bit of game theory he suggests;

“If Gayoom’s regime reads the Brit moves the same way Indian intelligence apparently does, and the Brits are seen to have an ulterior motive, then they might find Gayoom digs his toes in and the whole plan backfires.”

Related;
Zahir's Wife Received UK Police Caution
UK police warn wife of Maldives policeman over threat
Adam Zahir Cautioned By British Police
“The British police were able to act on the email because it was sent from a ‘blueyonder’ account, which was traced to Zahir’s London property. The email account was registered in Adam Zahir's wife's name, Husna Latheef.”
British Government Calls For Peaceful Evan Naseem Day

Nest - $80,000 to 90,000

The Economist runs an article on the booming Indian art market;

“IT IS not just Indian software and “business-process outsourcing” firms that are benefiting from the rise of the internet. Indian modern art is also on an upward spiral, driven by the aspirations of newly rich Indians, especially those living abroad, who use the internet to spot paintings and track prices at hundreds of gallery and auction websites. Prices have risen around 20-fold since 2000, particularly for prized names such as Tyeb Mehta and F.N. Souza.

There would have been “no chance” of that happening so fast without the internet, says Arun Vadehra, who runs a gallery in Delhi and is an adviser to Christie's, an international auction house. He expects worldwide sales of Indian art, worth $200m last year, to double in 2006. It is still a tiny fraction of the $30 billion global art market, but is sizeable for an emerging market.

For newly rich—often very rich—non-resident Indians, expensive art is a badge of success in a foreign land. “Who you are, and what you have, are on your walls,” says Lavesh Jagasia, an art dealer in Mumbai. Indian art may also beat other forms of investment. A painting by Mr Mehta that fetched $1.58m last September would have gone for little more than $100,000 just four years ago. And a $22m art-investment fund launched in July by Osian's, a big Indian auction house, has grown by 4.1% in its first two months.

Scant attention was paid to modern Indian art until the end of the 1990s. Then wealthy Indians, particularly those living abroad, began to take an interest. Dinesh Vazirani, who runs Saffronart, a leading Indian auction site, says 60% of his sales go to buyers overseas.

The focus now is on six auctions this month. Two took place in India last week; work by younger artists such as Surendran Nair and Shibu Natesan beat estimates by more than 70%. Sotheby's and Christie's have auctions in New York next week, each with a Tyeb Mehta that is expected to fetch more than $1m. The real question is the fate of other works, including some by Mr Souza with estimates of up to $600,000. If they do well, it will demonstrate that there is strong demand and will pull up prices across the board. This looks like a market with a long way to run.”

* Above drawing by Anju Dodiya

Related;
Sepia Mutiny- art posts
Marginal Revolution- art posts
Indian painter agrees $21m deal
Wonders of Sikh Spirituality Come Alive
Donald Pittenger on Illustration
Donald Pittenger on Flair in Art, Part One
Donald Pittenger on Flair, Part 2
In the Land of Beautiful People, an Artist Without a Face
Banksy shop-drops 500 remixed Paris Hilton CDs

Google Special- Banned Books

Explore Banned Books with Google.

Related;
Banned Books Week
Google Scholarships
Google goes Bollywood
Google's For-Profit Philanthropy
Philanthropy Google’s Way: Not the Usual

Ancient Prejudices?

Karen Armstrong weighs in on the Pope controversy;

“In the 12th century, Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, initiated a dialogue with the Islamic world. "I approach you not with arms, but with words," he wrote to the Muslims whom he imagined reading his book, "not with force, but with reason, not with hatred, but with love." Yet his treatise was entitled Summary of the Whole Heresy of the Diabolical Sect of the Saracens and segued repeatedly into spluttering intransigence. Words failed Peter when he contemplated the "bestial cruelty" of Islam, which, he claimed, had established itself by the sword. Was Muhammad a true prophet? "I shall be worse than a donkey if I agree," he expostulated, "worse than cattle if I assent!"

Peter was writing at the time of the Crusades. Even when Christians were trying to be fair, their entrenched loathing of Islam made it impossible for them to approach it objectively. For Peter, Islam was so self-evidently evil that it did not seem to occur to him that the Muslims he approached with such "love" might be offended by his remarks. This medieval cast of mind is still alive and well.

Last week, Pope Benedict XVI quoted, without qualification and with apparent approval, the words of the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." The Vatican seemed bemused by the Muslim outrage occasioned by the Pope's words, claiming that the Holy Father had simply intended "to cultivate an attitude of respect and dialogue toward the other religions and cultures, and obviously also towards Islam".

But the Pope's good intentions seem far from obvious. Hatred of Islam is so ubiquitous and so deeply rooted in western culture that it brings together people who are usually at daggers drawn. Neither the Danish cartoonists, who published the offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad last February, nor the Christian fundamentalists who have called him a paedophile and a terrorist, would ordinarily make common cause with the Pope; yet on the subject of Islam they are in full agreement.

Our Islamophobia dates back to the time of the Crusades, and is entwined with our chronic anti-semitism. Some of the first Crusaders began their journey to the Holy Land by massacring the Jewish communities along the Rhine valley; the Crusaders ended their campaign in 1099 by slaughtering some 30,000 Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem. It is always difficult to forgive people we know we have wronged. Thenceforth Jews and Muslims became the shadow-self of Christendom, the mirror image of everything that we hoped we were not - or feared that we were…."

Related;
Pope apology fails to end anger
Al-Qaida in Iraq warns Pope
Political error or calculated move?
Pope: Manuel II's Views of Muhammad are not My Own

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Medieval Sourcebook

Podcasts of the Day

Radical Islam in Pakistan; For years there has been debate over Pakistan's role in international terrorism. What is the link between Islamic extremism and Pakistan and when and how did it emerge? Guests include Hussain Haqqani, Associate Professor of International Relations, Boston University, Samina Yasmeen, Senior Lecturer in Political Science and International Relations,University of Western Australia and Ahmed Rashid, Correspondent with The Far Eastern Economic Review

Islam in the Renaissance; Between the 15th and 16th centuries, the European Renaissance generated scientific breakthroughs including the discovery by Copernicus that the Earth revolves around the Sun. The progress in scientific thought has been attributed in part to the translation of Arabic texts into Latin. However, Professor George Saliba argues that crucial information was contained in texts that were not translated, so how did Copernicus know about them? Guest on the show George Saliba, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Science at Columbia University in New York.

The history of scientific discoveries

Peace by Artful Means
In societies fractured by violence, family conflict and global threats of terrorism, how do we encounter 'the other' in ways which build sustainable peace? From the growing practice of mediation to the global art of hip hop, this Encounter explores the role of creativity in transforming conflict

Regaining confidence in western culture

All the podcasts from Radio National’s shows.

Pope says Sorry

I’ve to admit that I haven’t read the entire speech of Pope when I commented earlier. Kevin summarizes the gist of the speech in the comments. It’s irresponsible on the part of the advisers of Pope to have included such a comment.

At the same Muslim anger and reaction seems vastly disproportional to the broad issues raised by the Pope (even in secular countries like Turkey-see the pic). Muslims in countries like Pakistan have more things to worry than cartoons and speeches. We have to accept that certain segments of Islamic societies are not willing to accept reasoned dialogue to deal with society’s issues. I don’t think we could have reasoned with the Saudi hijackers who blew up the World Trade Center – their worldview had become too narrow.

Now that Pope has said sorry, overzealous Muslims may calm down.

Juan Cole summarizes some of the factual errors in Pope’s speech;

“He notes that the text he discusses, a polemic against Islam by a Byzantine emperor, cites Qur'an 2:256: "There is no compulsion in religion." Benedict maintains that this is an early verse, when Muhammad was without power.

His allegation is incorrect. Surah 2 is a Medinan surah revealed when Muhammad was already established as the leader of the city of Yathrib (later known as Medina or "the city" of the Prophet). The pope imagines that a young Muhammad in Mecca before 622 (lacking power) permitted freedom of conscience, but later in life ordered that his religion be spread by the sword. But since Surah 2 is in fact from the Medina period when Muhammad was in power, that theory does not hold water.

In fact, the Qur'an at no point urges that religious faith be imposed on anyone by force. This is what it says about the religions:

' [2:62] Those who believe (in the Qur'an), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians and the Sabians-- any who believe in God and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve. ' …

The idea of holy war or jihad (which is about defending the community or at most about establishing rule by Muslims, not about imposing the faith on individuals by force) is also not a Quranic doctrine. The doctrine was elaborated much later, on the Umayyad-Byzantine frontier, long after the Prophet's death. In fact, in early Islam it was hard to join, and Christians who asked to become Muslim were routinely turned away. The tyrannical governor of Iraq, al-Hajjaj, was notorious for this rejection of applicants, because he got higher taxes on non-Muslims. Arab Muslims had conquered Iraq, which was then largely pagan, Zoroastrian, Christian and Jewish. But they weren't seeking converts and certainly weren't imposing their religion.

The pope was trying to make the point that coercion of conscience is incompatible with genuine, reasoned faith. He used Islam as a symbol of the coercive demand for unreasoned faith.

But he has been misled by the medieval polemic on which he depended.

In fact, the Quran also urges reasoned faith and also forbids coercion in religion. The only violence urged in the Quran is in self-defense of the Muslim community against the attempts of the pagan Meccans to wipe it out.

The pope says that in Islam, God is so transcendant that he is beyond reason and therefore cannot be expected to act reasonably. He contrasts this conception of God with that of the Gospel of John, where God is the Logos, the Reason inherent in the universe.

But there have been many schools of Islamic theology and philosophy. The Mu'tazilite school maintained exactly what the Pope is saying, that God must act in accordance with reason and the good as humans know them. The Mu'tazilite approach is still popular in Zaidism and in Twelver Shiism of the Iraqi and Iranian sort. The Ash'ari school, in contrast, insisted that God was beyond human reason and therefore could not be judged rationally. (I think the Pope would find that Tertullian and perhaps also John Calvin would be more sympathetic to this view within Christianity than he is).

As for the Quran, it constantly appeals to reason in knowing God, and in refuting idolatry and paganism, and asks, "do you not reason?" "do you not understand?" (a fala ta`qilun?)

Of course, Christianity itself has a long history of imposing coerced faith on people, including on pagans in the late Roman Empire, who were forcibly converted. And then there were the episodes of the Crusades.

Another irony is that reasoned, scholastic Christianity has an important heritage drom Islam itself. In the 10th century, there was little scholasticism in Christian theology. The influence of Muslim thinkers such as Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Avicenna (Ibn Sina) reemphasized the use of Aristotle and Plato in Christian theology. Indeed, there was a point where Christian theologians in Paris had divided into partisans of Averroes or of Avicenna, and they conducted vigorous polemics with one another.

Finally, that Byzantine emperor that the Pope quoted, Manuel II? The Byzantines had been weakened by Latin predations during the fourth Crusade, so it was in a way Rome that had sought coercion first. And, he ended his days as a vassal of the Ottoman Empire.

The Pope was wrong on the facts. He should apologize to the Muslims and get better advisers on Christian-Muslim relations.”

The greatest irony I find is that I had to quote Juan Cole, a Christian to defend the position of Islam- even the statement made by the Organization of Islamic Countries doesn’t come close to above. One of the best things that Muslim scholars living in the west could do is to start a dialogue with the youth in Islamic countries- blogs are one effective mean. Akbar Ahmed, Sayyid Hussain Nasr, Hamza Yousuf, Jeffrey Lang, Tariq Ramadan, Yousuf Islam , Murad Hoffman and Timur Kuran are you listening. Minaret of Freedom has a blog coverage of news items but not much analysis.

Related;
Pope's Trip to Turkey in Doubt
Iraq calls for calm after Pope's remarks
Mixed feelings over Khatami visit
Pope and Islam: 'Non Mea Culpa'
How Pakistan's rape reform ran aground
Losing the war on Afghan drugs

Germans reconsider religion

'Rottweiler' bares teeth- “First, he has done it before. At Auschwitz, in May, he appalled many Jews by passing up what they saw as a historic opportunity for a German pope to apologise for the Roman Catholic Church's conduct in World War II. The second factor is that the Pope has indicated he favours a tougher line in his church's dealings with Islam.”

Multimedia
Doha Debate

Best of the Spiritual Classics;Highlights from our Spiritual Classics series, with sacred writings from Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism, through Christianity and Islam, to the wisdom texts of Confucius and the holy book of the Sikhs

The Adolescent Brain and Social Policies

“A decade ago, the prevailing notion was that brain growth ended at about the age of 2 years. Since then, we have learned that brain growth continues well into adolescence (between ages 10 and 19) and into young adulthood (see the figure below). During this period the brain undergoes a series of changes, and parts of the brain associated with social skills, problem solving, and identifying emotions mature only by the early twenties. However, this process of brain development cannot entirely explain adolescent decision making and behavior. Nor does it override the effect of the environment—parents, schools, communities—in which young people live.

Brain development: arborization and pruning
The brain is made up of nerve cells—about 10 billion of them—connected by branches or dendrites. These branches move information from one cell to another, but these connections are not soldered together; rather, there are spaces between the branch of one cell and the body of another. These spaces are called synapses, and information moves from cell to cell across these spaces by releasing tiny packets of chemicals. When there are abnormalities in the chemicals in the synapses, a variety of clinical conditions result, such as depression and attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorders.

Different parts of the brain handle different activities—that much is well-known. What is new is the finding that during adolescence certain areas of the brain grow in size and other regions become more efficient. For example, the area of the brain responsible for language more than doubles in size between ages 8 and 14. Consequently, language acquisition is optimal at those ages. So, too, connections grow and strengthen between the brain stem and the spinal cord, increasing the connections between the emotions and what the body feels. Throughout childhood and adolescence, more and more nerve cells grow sheaths around them called white matter or myelin. This is like building a superhighway, allowing information to be interpreted and recalled much faster than was ever possible as a young child.

These structural changes are only some of the brain’s alterations during adolescence. Another major change is called “pruning.” Throughout early childhood, the number of connections between cells increase, and because the process is much like the growth of branches on a tree, it is called arborization. It allows a child’s brain to be very excitable—which is why children seem to be perpetual motion machines. In adolescence, many of those branches die—through pruning. The brain is less excitable but also more efficient in carrying information.

The pruning follows a consistent pattern throughout adolescence and young adulthood starting at the back of the brain and ending at the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex regulates impulses, risk taking, planning, decision making, empathy, and insight. Research also shows that the cerebellum, recently discovered to be important for mathematics, music, decision making, social skills, and understanding
humor, continues to grow through adolescence and well into emerging adulthood. The last structure of the brain to stop growing, it develops until the mid-twenties.

Implications for social policies
What does this new brain research mean for understanding adolescent decision making and behavior? Although much more research is needed before defi nitive policies can be recommended based on the new brain research, it suggests some interesting policy considerations:

• The loss of neuronal excitation in adolescence is associated with a rise in depression, especially among adolescent females, suggesting a biological basis for the epidemiological finding that gender differences in depression start around the time of puberty. These biological changes combine with external sources of stress to increase the risk of suicide for youth in many countries of the world.
• As the brain matures during adolescence, alternations in the synaptic chemicals may influence learning (drugs for attention-deficit disorders improve information transfer at the level of the neuronal synapse). For example, antidepressive drugs may allow for certain excitatory neurotransmitters to stay in the space between two brain cells longer than otherwise.
• Learning and teaching strategies should be timed to increase neurodevelopmental capacities. Because neurodevelopmental maturation occurs at different chronological ages for different people, their inability to grasp a concept at one age does not mean that they are unable to learn the material. This speaks to the risk of educational “tracking” based on comprehension or performance examinations at a young age.
• Without a fully mature prefrontal cortex, adolescents may be more impulsive than adults and perhaps more susceptible to peer influences. This impulsiveness—especially in reactive decision making, as when faced with a situation or threatened to make an immediate decision—suggests the value of second chance programs.

It is, however, too early in the research to draw definitive conclusions about brain development and behavior. Also, physical development interacts with the social environments to determine behaviors and outcomes. So parental behaviors and expectations, effective schools, communities that are youth oriented and supportive, all make a difference in determining young people’s behavior and how well they learn complex decision-making skills.”

Source- World Development Report 2007, Box 2.9 ‘Brain development among youth: Neuroscience meets social science’, p.61 (emphasis mine)

Related;
Eye gaze and cognition in children
Glazed looks sharpen the mind
Universities: A social duty
Into the Mystery of the Adolescent Mind
A Study of Interactions: Emerging Issues in the Science of Adolescence Workshop Summary
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens

World Development Report 2007 links;
Graphs from the report
Video and Audio

Violence is not sexy

BBC reports;

“Wives and girlfriends of gang members in one of Colombia's most violent cities have called a sex ban in a bid to get their men to give up the gun.

Dozens of women are said to be taking part in what is being called the "strike of crossed legs", a move backed by the mayor of Pereira…”

Related; Center for International Policy’s Colombia blog

Wolfowitz’s Second War

NYT reviews Wolfowtiz’s focus on corruption at the World Bank;

“In his first 15 months as president of the World Bank, Paul D. Wolfowitz has made the fight against corruption in poor countries a hallmark issue, waging an aggressive campaign that has led to the suspension of hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contracts to nations including India, Chad, Kenya, Congo, Ethiopia and Bangladesh.

It is a new incarnation for Mr. Wolfowitz, a neoconservative intellectual who was a primary architect of the Iraq war during four years as deputy secretary of defense…..

“Anticorruption efforts are an essential part of development finance,” said Roberto Dañino, a senior vice president of the bank until early this year. “But getting rid of corruption is not a silver bullet. The bank should not overemphasize its anticorruption agenda at the expense of other policies required for development.”….

He has begun firing back at the critics at internal meetings and in public statements. He notes, for example, that the bank’s lending under his leadership actually rose slightly last year, to nearly $23 billion.

Mr. Wolfowitz says he has tried to rebut what he calls the myth that combating fraud is “somehow at odds with development or becomes an excuse not to provide assistance.” While no one knows how much of the bank’s resources have been improperly diverted, informal estimates range from 10 percent to the 25 percent that Mr. Wolfowitz says went to corrupt cronies and family members of Indonesia’s leadership in the 1990’s…..

The doubts center on Mr. Wolfowitz’s role as a leading advocate of the American invasion of Iraq, with many critics contending that his zeal on corruption reminds them of what they say was his messianic but unrealistic faith that installing democracy by force in Iraq, and by other means through the Middle East, would bring stability to the region.

The criticism has been especially sharp among Europeans at the bank, where many officials say that judgments about what constitutes “good governance” could rupture the bank’s delicate relationships with aid recipients, especially if the judgments are based on information gathered from dissidents and other critics in those countries…

Several longtime bank officials say they cannot remember when board members wrangled over the wording of a policy paper with a bank president. At recent meetings, directors demanded that Mr. Wolfowitz agree to a greater role for the board in any future decisions on cutting off aid.

In addition, members forced the deletion of language suggesting that the United Nations’ goal of reducing world poverty 50 percent by 2015 would have to take second place to the bank’s drive against corruption…

“I think some of the board members,” Mr. Wolfowitz said, “are legitimately afraid that as soon as you start criticizing, the next thing you’re going to do is wag your finger and say, ‘You’re not going to get money unless you behave.’ That’s not our objective. Our objective is to make the lending go up.”…

Mr. Wolfowitz’s management style also grates on some bank officials, with a number of them complaining that he has relied on a small coterie of loyal aides. “He presumes,” said Mr. Dañino, the former bank senior vice president and once prime minister of Peru, “that anyone who opposes him is either incompetent or corrupt.”

In his first 15 months as president of the World Bank, Paul D. Wolfowitz has made the fight against corruption in poor countries a hallmark issue, waging an aggressive campaign that has led to the suspension of hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contracts to nations including India, Chad, Kenya, Congo, Ethiopia and Bangladesh.….”

Via Foreign Policy Blog

Wolfowitz’s focus on corruption should be lauded, it is one of the biggest impediments to the poverty reduction agenda. However pompous releases of reports, (see the latest release of governance indicators ) doesn’t help the poor person on the street. IFIs need to take a broader view of corruption.

Related;
Strengthening Bank Group Work in Governance and Anticorruption
World Bank Releases Largest Available Governance Data Source
Uses and Abuses of Governance Indicators
Rescuing the World Bank
Tackling Corruption is Essential in Making Poverty History
UK withholds World Bank donation

Discussing Doing Business

World Bank is running an online discussion of its recent report Doing Business 2007, via PSD Blog. The discussion questions are interesting particularly the second one. I’ve tried to link to various local news coverage of the report – among the media there seems to be some fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the report it seems. World Bank should be doing more for media to understand its publications.

-Of the 10 topics in the Doing Business report, where do you think reforms can most significantly improve the investment climate? -A country's ranking in the Doing Business report has become a well-known indicator. Are countries beginning to "game" the ranking by reforming only those areas of business regulation covered by the report’s methodology? -What are good reform strategies for administrations which have left the "reform window" of the first 15 months? -Have you read earlier Doing Business reports and how would you evaluate this one in comparison to the others? -The next report may address topics like the quality of business infrastructure and the cost of corruption. With this addition to the indicators, what research questions would you like to see in future Doing Business reports?

Some news coverage of the report;

Doing business is still very tough
"How free is India's economy after 15 years of liberalisation? Not very, say two reports released last week. Economic Freedom of the World 2006, published by the Fraser Institute and Cato Institute in North America, ranks India 53rd out of 130 countries in its Freedom of the World Index.

Not too bad. But Doing Business 2007, a World Bank report on how difficult it is to conduct business, ranks India 134th out of 175 countries, deep in the bottom half. The indicators used in the two reports are different."

Chasing the dragon
There is no point belabouring comparisons with China that attracts nine times more foreign direct investment (FDI) than India gets every year.

Time for step two
"Investment Minister Mahmoud Mohieddin was not a happy man. Speaking at the opening of this year's 11th annual Euromoney conference in Cairo, the minister directed his anger at the International Finance Corporation's (IFC) 2006 Doing Business report, which ranked Egypt at 165th worldwide in terms of countries that had improved business regulations and cut red tape. Mohieddin said the experts who put together the report did not appear to "have a full understanding of our economy". The 16 firms that the IFC -- the World Bank's private sector arm -- chose to examine for its report, he said, were not a very representative sample."

Business Scene-GEORGIAN AMBASSADOR Lasha Zhvania is happily circulating a World Bank and International Finance Corporation report that lists Georgia as the top reformer in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). According to the report, Georgia also led the global top 10 reformer rankings on the ease of doing business in 2005-2006.

World Bank says: work 24/7 with no rights;"A new World Bank report calls for the wholesale elimination of workers' rights. The 2007 edition of the ‘Doing Business’ report has declared the Marshall Islands to be the world’s “Best Performer” for its almost total absence of labour regulation, displacing last year’s champion, Palau. According to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), both Marshall Islands and Palau have in common that they are tiny Pacific island nations that have no labour code and are not members of the International Labour Organisation. The World Bank’s online Doing Business database explains that it has given top ranking for labour market regulations to these countries because, among other exemplary features, both allow workers to be forced to work up to 24 hours per day and up to seven days per week and require no vacations or advance notice for dismissal."

India, top reformer in South Asia, says World Bank report

China is ranked top ten in reforming business practices

GHANA AMONG TOP TEN BUSINESS REFORMERS

World Bank praises Romanian reforms

SA scores for doing business

99th in business report

Cameroon: Harsh Taxes Impede Business - World Bank

Consultant reiterates obstacles persist for doing business in Dominican Republic

World Bank rectifies report on Dominican business standing

Bettering business environment with ‘iron hands’

Tanzania and Rwanda Lead in Regional Economic Reforms

Hungary slips 6 places on World Bank's “Doing Business" ranking

World Bank's 2007 Doing Business Report ranks Saudi Arabia #1 in the MENA region

Africa is performing better than Latin America

World Bank: CR no. 52
"The CR dropped two spots year on year. Of the 10 indicators of the overall business environment tracked in the study, the Czech Republic had improved only in two categories: starting a business (74), the time period for which shortened to nine months, and the dealing with licenses (110) category, which relates to already-existing business operations. The country fared best in the getting credit category (21) and worst in closing a business (113), that is bankruptcy procedures — which can still take up to nine years, compared to the average 3.5 years in European and Central Asian regions. Creditors receive 18 hellers for each Kč 1 of debt, again less than half the regional average."

Morocco is top reformer in the Middle East and North Africa

World Bank hails Kenya’s success in tax reforms
"THE World Bank (WB) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) have praised the Kenyan government for introducing the electronic data interface system in the Customs department. Consequently, Kenya is ranked among Africa’s top nations striving to create an enabling atmosphere to do business"

World Bank reports rank Tanzania among top reformers

Nigeria: World Bank Ranks Nigeria's Economic Climate Low
"We know Nigeria is making efforts to ease the process of doing business" but advised that "there is still room for improvement". She said reforms need to address the whole process, including business registration. She noted there still exists, some complex regulations as against other countries."
The World Bank said early this week that the impact of reforms instituted by the current administration led by President Olusegun Obasa-njo was rather slow.

Dominican Customs is Latin America's 2nd best;Argentina is better than Brazil and Mexico when it comes to customs procedures. And Haiti is generally among the worst in the region.

Cameroon: Harsh Taxes Impede Business - World Bank

Why reform has become a dirty word;“Reform” has been hijacked, even by the World Bank, which should know better, to mean reducing the “burden” on corporations. Te Bank’s index, which has become quite influential and is widely used by governments around the world to set their policies, specifically excludes things like infrastructure, institutions and security, i.e. these pesky things usually provided by good governments and paid by taxes and “forgotten” by businesses when they complain about governmental interference (but not when they choose where to invest, as attests France’s almost permanent presence in the top five favorite destinations for FDI alongside China and the USA). That such issues can be mindlessly excluded from public discourse on this topic via a 3 line disclaimer in their report is profoundly dishonest.
If the logic was to facilitate wealth creation by companies with a later focus on redistribution of that wealth, that might make a little bit of sense, but the goal seems only to be wealth capture by corporations per se, whether out of actual creation of wealth or, increasingly, from the shifting of costs from their P&L to the public purse. Where that wealth goes is obviously no longer a worry of the World Bank, something I find frankly disquieting. Even more, as taxes are seen as a negative thing, any redistributive policy is explicitly considered an obstacle to “reform”. Thus we end up in situations where economies appear to be growing strongly and yet median income (as opposed to average income) is stagnant or even declining, a sure sign of growing inequality rather than growing prosperity."

Malawi drops 14 steps on business ease index

Reforms in Charter to make RP business-friendly, says AdCom
The Philippines' dismal ranking in the latest World Bank (WB) economy rankings of countries worldwide should serve as a wake-up call that the local business environment is not too encouraging to foreign investors.

Pace of business reforms slows-"UGANDA has lagged behind Kenya on the pace of reforms to ease doing business, but a report notes that her effort to ease registration requirements made it easy for companies to operate in the formal sector. Uganda was ranked 107 compared to Kenya’s 83rd position, while Tanzania trailed at 142, a study on tracking reforms done by the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) shows. However, Uganda was cited as one of the countries that undertook reforms that eased the burden of doing business in the country"

World Bank study laments red tape in the Philippines

African Countries Emerge as Regulation Reformers, Report Says; World Bank views a push by donor countries as a contributing factor
"China, Number 93 a year ago, moved up 15 places. Like Georgia, Mexico, Tanzania and Ghana, China is among the World Bank’s “top 10 reformers.” Its government has sped up the business-starting process, increased investor protections, reduced red tape in trade, and established a credit-information registry for consumer loans that provides credit histories of 340 million citizens, according to the report.
A separate report on foreign direct investment, released by Columbia University and The Economist publishing group, predicts that until 2010 China will be the top emerging market for business investment inflows, but Africa will not receive much investment any time soon.
Karl Sauvant, director of the Columbia Program on International Investment, which released the investment report, said China will attract $87 billion from U.S. businesses alone in 2006, while sub-Saharan Africa, with 10 percent of the world’s population, gets less than 1 percent of total foreign direct investment flows."

Fiji ranks 31 in World Bank report
"FIJI has dropped back two rankings to 31 on the 2007 World Bank's Doing Business report after being ranked 29 this year.
The drop in ranking comes amid concerns from the bank about some aspects of doing business in Fiji even though it has improved a lot from its previous ranking in previous years."

Bangladesh 3rd best business place in S Asia
"Bangladesh is the third easiest country in which to do business in South Asia, although as a whole is lagging behind other parts of the world when it comes to reforms that could enhance business activity, says a World Bank-IFC (International Finance Corporation) report. The top ranked countries in the region are the Maldives (53) and Pakistan (74), followed by Bangladesh (88), Sri Lanka (89) and Nepal (100). India comes in at 134, Bhutan at 138 and Afghanistan at 162."

Mozambique says to cut red tape in 2007
Mozambique will shake up its ineffective judiciary in a series of radical measures aimed at cutting red-tape and increasing business confidence in its resurgent economy

World Bank: Indonesia Losing Appeal As Invest Destination

Less Foreign Direct Investment forecasted for 2007;In a global context of weaker foreign direct investment, FDI, in emerging markets because of “structural weaknesses”, Latinamerica is also set to suffer, according to a report from the University of Columbia in New York and The Economist group. ..
However another report but from the International Finance Corporation, IFC, the private sector arm of the World Bank shows that doing business became easier worldwide in 2005/06. Two hundred and thirteen regulatory reforms—in 112 economies— reduced the time, cost, and hassle for businesses to comply with legal and administrative requirements.

Meeting with private sector to clarify delivery system..He said Malaysia’s 25th ranking in the recent World Bank’s report on Doing Business 2007 needed to be improved.

Taiwan climbs a spot to become 24th-freest economy; Taiwan is the world's 24th freest economy among 130 nations, one spot up from last year, according to a report released on Thursday by the Fraser Institute, an independent public policy organization in Canada
According to a recent report released by the World Bank and the International Finance Corp, Taiwan ranked No. 47 in ease of doing business, down from 43rd last year.

In what do we trust?The language of business is peppered with the word trust. Trust deed, deed of trust, unit trust, trust account, investment trust, trust fund are just a few of the plethora of trust terms in the commercial world.
That's no coincidence. Without trust, much business activity could not be carried out. There has to be an underlying belief that the other party to a transaction will fulfill his/her obligations. Two reports that came out recently give a seemingly contradictory view of the state of trust in contemporary China.

WB Increases Azerbaijan’s Rating on Favorable Business Environment

Israel 26th business-friendly country

Malaysia Is More Business Friendly Than That Rated By World Bank, Says MB

Caribbean Way Behind as Business Destination

Slovakia offers best business conditions of V4 states

Britain overtaken by Hong Kong in table of best places to do business

Zambian investment environment worsening

ARMENIA LEADER IN CIS AS A COUNTRY WITH TROUBLE-FREE CONDITIONS FOR RUNNING A BUSINESS

Sri Lanka lags reforming nations in South Asia

''The Easiest Place To Do Business In South Asia''-“The Maldives remains ‘the easiest place to do business’ in South Asia, but it is only the best of a bad bunch, according to an influential World Bank report….
The report found that the South Asia region ranks behind all others on the pace of reforms, with only a quarter of countries, making at least one reform that improved the Doing Business indicators.

However, the World Bank’s methodology is fiercely skewed towards liberalization and privatization regardless of context. It does not track variables such as market size, macroeconomic policy, quality of infrastructure, currency volatility, investor perceptions, or crime rates.

The Maldives was therefore criticized in this year’s report for introducing some measure of labour protection. The World Bank condemned the new mandatory two-month notice period before workers can be dismissed, saying it was ‘a move that may especially discourage small business and the hiring of poor, low-skilled, and young workers’.

The Maldives’ high regional ranking reflects its exceptionally laissez-faire attitude to tax and employment protection. It ranked first out of all 175 countries on ‘paying taxes’ – businesses pay back an average of just 9.3% of profit to the state, in comparison to a regional average of 45.1% and a developed world average of 47.8%...”

Australia eighth in easy business survey
Australia has moved up one spot into eighth place in the World Bank's latest ranking of the easiest markets to do business, overtaking Norway.

NZ knocked from top business spot
"New Zealand has been knocked off its perch, at the top of world rankings for ease of doing business….Australia's significant reforms of the last year have helped it improve to 8th place"

How Nations Prosper: Economic Freedom and Doing Business in 2007- an event coming up at Cato later in the month.

Earliers posts- The Road Less Traveled of Business Regulatory Reform, Excessive Anti-Corruption Drive Hurting the Economy?

The Hammer Against Witches

Kevin in a comment to an earlier post mentioned that ‘No bigot I have ever known was as scientistic or as vicious as the writer of this article in EB,’. I think the following book Malleus Maleficarum (1486), written as a guide to witch hunting beats the Negro definition from the Encyclopedia Britannica. The book was second only to Bible in popularity when it was published (watched the History Channel video). Some excerpts from the chapter titled; “Concerning Witches who copulate with Devils. Why is it that Women are chiefly addicted to Evil superstitions”-

“…For S. Jerome in his Contra Iouinianum says: This Socrates had two wives, whom he endured with much patience, but could not be rid of their contumelies and clamorous vituperations. So one day when they were complaining against him, he went out of the house to escape their plaguing, and sat down before the house; and the women then threw filthy water over him. But the philosopher was not disturbed by this, saying, “I knew the rain would come after the thunder.”

There is also a story of a man whose wife was drowned in a river, who, when he was searching for the body to take it out of the water, walked up the stream. And when he was asked why, since heavy bodies do not rise but fall, he was searching against the current of the river, he answered: “When that woman was alive she always, both in word and deed, went contrary to my commands; therefore I am searching in the contrary direction in case even now she is dead she may preserve her contrary disposition.”

And indeed, just as through the first defect in their intelligence that are more prone to abjure the faith; so through their second defect of inordinate affections and passions they search for, brood over, and inflict various vengeances, either by witchcraft, or by some other means. Wherefore it is no wonder that so great a number of witches exist in this sex.

Women also have weak memories; and it is a natural vice in them not to be disciplined, but to follow their own impulses without any sense of what is due; this is her whole study, and all that she keeps in her memory. So Theophrastus says: If you hand over the whole management of the house to her, but reserve some minute detail to your own judgement, she will think that you are displaying a great want of faith in her, and will stir up a strife; and unless you quickly take counsel, she will prepare poison for you, and consult seers and soothsayers; and will become a witch.

But as to domination by women, hear what Cicero says in the Paradoxes. Can he be called a free man whose wife governs him, imposes laws on him, orders him, and forbids him to do what he wishes, so that he cannot and dare not deny her anything that she asks? I should call him not only a slave, but the vilest of slaves, even if he comes from the noblest family. And Seneca, in the character of the raging Medea, says: Why do you cease to follow your happy impulse; how great is that part of vengeance in which you rejoice? Where he adduces many proofs that a woman will not be governed, but will follow her own impulse even to her own destruction. In the same way we read of many woman who have killed themselves either for love or sorrow because they were unable to work their vengeance.

S. Jerome, writing of Daniel, tells a story of Laodice, wife of Antiochus king of Syria; how, being jealous lest he should love his other wife, Berenice, more than her, she first caused Berenice and her daughter by Antiochus to be slain, and then poisoned herself. And why? Because she would not be governed, and would follow her own impulse. Therefore, S. John Chrysostom says not without reason: O evil worse than all evil, a wicked woman, whether she be poor or rich. For if she be the wife of a rich man, she does not cease night and day to excite her husband with hot words, to use evil blandishments and violent importunations. And if she have a poor husband she does not cease to stir him also to anger and strife. And if she be a widow, she takes it upon herself everywhere to look down on everybody, and is inflamed to all boldness by the spirit of pride.

If we inquire, we find that nearly all the kingdoms of the world have been overthrown by women. Troy, which was a prosperous kingdom, was, for the rape of one woman, Helen, destroyed, and many thousands of Greeks slain. The kingdom of the Jews suffered much misfortune and destruction through the accursed Jezebel, and her daughter Athaliah, queen of Judah, who caused her son's sons to be killed, that on their death she might reign herself; yet each of them was slain. The kingdom of the Romans endured much evil through Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, that worst of women. And so with others. Therefore it is no wonder if the world now suffers through the malice of women.

And now let us examine the carnal desires of the body itself, whence has arise unconscionable harm to human life. Justly we may say with Cato of Utica: If the world could be rid of women, we should not be without God in our intercourse. For truly, without the wickedness of women, to say nothing of witchcraft, the world would still remain proof against innumerable dangers. Hear what Valerius said to Rufinus: You do not know that woman is the Chimaera, but it is good that you should know it; for that monster was of three forms; its face was that of a radiant and noble lion, it had the filthy belly of a goat, and it was armed with the virulent tail of a viper. And he means that a woman is beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep.

Let us consider another property of hers, the voice. For as she is a liar by nature, so in her speech she stings while she delights us. Wherefore her voice is like the song of the Sirens, who with their sweet melody entice the passers-by and kill them. For they kill them by emptying their purses, consuming their strength, and causing them to forsake God. Again Valerius says to Rufinus: When she speaks it is a delight which flavours the sin; the flower of love is a rose, because under its blossom there are hidden many thorns. See Proverbs v, 3-4: Her mouth is smoother than oil; that is, her speech is afterwards as bitter as absinthium. [Her throat is smoother than oil. But her end is as bitter as wormwood.]

Let us consider also her gait, posture, and habit, in which is vanity of vanities. There is no man in the world who studies so hard to please the good God as even an ordinary woman studies by her vanities to please men. An example of this is to be found in the life of Pelagia, a worldly woman who was wont to go about Antioch tired and adorned most extravagantly. A holy father, named Nonnus, saw her and began to weep, saying to his companions, that never in all his life had he used such diligence to please God; and much more he added to this effect, which is preserved in his orations.

It is this which is lamented in Ecclesiastes vii, and which the Church even now laments on account of the great multitude of witches. And I have found a woman more bitter than death, who is the hunter's snare, and her heart is a net, and her hands are bands. He that pleaseth God shall escape from her; but he that is a sinner shall be caught by her. More bitter than death, that is, than the devil: Apocalypse vi, 8, His name was Death. For though the devil tempted Eve to sin, yet Eve seduced Adam. And as the sin of Eve would not have brought death to our soul and body unless the sin had afterwards passed on to Adam, to which he was tempted by Eve, not by the devil, therefore she is more bitter than death.

More bitter than death, again, because that is natural and destroys only the body; but the sin which arose from woman destroys the soul by depriving it of grace, and delivers the body up to the punishment of sin.

More bitter than death, again, because bodily death is an open and terrible enemy, but woman is a wheedling and secret enemy.

And that she is more perilous than a snare does not speak of the snare of hunters, but of devils. For men are caught not only trough their carnal desires, when they see and hear women: for S. Bernard says: Their face is a burning wind, and their voice the hissing of serpents: but they also cast wicked spells on countless men and animals. And when it is said that her heart is a net, it speaks of the inscrutable malice which reigns in their hearts. And her hands are as bands for binding; for when they place their hands on a creature to bewitch it, then with the help of the devil, they perform their design.

To conclude. All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable. See Proverbs xxx: There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth thing which says not, It is enough; that is, the mouth of the womb. Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils. More such reasons could be brought forward, but to the understanding it is sufficiently clear that it is no matter for wonder that there are more women than men found infected with the heresy of witchcraft. And in consequence of this, it is better called the heresy of witches than of wizards, since the name is taken from the more powerful party. And blessed be the Highest Who has so far preserved the male sex from so great a crime: for since He was willing to be born and to suffer for us, therefore He has granted to men the privilege.”

Related;
Sexy Devils;What really lay behind the massive witch hunts of the Middle Ages?

Witchcraft Collection- Cornell University

The massa marittima mural / the malleus maleficarum

Witch Trials

Images of Circe and Discourses of Witchcraft, 1480-1580

History of Witchcraft - Research Guide

Multimedia;
WITCHCRAFT- BBC
"Why did practices that had been tolerated for centuries suddenly become such a threat? What brought the prosecutions of witchcraft to an end, and was there anything ever in Europe that could be truly termed as a witch?"

Listen to Helen Fisher for an intelligent discussion for some real differences between the sexes (very highly recommended).

Silliest thing I heard today

Organization of Islamic Conference is urging Muslim tycoons to buy stakes in global media outlets to help change anti-Muslim attitudes around the world;.

"Muslim investors must invest in the large media institutions of the world, which generally make considerable profits, so that they have the ability to affect their policies via their administrative boards," OIC chief Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu told the gathering in the Saudi city of Jeddah.

"This would benefit in terms of correcting the image of Islam worldwide," he said, calling on Muslim countries to set up more channels in widely-spoken foreign languages.

Muslim stakes in Western media are minimal. Billionaire Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns 5.46 percent of media conglomerate News Corp., the Rupert Murdoch-run group behind the Fox News Channel. The U.S. channel is generally seen as right-wing and no friend of Arab or Muslim interests.”

If that is the best alternative that ministers from Islamic countries can come up with, than ….

Related;
The War with al-Qaeda
Opium Threats in Afghanistan, Iran
Pakistan’s Troubled Leader

“My God is bigger than yours” Dept.

Pope Benedict XVI quoted criticisms of the Mohammed by a 14th Century Byzantine Christian emperor, Manuel II Paleologus in a recent speech in Germany;

“Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached".

For a different approach at dialogue listen (browse down the page) to Robert Thurman.

Related;
Muslim Leaders Assail Pope’s Tough Speech on Islam
Pope hits out at Islam
Google News coverage

The Seduction of Culture in German History

During the Allied bombing of German cities, Hitler was more concerned by the loss of cultural treasures than he was by human casualties. At the time, his propagandists broadcast the fact, believing it would impress the German public by revealing Hitler's cultural sensitivity: the artist's spirit inside the military uniform. Wolf Lepenies argues that this incident is part of the long German tradition of valuing cultural achievement above all else, including politics - a tradition which he believes has had a catastrophic consequences for his country. Listen to the podcast from Radio National (starts at the end of the program).

Here is the Introduction of the book;

“This book examines the German attitude of regarding culture as a substitute for politics and of vilifying politics, understood above all as parliamentary politics, as nothing but an arena of narrow-minded, interest-group bargaining and compromise. But this work is not a debate on the Sonderweg (special path) in disguise, asserting that the aversion to politics and the idealist and romantic veneration of culture were the main reason why Germany departed from the "normal" Western course of development and steered into the disaster of Nazism. I do not describe an attitude that is a uniquely German phenomenon. Still, I argue that an overestimation of cultural achievements and a "strange indifference to politics" (G.P. Gooch) nowhere played a greater role than in Germany and have nowhere else survived to the same degree. Seeing culture as a substitute for politics has remained a prevailing attitude throughout German history--from the glorious days of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Weimar through, though now in considerably weaker form, the reunification of the two Germanys after the fall of communism. Peter Gay, Georg Mosse, Fritz Ringer, Fritz Stern, Peter Viereck, and others have explored this specific German attitude toward culture and politics. I am revisiting their arguments and try to offer new insights into an old problem. “

Also recommended;
The Wages of Destruction: The Making and the Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze. See reviews at Financial Times and The Guardian. Brad de Long also recommends the book.

The Myth of a Tragic Past

Andrei Lankov, debunks the myth that Korea has a monopoly over a tragic history;

“Well, let’s have a look at the Choson Dynasty period, from 1392 to 1910. The last four decades of these five centuries were turbulent indeed, but what about earlier times? Even a cursory look demonstrates that it was hardly a time of troubles. Throughout 1392-1865, Korea fought three wars against foreign invaders, not including some minor border skirmishes with nomads in the north, and Japanese pirates on the coasts. In one case, the war with Japan from 1592-1598, known as Hideyoshi’s invasion in the West, and as the Imjin War in Korea, was disastrous and the entire country was devastated. As you know, the medieval armies, all those knights in shining armor, were not too nice when they encountered the civilian population. The two other conflicts, of 1627 and of 1636, were of much smaller scale _ essentially, two blitzkriegs brilliantly executed by Manchu generals whose cavalry units broke through Korean defenses, approached Seoul, and forced the Korean government to agree to an unfavorable peace.

Let’s compare this with the fate of more or less every European country. Throughout the same period of 1392-1865, almost every country in Europe fought a much greater number of conflicts, and suffered much greater casualties. Let’s have a look at German history. The period under consideration is marked by at least four major military conflicts, each lasting for one or several decades, and resulting in mass death and destruction: the Reformation Wars, the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), the Prussian campaigns of the mid-18th century and the Napoleonic wars. And these are only large-scale wars, each being as significant and bloody as Korea’s war with Japan in 1592-1598 (in all probability, all these conflicts were more destructive than the Hideyoshi invasion). Apart from these, there were a number of smaller conflicts, many of which were not small at all like the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), or the chain of conflicts that accompanied German unification in the 1850s and 1860s. And, of course, there were countless quarrels between the mini-states which formed the Germany of the era, each such quarrel being a military conflict on its own right, far exceeding Korea’s occasional skirmishes with Japanese raiders.

Is Germany an exception? By no means. This is the fairly typical history of any European country, and against such a background Korean history appears rather quiet. Rather than being a country with a uniquely turbulent history, Korea actually was a country, which enjoyed stability undreamed of in most other parts of the world!”

Via Foreign Dispatches

“Ignorance Is Bliss”

“Ignorance Is Bliss” by Saira Wasim
“With a tip of the hat to Norman Rockwell, “Ignorance is Bliss” illustrates a recent conflict between Western Europe and the Islamic world involving religious freedom and artistic expression”

Related;
A Mélange of Asian Roots and Shifting Identities
Blair confronts art close to home

Will Internet bring democracy to the Arabs?

Kuwait’s Annus Mirabilis, an interesting article on Kuwaiti political developments;

“Like the orange-clad protesters, candidates sent reams of text messages, using lists of cell phone numbers generated from records of attendees asked to sign in at events. Some messages, featuring rumor and gossip, were campaign tricks designed to make another candidate look bad. Most focused on thanking the recipient for his or her support and offered information about the candidate’s next event.

Blogs were a more important innovation. Voters could read some of the more sensational blog postings in daily newspapers. The Orange Movement leadership maintains a blog originating in the United States, managed jointly by overseas Kuwaiti students and one of the Orange organizers. This blog, KuwaitJunior, provided running news and commentary during the emiri transition in January 2006. During the campaign, it brought electoral corruption into the public eye thanks to a posting by a woman who recounted how two men in Rula Dashti’s district had attempted to buy her vote with the promise of a Chanel handbag. Although she did not mention the candidate’s name, it soon became public knowledge that she was speaking of Jamal al-‘Umar. The Orange leadership investigated this allegation by dispatching an undercover member, armed with a small video camera, to negotiate with the vote buyers. The camera failed, but the agent managed to capture pictures and voices on her cell phone. Then four young men who were not Orange organizers decided to challenge al-‘Umar during an event at his tent in Jabriyya southeast of Kuwait City. They asked him to explain why people were buying votes on his behalf if he was innocent of corruption as he claimed. The youths were roughed up and thrown out by the candidate’s assistants and, adding insult to injury, the Jabriyya police refused to accept their assault complaint. The worst part of the story came at the end, when al-‘Umar came in second, thereby winning a seat in the 2006 parliament….

All of which brings us back to democracy and Kuwait’s year full of miracles. As political scientist Eleanor Doumato has observed, women’s rights in the Arab Gulf states are the gift of monarchs, not parliaments. This is certainly the case in Kuwait, where opinion polls taken before the electoral law was changed in May 2005 showed a discouraging lack of support for female candidates, although more for female voters. The role of democracy in the 2006 election should be considered in broader terms than that, however. That there was an election at all was even more indicative of expectations that a democratic process should -- and did -- exist in Kuwait. The demonstrations that helped bring down the government were non-violent, as was virtually all of the official response to them. The new emir may have acted precipitously in canceling the parliamentary session and calling a new election -- and the speaker of the parliament later excoriated this decision publicly as unnecessarily confrontational. Yet only 20 years ago, a Kuwaiti emir dissolved a parliament and did not call for a new election until invasion, war and liberation made it impossible for him to continue resisting demands for the restoration of constitutional life.

These demands came from Kuwaitis, through a long and occasionally frightening period when street demonstrations were met with more than the possibly accidental injury of one person by a policeman’s baton. The pro-democracy movement of 1989-1990 saw more widespread beating of demonstrators, along with the desecration of a mosque by tear gas and police dogs, and the arrest of more than a dozen prominent dissidents. Demands for reform came from outside, too, not only from exiles abroad during the Iraqi occupation, but also from countries that, having sent troops to liberate Kuwait, expected its leaders to behave better than the ousted invader. Despite clerical and even popular criticism, after liberation foreign ambassadors and NGOs pressed for women’s rights, protection for stateless persons, better treatment of maids and other foreign workers, and structural changes to open Kuwait’s economy and political system. That each of these causes was also advocated by Kuwaitis does not diminish the usefulness of external support from those whose good opinion Kuwaiti leaders value. Such external advocacy is not only an additional check on backsliding toward a more authoritarian past, but is also evidence that other governments support democratization in the Middle East.

Jamie Meyerfeld, writing in support of the International Criminal Court, emphasizes the role of external checks to support democracy. “Like Ulysses tied to the mast…democracies steel themselves against future unwise temptations…. It is astonishing that [102] countries have voluntarily agreed to make their own leaders vulnerable to prosecution and punishment before an international court.” Similarly, international observers add to the checks exercised by national constituents of governments. These national watchers are more important, of course, but a little encouragement from outside can reinforce their efforts to build democratic institutions, and discourage governments impatient with the noisy demands of democratic politics from shutting those institutions down. If the international community were serious about democratization, no pillar of authoritarianism would fall without an attentive audience listening for the crash.”

Via Abu Aardvark

Related;
Young Kuwaitis turn ‘Orange’
Kuwaiti women one step away from their political rights
Kuwait and democracy in the Gulf;

“Kuwait is hardly a model of democracy either—at least, not yet. Its head of state is hereditary, and he appoints the 15-person cabinet. Typically, half its ministers are members of the ruling Al Sabah family. All have voting rights in the parliament. This raises the number of legislators from the 50 elected MPs to 65, and raises the bar for winning a vote against the government. Yet the parliament does have the right to embarrass ministers with tricky questions. It can rely on the Arab world's freest press to air grievances, too, though in this small, hyper-rich state with barely 1m citizens among its 2.3m residents, word of scandal gets around anyway. In January, it won greater legitimacy when it endorsed the removal of the ailing crown prince, only a few weeks after the death of the previous emir, and his replacement by an abler man.”

Can Iraq Make It?
Why America gives Israel its unconditional support
Moody's warns of risk for Gulf banks

Multimedia;
Illusion and Reality in the Middle East-A Discussion of American Strategy Regarding Iran, Syria, and the Greater Middle East (podcast from New America Foundation)
Is Dubai the new model for the Middle-East?
Obituary: Egyptian Nobel Laureate writer Naguib Mahfouz

War on Sex Toys

Plastic sex toys are bad for your health says Greenpeace;

“A new report released today by our Dutch office reveals that the plastics used to construct a wide range of sex toys contain very high concentrations of hazardous phlalates, toxic chemical softeners used in PVC to make it soft and flexible.

Greenpeace Netherlands asked research organization TNO to test eight different sex toys, including dildos and vibrators, for phthalates. Worryingly, seven out of eight contained phthalates in concentrations varying from 24 to 51 percent. Remember, these are chemicals which do not easily biodegrade and can be dangerous - even in small amounts.

The research was commissioned after Durex's 2005 Global Sex Survey revealed that three million Dutch people admit to owning a sex toy. Over a million are sold there every year, making the market worth 22 million Euros.”

The solution according to Greenpeace is more legislation.

Via Improbable Research

Iraq Chaos

Juan Cole has a commentary in Salon on the divisions between the Shiite community in Iraq;

“Sadly, not even the man once considered the Shiites' great peacemaker has been able to stop the violence. The decline in influence of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, once a revered voice of calm and unity, underlines the fragmentation of the Shiite south. When his call to stop a Shiite-on-Shiite skirmish in mid-August went unheeded, Sistani was reportedly so discouraged that he was said to be contemplating a complete withdrawal from politics. Sistani had earlier been a key architect of Shiite unity, cobbling the various religious parties into the United Iraqi Alliance, which has more or less won both parliamentary elections. But his influence has waned as he has continued to preach social harmony and avoidance of reprisals against Sunnis, a message the Shiite masses no longer want to hear.

The military position of the United States and Britain in Iraq is already fragile. Coalition forces seem barely able to keep a lid on the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement in Ramadi, Samarra, Mosul and even Baghdad. The Pentagon admitted in its recent quarterly report that violence was up 15 percent in May through July over the previous quarter. July was the most violent month in terms of civilian fatalities since the fall of Saddam. Some 90 percent of the dead are simply found in the street - bullet in the brain, hands tied, signs of torture. For the most part such violence has been a dirty war conducted by Sunni and Shiite militias against one another. If Shiite-on-Shiite violence spreads, at a time when even Grand Ayatollah Sistani has been helpless to intervene, it is difficult to see how the American and British militaries can remain viable in Iraq.”

Related:

Iraq Country Analysis- Energy Information Administration

Cordesman: Civil War Can Break Out Anytime In Iraq

Iraq, Terrorism, and U.S. Politics

Fact Sheet: The President's National Strategy for Combating Terrorism

Saddam 'had no link to al-Qaeda' ; Senate's Intelligence Committee report

PortAl Iraq

The Official Website of the Multi-National Force in Iraq

After the Guns of August- Saad Eddin Ibrahim;

"President George W. Bush has been short on neither initiatives nor catchy slogans and acronyms. Recent years are littered with them: “Global War on Terror” (GWOT), “Road Map,” “Middle East Partnership Initiative “ (MEPI), “Broader Middle East and North Africa” (BMENA) – originally “Greater Middle East Initiative (GMEI) – Democracy Assisted Dialogue (DAD), and so on. His latest reverie, envisioned in the thick of the recent fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, was the New Middle East (NME), with US clients Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia serving as the pillars of regional order."

Watchdog criticises US-run Radio Sawa, Alhurra TV; The Government Accountability Office (GAO) also found that Sawa and the Alhurra satellite television network were falling short in measuring the quality of their programmes, which the stations say reach nearly 36 million people.

Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq- Quarterly Reports

The Iraqi Conflict- miscellaneous links on Iragi history

Talking to Terrorists (podcast)
"This is a conversation with Rick Welch, a lawyer from McConnelsville, Ohio, who is also a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army reserve. For 18 months, from late 2003 until the middle of last year, Rick was the civil-military advisor to the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, Taskforce Baghdad, and a major part of his job was to sit down with key figures in the insurgency"

Singapore keep up to its reputation

IMF/ World Bank released a statement rebuking Singapore government of refusing entry of certain NGOs for the annual meetings of the multilateral banks;

“In the interest of good governance, transparency and accountability, we urge the Government of Singapore to allow all properly accredited civil society representatives to attend our meetings. We have consistently opposed any restrictions on full participation and peaceful expression of views. Open dialogue with civil society is also important for the effective operation of our institutions.

The Singapore Government has informed us of their objection to the accreditation of a number of these civil society representatives, and has stated their intention to block those individuals' access to the Annual Meetings. These individuals have been cleared to attend the Annual Meetings by their respective governments and we have accredited them according to our standard procedure.”

Financial Times notes;

“Some NGOs alleged that the IMF/World Bank, which holds its annual meetings outside Washington every three years, had selected Singapore as the venue for this year's meeting because of its authoritarian reputation. Previous IMF/World Bank meetings have been marred by violent protests.

Among those banned by Singapore were representatives from the UK-based World Development Movement, Thailand's Focus on the Global South, the Freedom from Debt Coalition in the Philippines and the Forum on Indonesian Development (Infid)”

Related;
Singapore to ban outdoor protests at IMF meeting

Podcast of the Day- Diplomats and Parking fine corruption

The Case of the Unpaid Parking Ticket- podcast of the Tim Harford article in Slate.

Or listen to a Tim’s interview discussing the issue online;

“There's a depressing conclusion and there's an optimistic conclusion. The depressing conclusion is there's nothing you can do about corruption because, well, you know, these guys from Chad and Bangladesh, they're just corrupt. That's what a lot of people, I think, have read this paper and thought that. But I take a different view. Because there's a kicker right at the end of the paper, which is what happened when the law changed. There was the Clinton-Schumer Amendment in 2002. It meant that, OK, you couldn't fine people for committing parking violations. But you could, and you would, tow their cars. And you would actually deduct the parking fines from each country's allocation of foreign aid. So they really started to take a stand on this.

And guess what? Personal morality matters, but enforcing the law matters, too. Because when the amendment was passed, all of these parking violations, by all of these ambassadors, immediately fell by 90 percent. So there is hope for improving the world and stamping out corruption after all.”

There was an interesting letter in this week’s The Economist;

“SIR – In international events bronze medallists usually get little attention (“A ticket for corruption”, August 12th). However, when describing a new corruption ranking based on parking violations by UN diplomats you singled out Chad, the third-highest offender, and ignored Kuwait, the gold winner, which had twice as many infractions. I take solace in finding that my country's diplomats committed zero violations. Manuel Navas, Bogotá, Colombia”

Related;

Diplomats and parking fines;

“A study* by Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel, economists at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, gives a rare picture of how people from different cultures perform under new cultural norms. For instance, between 1997 and 2002 diplomats from Chad averaged 124 unpaid parking violations; diplomats from Canada and the United Kingdom had none. The results from 146 countries were strikingly similar to the Transparency International corruption index, which rates countries by their level of perceived sleaze. In the case of parking violations, diplomats from countries with low levels of corruption behaved well, even when they could get away with breaking the rules. The culture of their home country was imported to New York, and they acted accordingly.

The same applied to high-corruption countries. Their diplomats became increasingly comfortable with parking where they liked; as they spent more time in New York, their number of violations increased by 8-18%. Overall, diplomats accumulated 150,000 unpaid parking tickets during the five years under review.

Yet any moral superiority New Yorkers may feel should be tempered by the behaviour of the American embassy in London. Last year, embassy staff stopped paying the congestion charge—now £8, or over $15—for bringing cars into central London. The growing pile of unpaid charges now stands at $716,000.”

Blogs discussing the above paper; PSD blog, Marginal Revolution, Healthcare Economist

How Did Suharto Steal $35 Billion?

Why Is Chicago So Corrupt?

UN Diplomats Owe $18 Million in Parking Tickets

In The Economist this Week: Katrina, FEMA, and Corruption

The Oil-for-Food Scandal

Adventures in Cheating-A guide to buying term papers online

Some recent columns of Tim Harford;
Explaining the huge rise in teen oral sex
'Product sabotage' helps consumers
Overpaid, underworked and in charge

Why do people go on the Internet?

It seems many Danes click online for government information, while the Swiss use the net more for job hunting, in UK more for games and music;

“Intensive computer game players are relatively few in number: usually male, aged 15-28, playing more than 20 hours per week. Mass-market consumers, on the other end of the scale, prefer playing games that are easy to learn and last a short time. Meanwhile, the market continues to evolve as players get older and tend to have higher incomes. Also, more and more women are starting to play multiplayer games online. In fact, although in most OECD countries men are more likely than women to use the Internet, significantly more women than men use it in the US.”

Why do you think it’s the case?

Related;
OECD STI Scoreboard
Internet World Statistics
Poll Shows More U.S. Adults Are Going Online at Home
A Web Journal Studying How Technology Affects Society
Digitial divide still separates white and minority students
Top 15 Online Populations by Country
Internet Activities

Good Inaugurals

The John Curtin Institute of Public Policy has just established the journal Public Policy.

Via Andrew Leigh

Good Magazine- your subscription money goes to a charity of your choosing. See Jeffrey Sachs article and their blog.

Via Pienso

The Road Less Traveled of Business Regulatory Reform

According to the World Bank's Doing Business 2007, the four steps to successful business regulatory reform;

• Start simple and consider administrative reforms that don’t need legislative changes.
• Cut unnecessary procedures, reducing the number of bureaucrats entrepreneurs interact with.
• Introduce standard application forms and publish as much regulatory information as possible.
• And remember: many of the frustrations for businesses come from how regulations are administered. The internet alleviates these frustrations without changing the spirit of the regulation

More on the report from the preface;

“Regulations affecting 10 areas of everyday business are measured: starting a business, dealing with licenses, employing workers, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and closing a business. The indicators are used to analyze economic outcomes and identify what reforms have worked, where and why.

The methodology has limitations. Other areas important to business—such as a country’s proximity to large markets, quality of infrastructure services (other than services related to trading across borders), the security of property from theft and looting, the transparency of government procurement, macroeconomic conditions or the underlying strength of institutions—are not studied directly by Doing Business. To make the data comparable across countries, the indicators refer to a specific type of business—generally a limited liability company operating in the largest business city.

The methodology for 4 of the Doing Business topics changed in this edition. For paying taxes, the total tax rate now includes all labor contributions paid by the employer and excludes consumption taxes. For enforcing contracts, the case study was revised to reflect a typical contractual dispute over the quality of goods rather than a simple debt default. For trading across borders, Doing Business now reports the cost associated with exporting and importing cargo in addition to the time and number of documents required. And for employing workers, nonwage labor costs are no longer included in the calculation of the ease of employing workers. For these reasons— as well as the addition of 20 new economies—last year’s rankings on the ease of doing business are recalculated using the new methodology and reported in the Overview.”

Singapore is the number one in the rankings- coincidently the World Bank-IMF annual meetings are also being held in Singapore this month. It is interesting that Singapore (not a democratic country according to Acemoglu) beat more deomcratic countries like Australia in the rankings.

As for a lot of the other poor countries, there is a sense in these countries that a lot of the wealth has been generated through either corruption or unfair competition. May be one need to take a hard look at some of the local partners of the Doing Business survey for their independence.

Quick Links;
The Doing Business Law Library
Create their own custom dataset of main indices
Local Partners
Economy Rankings
Explore Economies
Economy Characteristics

Related;
Blog coverage of the report- PSD Blog, New Economist, Greg Mankiw, Econlog, Pienso.

Doing Business and Poverty Reduction

Does Doing Business suck?

Business Regulation measure

Measuring Labor Market Flexibility

MI Indexes

Doing Business in 2006: Creating Jobs-online discussion

How Should States Encourage Entrepreneurship?
"At the heart of this public policy issue are two competing views of how to facilitate entrepreneurship. For some policymakers encouraging entrepreneurship involves improving the entrepreneurial climate through the lowering of tax and regulatory burdens. This view is consistent with a large body of academic literature showing that a good way to encourage entrepreneurship is to provide individuals with the freedom to pursue their dreams. Other policymakers focus on the financial constraints facing would-be entrepreneurs and how public policy can mitigate the financial hurdles to entrepreneurship. State financing of venture capital firms is consistent with this view."

Multimedia
Podcast of news from the World Bank on the Doing Business 2007
The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else; I would also highly recommed de Soto's book, 'The Other Path'
How to Reform the Business Environment ; highly recommended especially comments by Egyptian minister.
Doing Business in 2006: Creating Jobs- Book Event at Cato
Doing Business in India Today: McDonalds Experience Entering the Indian Market

Related Bank Publications
Doing business in 2006 - creating jobs
Doing Business in 2005
Doing business in 2004 : understanding regulation
Doing business in South Asia in 2005
Doing business in 2005: comparing the Cambodian business environment with the world
Doing business in 2005 : India regional profile
Ukraine - Cost of doing business survey, 2002
Latvia : self-assessment report on administrative barriers to doing business
Perceived obstacles to doing business: worldwide survey results
Doing better business through effective public consultation and disclosure : a good practice manual
Doing business in Brazil
Doing business in Mexico
Despite many reforms, doing business is still not easy in Vietnam
Institutional obstacles to doing business : region-by-region results from a worldwide survey of the private sector

*updated 8th September, 2006

A New Map of the Middle East?

An article in Armed Forces Journal suggests we need to revise the map of the of the Middle East;

“A just alignment in the region would leave Iraq's three Sunni-majority provinces as a truncated state that might eventually choose to unify with a Syria that loses its littoral to a Mediterranean-oriented Greater Lebanon: Phoenecia reborn. The Shia south of old Iraq would form the basis of an Arab Shia State rimming much of the Persian Gulf. Jordan would retain its current territory, with some southward expansion at Saudi expense. For its part, the unnatural state of Saudi Arabia would suffer as great a dismantling as Pakistan.

A root cause of the broad stagnation in the Muslim world is the Saudi royal family's treatment of Mecca and Medina as their fiefdom. With Islam's holiest shrines under the police-state control of one of the world's most bigoted and oppressive regimes — a regime that commands vast, unearned oil wealth — the Saudis have been able to project their Wahhabi vision of a disciplinarian, intolerant faith far beyond their borders. The rise of the Saudis to wealth and, consequently, influence has been the worst thing to happen to the Muslim world as a whole since the time of the Prophet, and the worst thing to happen to Arabs since the Ottoman (if not the Mongol) conquest.

While non-Muslims could not effect a change in the control of Islam's holy cities, imagine how much healthier the Muslim world might become were Mecca and Medina ruled by a rotating council representative of the world's major Muslim schools and movements in an Islamic Sacred State — a sort of Muslim super-Vatican — where the future of a great faith might be debated rather than merely decreed. True justice — which we might not like — would also give Saudi Arabia's coastal oil fields to the Shia Arabs who populate that subregion, while a southeastern quadrant would go to Yemen. Confined to a rump Saudi Homelands Independent Territory around Riyadh, the House of Saud would be capable of far less mischief toward Islam and the world.

Iran, a state with madcap boundaries, would lose a great deal of territory to Unified Azerbaijan, Free Kurdistan, the Arab Shia State and Free Baluchistan, but would gain the provinces around Herat in today's Afghanistan — a region with a historical and linguistic affinity for Persia. Iran would, in effect, become an ethnic Persian state again, with the most difficult question being whether or not it should keep the port of Bandar Abbas or surrender it to the Arab Shia State.

What Afghanistan would lose to Persia in the west, it would gain in the east, as Pakistan's Northwest Frontier tribes would be reunited with their Afghan brethren (the point of this exercise is not to draw maps as we would like them but as local populations would prefer them). Pakistan, another unnatural state, would also lose its Baluch territory to Free Baluchistan. The remaining "natural" Pakistan would lie entirely east of the Indus, except for a westward spur near Karachi.”

Via Cartography blog.

*I do not share the views of the author

Google News Corporation

Google has started a new feature- News Archive Search. I tried searching for Maldives news items- some interesting things came up (slight spelling corrections made below);

“Holland Evening Sentinel - NewspaperArchive - Jul 7, 1952, THE BENIGHTED MALDIVES LACK CIVILIZED WOES; Now that the Maldive islands, in the Indian ocean, have adopted a republican form of government, it is obvious that something ought to be done to bring the benefits twentieth century civilization to the inhabitants. The MALDIVES, known chiefly to stamp collectors, seem to be singularly backward. They have no relations to speak of with other nations, and hence no cold war tensions. They have no television, and only a few automobiles, limited to one' of the inhabited islands. They have no crime and no jails. The islanders never need aspirin or pheno-barbital. The people, it seems, spend most of their time fishing, fashoning lacquer work, making rope and collecting. They've never learned to get stirred up over things. When the time comes to change their government, they don't make a lot of fuss and speeches; they simply tell some- ody to sit under a palm tree and up a constitution. It's something of a mystery why these benighted people have not tried before this to improve their sorry lot and learn how to enjoy he boons we civilized people take or granted. There's a possible answer which we hate to consider, .faybe they're smarter than we.”

Native Revolt In Maldives Is Disclosed; LONDON, Jan. 8 1959 (AP)--Angry mobs swarming from a canoe armada have wrecked and burned offices of the native Government on a remote ...

Reno Evening Gazette - NewspaperArchive - Dec 7, 1934, Maldive Islands lack a sultan Until recently this Indian ocean archipelago had a ruler, Sultan Shamsudeen Iskander, who paid tribute to the British government of Ceylon. Caught trying to substitute an absolute monarchy for the established representative government of the MALDIVES, he has just been dethroned by King George V. "Dreamers who long for an Idyllic Island existence would find their dreams punctured by a visit to the Maldive Islands says a bulletin from the Washington, D C headquarters of the NATIONAL Geogiaphic Society.

…Tourists are warned against sleeping on the islands, as they, even more than natives, fall prey to strange complaints…; climate more than anything else, has hindered the development of these islands, especially their foreign intercom se "Only seventeen of the two thousand Islands are inhabitable, …But even agriculture In the MALDIVES has its drawbacks. Natives have to fight armies of rats which menace their cocoanut crops. All the rice consumed must be imported, and is so expensive that only the wealthy can afloid It …..So frequent are wrecks on this and other Maldive Islands that the governor of Ceylon, in granting Ceylon's, and therefore Britain's protection to the MALDIVES, stipulated that, In return, the islanders must aid all Europeans wrecked on their atolls. "In spite of bad climate, bad water, and other obstacles that would discourage most people, the eighty thousand Maldive Islanders live fairly comfortably. Most of them are short, dark copper in color, Intelligent and Industrious They weave their own cloth, and their own boats and nautical Instruments They are skilled navigators and spend much time on the water fishing for bonito. Several of the islands maintain training schools for sailors Maldivans are Mohammedans and occasionally make pilgrim voyages to the Red Sea …

"Native products are peddled among the Islands in native boats, but all trading with foreign countries is done from Male Island, capital of the group. Male, or Sultan’s Island, Is one of the nine inhabited islands ol a group of fifty which compiise Male atoll. On its small surface, less than one square mile In extent, aie crowded trees, houses along sandy streets, foits, the Sultans tomb, and the dethroned sultan's wall-enclosed palace One thousand of Its approximate five thousand Inhabitants are soldiers. "Coral patches and tide lips make one side of Male Island inaccessible, but the harbor on Its east side, protected by a rough breakwater is good. Once a month, two-masted sailing vessels leave for Colombo, Ceylon, with mail, reaching there in three days If the monsoon winds are favorable, sometimes not for thirty days, If they are unfavorable. In August 01 September boats leave for Ceylon, and Calcutta India, carrying principally coir yarn Male Island reaches its peak of activity and excitement when the annual foreign tiaclers call in March. Natives who have brought their product from other atolls gather on the shore to hall ijith delight ships from Ceylon, Sumatia, and Chittagong, India. Duty, consisting of bags of rice, red handkerchiefs, and other commodities such as onions coriander seed and cummin seed, was formerly presented to the Sultan and his government officials "To watch Maldivians do their equivalent of Christmas shopping is to witness a colorful sight. Foreign traders purchase from them large quantities of bonito, which is in great demand in Sumatra and Ceylon. They also buy tortoise shells, coconuts, coir yam, woven glass mats, and cowrie shells used as currency by some Asiatics. In return, the islanders receive rice, dates, salt, curry- stuff, leaf tobacco and betel nuts. They prize red and white checkered handkerchiefs, coarse white cloth, and colored waist cloths. Chinaware and Indian pottery go over big. Although they make a kind of sugar from cocoanuts, they are glad to get coarse brown sugar. They will also trade their cowrie shells for small quantities of steel, thread and brass."

‘There is no compulsion in religion’

Juan Cole reminds us that;

“Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that the Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar Seminary in Cairo, perhaps the foremost Sunni Arab authority, has issued a statement that jihad or "holy war" was legislated in Islam for the defense of the persons and honor of Muslims, and is not to be used as a threat or a form of aggression against the innocent.”

We shouldn’t forget religious practices are not monolithic;

“In Senegal, I found local Muslims irate at the condescending attitudes of Saudi emissaries who condemned their practices as contrary to Islam. With their long-established Muslim brotherhoods and their beloved marabouts, the Senegalese responded, "We were Islamic scholars when the Saudis were living in tents."

From West Africa to Indonesia, an unnoted defense against Islamist extremism is the loyalty Muslims have to the local versions of their faith. No one much likes to be told that he and his ancestors have gotten it all wrong for the last five centuries. Foolish Westerners who insist that Islam is a unified religion of believers plotting as one to subjugate the West refuse to see that the fiercest enemy of Salafist fundamentalism is the affection Muslims have for their local ways. Islamist terrorists are all about globalization, while the hope for peace lies in the grip of local custom.

Uninterested in political correctness, a Muslim from Côte d'Ivoire remarked to me, "You can change the African's dress, you can educate him and change his table manners, but you cannot change the African inside him." He might have said the same of the Russian, the German, or the Chinese. By refusing to acknowledge, much less attempting to understand, the indestructible differences between human collectives, the 20th-century intelligentsia smoothed the path to genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Sudan, as well as to the age of globalized terror. Denied differences only fester; ignored long enough, the infection kills.

Our insistence that human beings will grow ever more alike defies the historical evidence, as well as practical and spiritual needs. Paradoxically, we make a great fuss of celebrating diversity, yet claim that human values are converging. We, too, have our superstitions and taboos.”

Related;

Sheikh of Al-Azhar : Jihad initiated for self-defense and not for threat or attack

Young U.S. Muslims Strive for Harmony

For Conservative Muslims, Goal of Isolation a Challenge

Iran's liberal lecturers targeted

Islam’s Heart of Darkness

Religionomics!

Creation of "Islamic" Bogeyman

World Conference of Religions for Peace

Fair play and civility in interreligious relations

Multimedia;
Dr Gary Bouma, Professor of Sociology, Monash University on the World Conference on Religions for Peace

Weird Babel of Tongues; One hundred years ago an old building on Azusa Street in the industrial part of Los Angeles held religious meetings that started with people 'breathing strange utterances and mouthing a creed...no sane mortal could understand.' It was the beginning of the modern Pentecostal movement, which remains a thriving church tradition mainly within Protestantism

Creating a Sacred Space; The City of Greater Dandenong is one of Australia's two most diversely populated municipalities and its local hospital, a large acute care hospital, has substituted a multi-faith 'sacred space' in the place of its old chapel. Members of the hospital staff and the City of Greater Dandenong's Interfaith Network, and the Dandenong Historical Society tell about the creation of the sacred space

The Dawning of Consciousness; Emeritus Professor, Derek Denton, is internationally recognised for his work on instinctive behaviours. Professor Denton is 82 but remains involved in various research projects around the globe. His most recent venture is the most ambitous to date - it aims to demonstrate the role of evolution in the emergence of animal and human consciousness

Chinese philosophy; To anybody schooled in Western philosophy, Chinese philosophy doesn't look much like philosophy at all: there seems to be no argument, no analysis, just a lot of proverbs and stories. But this is real philosophy and Dr Karyn Lai gives us an overview. And Chin-Ning Chu, author, motivator and strategist explains what relevance the oldest military treatise in the world has in today's boardroom

Smoker’s International Airways

It’s about time you had an airline for smokers;

“With a growing number of countries choosing to ban smoking in public places, it is an idea that might seem inopportune. But Mr. Schoppmann, a German entrepreneur, is hoping to take advantage of smokers’ resentment at efforts to further curb where they can smoke by giving them their own airline, Smoker’s International Airways.

As the name suggests, the airline, known as Smintair, will probably not be for the faint of lung. The carrier, expected to begin luxury service with business and first-class seats early next year, plans daily flights between Mr. Schoppmann’s hometown of Düsseldorf and Tokyo — a 12-hour journey that, for some smokers, is simply not worth the nicotine-withdrawal headache.

“Many people simply don’t travel long distances anymore because they can’t smoke,” said Mr. Schoppmann, 55, who smokes 30 cigarettes a day in addition to the occasional cigar. “That has to be why they invented videoconferencing.”…

According to the International Air Transport Association, more than a million passengers traveled between Japan and Germany in 2004, a figure that is expected to increase by an average of 3.6 percent a year through 2009. While the majority of Japanese visitors to Germany are tourists, fully half of Germans traveling to Japan are there on business.

What’s more, about one-quarter of Germans smoke, while in Japan, 49 percent of men and 14 percent of women do, according to government surveys…”

Related;
Thank You for Smoking
Stephen Colbert - Civil Lights
One of the SMINTAIR Philosophies;

“Allowing our guests to smoke is one of the freedoms we are happily prepared to grant. Non-smokers will find the cabin air more refreshing than on any other flight with any other airline, as SMINTAIR adds fresh outside air to the conditioning system! This is more expensive, as it burns more fuel, but it is seen as an additional service to our guests.”

Arundhati Roy’s Question

It is now 4 days to the Dropping Knowledge forum.

Arundhati Roy’s questions about the future of non-violent resistance and armed struggle. “What is effective?,” she wonders. “What is the right thing to do?”.Here is the video.

Related;
Civic Power and the People’s Rights: Nonviolent Action for a New World, Speech by Jack DuVall, President, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict

Political activism with a flick of the joystick

Markets in Everything-Selling Dreams

"Anyone who can't sell a bag of air with a dream inside it doesn't deserve to call himself an American, much less an art dealer." -David Hickey

Afghanistan- on the road to a narco-state?

"If this thing gets out of hand, you could move from a narco-economy to a narco-state," - Doug Wankel, director, US drugs control office

Things are going good for poppy cultivators in Afghanistan;

"Opium cultivation in Afghanistan rose 59 percent in 2006, largely due to a dramatic increase in the troubled southern provinces, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said on Saturday…

The Afghan Government, the Parliament and partner nations have made it clear that legalizing cultivation or buying up the opium crop for medical purposes is not an option under current circumstances. The price differential between the legal market, where opium costs about $20-30 per kilo, and the illegal one, where the price is $100, would lead to even greater cultivation and the massive diversion of supplies to the black market..."

NYT also reports on the report;

“He said the increase in cultivation was significantly fueled by the resurgence of Taliban rebels in the south, the country’s prime opium growing region. As the insurgents have stepped up attacks, they have also encouraged and profited from the drug trade, promising protection to growers if they expanded their opium operations. “This year’s harvest will be around 6,100 metric tons of opium — a staggering 92 percent of total world supply. It exceeds global consumption by 30 percent,” Mr. Costa said at a news briefing…

He said the harvest increased by 49 percent from the year before, and it drastically outpaced the previous record of 4,600 metric tons, set in 1999 while the Taliban governed the country. The area cultivated increased by 59 percent, with more than 400,000 acres planted with poppies in 2006 compared with less than 260,000 in 2005….
Afghanistan is already the world’s largest producer of opium, and 35 percent of its gross domestic product is estimated to come from the narcotics trade..”

Related;
Colombia's 'Drugs and Thugs'
Deconstructing Afghanistan
Afghanistan Reconstruction
Afghanistan's Uncertain Transition from Turmoil to Normalcy
South Asia Monitor: The Reconstruction of Afghanistan: A Fight for Survival
Afghanistan; Country in Brief – World Bank
Afghanistan's opium output: what problem?
Afghanistan’s Other War
Life in Afghanistan
Afghanistan-It's rough up north; "In Juma Bazaar, near Maimana, a commander called Rahmatullah Rais, loyal to General Dostum's Jumbesh party, rules the roost. Locals claim that, like most commanders, Mr Rais levies a produce tax, which he calls zakat, after the Muslim tithe to feed the poor, according to his whim. They also say he grabs their water, which after four droughts in five years is a precious resource, and accuse him of the murder of six men in the town earlier this year. Mr Rais denies involvement in the killings and says he hasn't levied zakat for a decade."
Afghanistan: a country on the move
World Drug Report 2006

Hail the Google Books!

“In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia decimated cultural institutions throughout the country. Khmer Rouge fighters took over the National Library, throwing books into the street and burning them, while using the empty stacks as a pigsty. Less than 20 percent of the library-home for Cambodia’s rich cultural heritage- survived.”
- University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman

A new feature of the Google’s Book Search makes out-of-copyright works available for downloading and printing.

Juan Cole raises a couple of problems with Google Book project;

“One problem: I am already finding poorly done books, where every other page is blurred beyond reading. This is very bad because I don't know when it would ever be corrected, and no one would have an incentive to carry out this sort of project once Google has…

A second, general problem with Google is that on the whole it is no good at searching by date. Why is that so hard to put in a search engine? Is it that programmers just don't appreciate the desirability of being able to study instances of the word "liberte" in France, 1700-1789? You can put dates in the searches, but in my experience that doesn't return satisfactory results. If Google wants the project to have maximum impact, they need to address this problem. (It would be nice to address it in their general web search engine, too. Have you ever tried to find a document put up on the Web in 1998, where you don't remember whole search strings?) Otherwise, I see a business opportunity for a historian who has good programming skills…”

Related;

Google, the Khmer Rouge and the Public Good; Mary Sue Coleman’s speech- highly recommended, gives also a history of JSTORE.

Making of America Books

Wikimania Conference

Overselling the Web: Development and the Internet- a new book that is coming up, published by a World Bank economist, Charles Kenny.

Best Search Words I Read Today

Going through the site meter of T&B, I came across the following search words from a Pakistani visitor;

‘how would u warn irresponsible employees to work positively with reference to Holy Quran’

Some related and not so related links-most of them podcasts;

Tyler Cowen asks 'If I were a Muslim, would I be a Shiite or a Sunni?'

Reza Aslan at the Daily Show

The looming conflict between Shi'ites and Sunnis; If the war in Lebanon appears to have dramatically increased the prestige of shi'ite Hezbollah in the hopeless Middle East, Robert McCulloch, an Australian Columban priest who has been living and working in Pakistan for twenty eight years, says we should not allow ourselves to be distracted - throughout the whole of the Middle East the big looming furture conflict could well be the conflict between Shi'ites and Sunnis

Best of the Spiritual Classics

On Garbage; This week we're rummaging through the philosophy of garbage. John Scanlan's book, On Garbage shows how western progress always has cleared away and discarded what went before; not only material waste but also knowledge. He believes that by examining our garbage we can gain useful insight into the condition of contemporary life

Books That Shook the World - The Qur'an, perspective by Bruce Lawrence

An Exploration of the Baha'i Faith

Lady Wisdom, the Desert and the Shell; Encounter explores the story of the good wife in the Book of Proverbs who represents Lady Wisdom in this Biblical text

Heaven Doesn't Speak;Confucius said that we should learn to be human, and that by doing so we'll create harmony in the cosmos. What he didn't say was that God was necessarily part of this equation, but that hasn't stopped his brand of practical ethics being given a transcendental spin

Nazi New Religions; Part 1, Part 2; Germany in the 1920s was rife with new religious movements which contributed significantly to Nazi ideology. The cult of the hero for example, popularised in German literature, borrowed from Nordic and Eastern mythology, and formed the basis of a 'master race' ideology. And Anti-Semitism and anti-Christianity were persistent features of the new religions. Karla Poewe examines the rise of the new religions in Nazi Germany

Christian Relics and the Historical Jesus

Jerome Kagan - The Father of Temperament

The Nature of Belief : Australian Science Festival Debate

Authors, Books, Reviews, & Chapters

A collection of links on books and reviews.

Books Online
Trigonometric Delights

U.S. Trade Strategy -Free Versus Fair by Daniel W. Drezner,

Chapters Online

The Next Great Globalization: How Disadvantaged Nations Can Harness Their Financial Systems to Get Rich by Frederic S. Mishkin
Chapter 1 - THE NEXT GREAT GLOBALIZATION: A FORCE FOR GOOD?

Expert Political Judgment: How Good is It? How Can We Know? By Philip E. Tetlock
CHAPTER 1 Quantifying the Unquantifiable
John Kay review of the book

Economics and the Law, Second Edition: From Posner to Postmodernism and Beyond
By Nicholas Mercuro & Steven G. Medema
Chapter 2 CHICAGO LAW AND ECONOMICS

The State of Working America 2006/2007

Book Reviews

Reviews of Good and Plenty-The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding by Tyler Cowen at Weekly Standard and by Donald Boudreaux

Review of Claus Offe, REFLECTIONS ON AMERICA-Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno in the United States Translated by Patrick Camiller

Brain Science and the Moral Order
Interview with Mark Hauser
What Do Animals Think About Numbers?
A Universal Moral Grammer: a case for Intention Predicates, Consequence Predicates and Action Predicates?

Review of Judith Harris’ No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality

Review of ‘The White Man's Burden-Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good’ at IMF and CATO

Review of The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Benjamin M. Friedman,

Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade by Greif, Avner

Glyn Morgan, The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration (Princeton University Press 2005), at Crooked Timber and John Quiggin

Review of Unspeak

DEEPAK LAL'S REVIVING THE INVISIBLE HAND: A REVIEW

Review of THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze

Book Quotes from Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance by Perry Mehrling at Voluntary Exchange

Random Book Quotes at Core Economics.

Brad De Long on Econospinning

Review of Mao's Last Revolution By Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals

Naguib Mahfouz obituary

More on Amartya Sen’s Illusions of Identity by Fazeer

‘Iraq Is Bound to Fail'

Amity Shlaes summarizes a recent Easterly paper;

“Authors Alberto Alesina and Janina Matuszeski of Harvard University and William Easterly at New York University divided countries into two categories: natural and artificial. A natural state is one defined by ethnicity and geographic features such as mountain ranges. Mountains reinforce ethnic communities -- if only by isolating them. Natural national borders would tend to be bumpy.

The map of an artificial state by contrast looks like it was drawn with a ruler, which it often was. Its straight borders sometimes partition ethnic communities, placing them in two countries. Other times, they place tribes that are hostile to one another in the same nation.

Most nations have borders that are a combination of lines and bumps, so the authors developed a mathematical measure to quantify the extent of border bumpiness, which they called squiggliness. Since borders on oceans are extremely squiggly, the authors controlled for that and studied only the squiggliness of national borders with other nations. Their thesis is that it is better to be natural than artificial, and that squiggliness is good for growth and stability….

Less squiggly countries, the scholars found, generally have lower income, worse public services and higher infant mortality rates. They also found that social unrest, the sort that leads to wars, was also more frequent in unsquiggly places. The net finding, says Alesina, is that artificiality is ``correlated with bad stuff.''

It turns out that squiggliness matters even among countries ranking in the middle of the squiggliness scale. ``When you move from the top quarter of squiggly countries to the bottom quarter you see a serious loss of gross domestic product,'' Matuszeski says.

There are outliers, to be sure. At No. 11, Lebanon is super squiggly, which makes the current war there seem like an anomaly. The U.S. and Canada, as stable as they come, have long straight borders and low rankings. Here the situation is different, Matuszeski says, for ``a key factor is when the border is drawn.'' If it is drawn before settlers came -- as was the case in the near-empty New World -- then trouble is less likely…

There are other aspects of the study to challenge here, starting with the choice of the word ``squiggly.'' (It turns out the scholars thought about ``wiggly,'' but felt that ``squiggly'' worked better.)

The bigger problem with the study is the circularity of the argument. The great powers of a 100 or 50 years ago drew the lines that created the colonies or satellite countries.

Britain for example arbitrarily constructed Iraq, and arbitrarily decided its size, which is a bit less than twice that of the U.S. state of Idaho.

``The worst thing that ever happened to Iraq was the invention of the straight edge,'' Easterly says. ``They took Mesopotamia and combined mutually antagonistic groups in one nation.'' Colonialism or tyranny sets trouble in motion. The lines themselves came later. …``The lesson of history is respect nationality,'' Easterly says. ``For Iraq, at the very least you want to emphasize the federalism established there and strengthen it.'' He and his partners are looking at this in a new study, on wars and squiggliness."

Related;
Engaging Fragile States- a new initiative from CGD
State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century with Francis Fukuyama
State Building and Global Development
The Failed States Index Rankings
Squiggly border theory
Count Ethnic Divisions, Not Bombs, to Tell if a Nation Will Recover From War
The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall By Ian Bremmer
Postwar Economics

Bad weather equal bad government?

The latest edition of The Economist summarizes Leeson and Sobel paper on corruption and weather;

“According to a new paper by Peter Leeson and Russell Sobel of West Virginia University, natural disasters not only wreck property and disrupt lives, but also encourage graft. The academics compared the rate at which public officials were convicted for corruption in different states with the geographical distribution of natural disasters. Their correlation was striking. States which see lots of disasters, such as Mississippi, Florida and South Dakota, are also the most corrupt.

That link, reckon the authors, is not spurious. When disasters occur, the federal government dispenses large dollops of cash in affected areas through FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. A windfall of federal cash spawns graft in much the same way that oil wealth or foreign aid can cause corruption in poor countries. States with bad weather get more frequent gobs of FEMA cash and hence are more corrupt.

Help from FEMA encourages graft in many ways. Public officials can embezzle cash directly; they can overstate peoples' damage claims in return for a bribe, or demand kick-backs for rebuilding contracts. All told, the impact is big. The authors' calculations suggest that in the average state, an extra $1 per person in money from FEMA increases corruption in that state by 2.5%. Eliminating FEMA relief entirely would cut corruption by more than 20% in the average state. But don't hold your breath.”

Related;
Earlier post about the paper; Could bad weather be responsible for U.S. corruption?
Stevens admits to blocking the bill; Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens acknowledged holding up legislation that would open federal spending practices to public scrutiny.
Alaska Senator Stevens' successful investments
Sunlight Foundation
Porkbusters
CNN report on Sen Ted Stevens
A Constitutional Counterrevolution
Competent Government through Amendment: Reviving Madison's Vision by Cost-Benefit Analysis and Incentive

Traffic Fatalities and Corruption

An interesting paper- Traffic Fatalities and Public Sector Corruption by Nejat Anbarci, Monica Escaleras, and Charles Register. Abstract;

“Traffic accidents result in 1 million deaths annually worldwide, though the burden is disproportionately felt in poorer countries. Typically, fatality rates from disease and accidents fall as countries develop. Traffic deaths, however, regularly increase with income, at least up to a threshold level, before declining. While we confirm this by analyzing 1,356 country-year observations between 1982 and 2000, our purpose is to consider the role played by public sector corruption in determining traffic fatalities. We find that such corruption, independent of income, plays a significant role in the epidemics of traffic fatalities that are common in relatively poor countries.”

Related;
World report on road traffic injury prevention;"Every day around the world, more than 3000 people die from road traffic injury. Low-income and middle-income countries account for about 85% of the deaths and for 90% of the annual disability adjusted life years (DALYs) lost because of road traffic injury. Projections show that, between 2000 and 2020, road traffic deaths will decline by about 30% in high-income countries but increase substantially in low-income and middle-income countries. Without appropriate action, by 2020, road traffic injuries are predicted to be the third leading contributor to the global burden of disease and injury."

Multi-country study on helmet wearing

Ten Leading Causes of Death- US

'Psychological' traffic calming

International Road Traffic and Accident Database (IRTAD)

Analysis of Possible Oil Industry Ownership Structures in Post-War Iraq

An undergraduate honors thesis on Iraq;

“This thesis, an “Analysis of Possible Oil Industry Ownership Structures in Post-War Iraq” explores the various forms of ownership that could potentially be employed in the oil industry of Iraq. At a time when rapid change is occurring in the country, this thesis discusses the implications of different ownership structures, and how they might relate to the economic recovery of the people of Iraq. As a valuable natural resource, oil has proven to be a significant source of revenue in the past, and could provide an excellent vehicle for economic recovery of the country. Using standard texts, past industry trends, examples of other countries, and the most current statistics available, this thesis attempts to highlight the best possible ownership structure in order to enhance the economy in the foreseeable future.”

Linked to some recent Iraq related news;
Oil Workers Strike in Iraq-Inflation Rate hits 70% amid stagflation
In Baghdad, street kids live on petrol smuggling

Iraq war horrors soothed with Koran and herbs
IRAQ: Threatened teachers fleeing the country
Looters Ransack Base After British Depart
Saviour of Iraq's antiquities flees to Syria
Saving Iraq
Sadr's Militia and the Slaughter in the Streets
US Army reviewing combat deaths
Baghdad bikers shrug off sectarian violence
US using space hi-tech to fight in Iraq, Afghanistan
In Iraq, anyone can be policeman for few dollars

"With shirts available for 3.25 dollars (2.55 euros), pants at 5.50 dollars and an "IP" armband for one dollar, a hypothetical kidnapper would only have to spend 10 dollars for his disguise."

Political Scientists?

'Marxists are retards'

“Recently unearthed documents reveal that Franco's psychiatrist carried out bizarre experiments on members of the International Brigade in 1930s Spain. His aim: to prove that leftwingers are mad…

It was here, in 1938, that International Brigade members were subjected to a bizarre set of physical and psychological tests in one of the first systematic attempts to put psychiatry to the service of ideology. Sixty-four years later, the results of Vallejo's project to unravel the "biopsyche of Marxist fanaticism" have finally come to light.

Former prisoners at San Pedro de Cardena remember being subjected to up to 200 tests. They were quizzed on their sex lives, and had their heads and noses measured.

"They made us strip and did all these measurements. We supposed they thought it would be useful if the fascists ever invaded Britain," says Bob Doyle, one of the few remaining survivors of a group of 75 British and Irish prisoners tested at the camp. Another, Carl Geiser, the senior ranking American in the jail and a former political commissar to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, recalls: "I was photographed with just a small cloth over my penis."

KGB Used Clairvoyants as Agents;

“Correspondents of the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily said that not long before he passed away, Professor Alexander Spirkin, well-known scholar and co-author of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, admitted in an interview that the Soviet KGB employed clairvoyants to spy on their enemies

Alexander Spirkin used to head a secret lab under the Soviet government and worked closely with clairvoyants hired to carry out special missions for the Kremlin.”

Unrelated link; Pluto loses status as a planet

What is Art?

‘Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth’- Pablo Picasso

Some of Vilayanur Ramachandran's speculations about art and neuroscience;

“In particular what I'd like to do is raise the question: "Are there such things as artistic universals?" …

Let me put it somewhat differently. Let's assume that 90% of the variance you see in art is driven by cultural diversity or - more cynically - by just the auctioneer's hammer, and only 10% by universal laws that are common to all brains. The culturally driven 90% is what most people already study - it's called art history. As a scientist what I am interested in is the 10% that is universal - not in the endless variations imposed by cultures. The advantage that I and other scientists have today is that unlike we can now test our conjectures by directly studying the brain empirically. There's even a new name for this discipline. My colleague Semir Zeki calls it Neuro-aesthetics - just to annoy the philosophers.

I recently started reading about the history of ideas on art - especially Victorian reactions to Indian art - and it makes fascinating reading.

For example if you go to Southern India, you look at the famous Chola bronze of the goddess Parvati dating back to the 12th century. For Indian eyes, she is supposed to represent the very epitome of feminine sensuality, grace, poise, dignity, everything that's good about being a woman. And she's of course also very voluptuous.

But the Victorian Englishmen who first encountered these sculptures were appalled by Parvati, partly because they were prudish, but partly also just because of just plain ignorance.

They complained that the breasts were way too big, the hips were too big and the waist was too narrow. It didn't look anything like a real woman - it wasn't realistic - it was primitive art. And they said the same thing about the voluptuous nymphs of Kajuraho - even about Rajastani and Mogul miniature paintings. They said look these paintings don't have perspective, they're all distorted.

They were judging Indian art using the standards of Western art - especially classical Greek art and Renaissance art where realism is strongly emphasized.

But obviously this is a fallacy. Anyone here today will tell you art has nothing to do with realism. It is not about creating a realistic replica of what's out there in the world. …

But what's it got to do with the rest of art. Let's go back to the Chola bronze of Parvati. Let's talk about Indian art. Well the same principle applies. How does the artist convey the very epitome of feminine sensuality? What he does is simply take the average female form, subtract the average male form - you're going to get big breasts, big hips and a narrow waist. And then amplify it, amplify the difference. And you don't say: "My God, it's anatomically incorrect". You say: "Wow! What a sexy goddess!"

But that's not all there is to it because how do you bring in dignity, poise, grace?

Well what you do is something quite clever, what the Chola bronze artist does is something quite clever. There are some postures that are forbidden to a male. I can't stand like that even if I want to. But a woman can do it effortlessly. So what he does is he goes into an abstract space I call "posture space", and then subtracts the average male posture from the female and then exaggerates the feminine posture - and then you get elegant triple flexion - or tribhanga - pose, where the head is tilted one way, the body is tilted exactly the opposite way, and the hips again the other way. And again you don't say: "My God, that's anatomically inappropriate. Nobody can stand like that." You say: "My God! It's gorgeous. It's beautiful! It's a celestial goddess". So the image is extremely evocative and it's an example of the peak shift principle in Indian art.…

Related;
John Hyman criticizes neuroscientists’ interpretation of art.
The neurological basis of artistic universals
The Cognitive Science of Art
Pamela Anderson and the hindu goddesses
PsyArt is an online, peer-reviewed journal featuring articles using a psychological approach to the arts.
What makes us human?The unfortunate 'rat people' of Pakistan could provide the answer.

Multimedia;
From Mirror Neurons to Mona Lisa- Visual Art and the Brain
Cognitive science podcasts from Science and the City
MeaningofLive.tv
The Lost Temples of India
Ramachandran interview-starts in the middle of the program
Miscellaneous; Short videos of well-known visual illusions, Brain and Behavior, The Exploratorium; Seeing, Vision Experiments, Ramachandran's own page of illusions
Dissociation between cat brain and cat's anatomy

Today’s Podcasts

Most of the podcasts are from Sydney Ideas Festival;

How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World A Better Place: Bjorn Lomborg

Tim Flannery and the nuclear question

Paul Redding on Kant

Peter Anstey on Locke

What's happening to democracy? John Keane

Raewyn Connell on Globalisation

Concepts of liberty- Quentin Skinner

Duncan Ivison on Freedom

Why are we scared of ourselves? Frank Furedi

Robert Fisk lecture

Italy Now- Paul Ginsborg

Hurricane Katrina - one year on

Oil Depletion Protocol

Non-proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction- Hans Blix

See also recent additions on the TED Talks including the session of Jimmy Wales founder of Wikipedia.

Christopher Hitchens- Books That Shook the World - Thomas Paine's Rights of Man

In Search of Mozart

Communications Technology and Life

U.S. Trade Policy in the Wake of Doha

Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government

Comprehensive Immigration Reform for a Growing Economy

Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East

U.S.-China Trade, Exchange Rates, and the U.S. Economy

Speech by Andrew Mitchell MP, Shadow Secretary of State for International Development, UK on the case for a Pan-African Trading Area

Jeffrey Sachs on the Millennium Development Goals

Andrew Lawson on Harmonization and Alignment

A master-dispenser of illegal spoils

The Economist has an obituary of the ex dictator of Paraguay Alfredo Stroessner;

“For 35 years, from 1954 to 1989, Alfredo Stroessner ruled there. Under him, although he brought electrification, asphalt roads and friendship with America, the place became yet more isolated and benighted. The economy was based on contraband: whisky, cigarettes, passports, coffee, cocaine, luxury cars, rare bird skins, anything, until the unofficial value of Paraguay's exports was said to be three times the official figure. The style of government was a spoils system, underpinned by terror of a vicious network of spies and secret police. Foreign policy was a buddies' brigade with other dictators—Videla of Argentina, Pinochet of Chile—to co-ordinate counter-terrorism and assassinations. And the most famous tourist was Josef Mengele, the fugitive doctor of Auschwitz, riding into a village in the Paraguayan wilderness to be welcomed and protected….

His main machine of power was not the army. Although he was a distinguished soldier, rising to brigadier-general by the age of 36, and indeed had done nothing else in life since he was 17, he did not trust military men. He himself had skilfully ridden the divisions in the army to seize power from a civilian president in 1954. His policy was to keep the officers sweet with a cut from the smuggling revenues or a share of the contracts for his grandest project, the Itaipu hydroelectric plant built with Brazil on the Paraná. Some cronies amassed fortunes. General Andrés Rodríguez, who eventually overthrew him in what he contemptuously called a cuartelazo, or barracks revolt, built himself a replica of the Palace of Versailles…

…Paraguayans as a whole, however, were much slower to be disillusioned. It was true that he treated the country as his fief, to the point of picking out teenage girls for himself when he presented school diplomas; but he paid for the girls, set them up in houses, and gave their relatives money. You could argue that the Itaipu project left Paraguay with only 2% of the energy and 15% of the contracts; but that 15% had given the country, for eight years in the 1970s, the highest rate of growth in Latin America. General Stroessner was a master-dispenser of illegal spoils. Yet the dark truth of his Paraguay was that he co-opted even his opponents into that system with him.”

Eric Rasmusen offers an interesting anecdote;

“One former American ambassador to Paraguay, Robert E. White, remembered General Stroessner as darkly brilliant at profiting from others’ mistakes. Once, Mr. White recalled, the Paraguayan ambassador to Argentina had gambled away the embassy’s entire budget. The ambassador was immediately summoned to Asunción and was handed a confession to sign. General Stroessner then promoted him to foreign minister. “He could never have an independent thought or deed after that,” Mr. White explained.”

The above is a common denominator of all dictators. The sad story is how otherwise decent people remain silent in the face of such corruption and abuse of human rights and let people corrupt to their bones sit in the offices of government and parliament.

Related;
Ex-Paraguayan ruler dies in exile
Alfredo Stroessner: revisiting the general
Timeline: Paraguay
Even Angels Ask! Corruption of Public Discourse in Islamic Countries
Development as Accountability
Corruption of Legitimacy

Some Maldives related news;
Allegations of Corruption Against Top Ministers
ADK Hospital Leader; a clear-cut case of corruption
Sixteen Reasons why President Gayyoom Should Face Justice
Two Promoted In Kinbidhoo Health Centre Following Political Pressure

Definition of Negro

I was shocked to see the following entry for Negro from the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1798 (emphasis mine);

“NEGRO, Homo pelli nigra, a name given to a variety of the human species, who are entirely black, and are found in the Torrid zone, especially in that part of Africa which lies within the tropics. In the complexion of negroes we meet with various shades; but they likewise differ far from other men in all the features of their face. Round cheeks, high cheek-bones, a forehead somewhat elevated, a short, broad, flat nose, thick lips, small ears, ugliness, and irregularity of shape, characterize their external appearance. The negro women have the loins greatly depressed, and very large buttocks, which give the back the shape of a saddle. Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy race: idleness, treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauchery, nastiness and intemperance, are said to have extinguished the principles of natural law, and to have silenced the reproofs of conscience. They are strangers to every sentiment of compassion, and are an awful example of the corruption of man when left to himself.”

- The History of Human Rights-From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era by Micheline R. Ishay, p.113, try Google Book Search.

Related;
Jon Stewart’s “senior black correspondent” Larry Wilmore- The Daily Show
First Chapter of Ishay’s book

Carnival of Podcasts

A couple of podcasts mostly from Radio National Australia; please note some of discussions start at the end or middle of the audio. Also if you don’t download now, it might not be available next week.

Why don't Americans like soccer?; Economist Allen R Sanderson says that Americans appreciate competitive market forces and incentives that reward ability, hard work and ingenuity, in sport as well as business, and soccer just doesn't make the grade. John Birmingham reflects on the Australian view of the European game.

Future of trade liberalisation; With the latest GATT attempts to further open up international trade, the DOHA Round, collapsing some weeks ago, Alan Oxley explains what went wrong and what might happen next

The rise of the carbon traders

John Taylor, former undersecretary for international affairs at the U.S. Treasury and now an economics professor at Stanford University, talks with Bloomberg's Tom Keene from Palo Alto, California, about the outlook for the central bankers' annual conference this week in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and China's economic growth.

Stephen Roach, chief global economist at Morgan Stanley, talks with Bloomberg's Tom Keene in New York about the state of China's economy, banking system and political environment.

The Nature of Belief : Australian Science Festival Debate

Nazi New Religions, Pt 1

Christian Relics and the Historical Jesus

Conflict: What good is it?

Vietnam Remembered

Travel in the Age of Terrorism

A narrative for a long war

Peter Timms reviews How to Look At a Painting, by Justin Paton

Understanding Design

Airlines consider legal action against British Airports Authority

George Pell - Islam and Western Democracies

Susan Windybank - Welfare or Defence?

Lady Wisdom, the Desert and the Shell

International AIDS Conference

Sri Lanka: Militant nationalism and the current conflict

Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working in Africa

Postcard: The Democratic Republic of Congo

A Human Rights Act for Australia?

Intentional Marriage

Striking a patriotic chord; Michael Connors on the lyrics of those national anthems most footballers failed to sing before their World Cup matches

America's first dictionary 200 years on

Current TV

Embedded in the BBC

Reporting the Middle East

Financial literacy and accountability

Conscription, procurement and the economics of defence

Francis Wheen; Books that Shook the World - Marx's Das Kapital

A philosopher looks at Buddhism

Spinoza's heresy

What is Morality?

Keeping the Peace: The U.N. Security Council

Conflict Resolution

No Light For Eurotunnel?

Virgins, Vampires & Superheroes

Generation Y Spirituality

Spiritual Classics Pt 7: Sikhism

Women's Sport: Underpaid, underrated and under the radar

The Mystery of the Fluctuating Gas Price, featuring Thomas A. Firey

Save the Coral Reefs?, featuring Patrick J. Michaels

The Future of Medicaid, featuring Jagadeesh Gokhale

Dictators Watch- Burma

The military dictators of Myanmar (Burma) has got another asset to maintain their tyranny over the Burmese people and play around with neighboring giants- ten trillion cubic feet of natural gas;

“The Great Game of the 19th Century was played between empire builders Britain and Russia, using Afghanistan as their football in seeking control of central Asia. Today, there is a new great game under way between two very different competitors -- China and India. But this time the ball is Burma…

Burma is saturated in more than ten trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and possibly also oil, beneath its offshore waters, which stretch from the border of Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal down to within sight of Thailand's azure blue coastline, dotted with tourist resorts. It is that rugged and undeveloped coastline of almost 1,000 miles that particularly interests the new great game players.

After much wrangling, and especially after a first-ever visit by an Indian head of state, President Abdul Kalam, to Burma last March, New Delhi thought it had secured exclusive purchase from Burma of 5.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. That was the quantity onfirmed by independent U.S. assessors Gaffney, Cline & Associates to be in just one undersea block, known as A-1, of the Shwe field near the port of Sittwe. But while India was sizing up the route of a 960-mile land pipeline bypassing Bangladesh, China swooped in and signed a memorandum of agreement to buy the A-1 gas.”

Related;
Burma: Orwellian state, with teashops
Burma's confusing capital move
Annan pays tribute to UN envoy in Myanmar upon his resignation
Junta Pressures Social Welfare Group;
“Rangoon’s only funeral service association, under pressure by authorities, is likely to be taken over by a military-backed civilian group, according to social workers in Rangoon”

Podcasts Carnival –From BBC

Inside the World of Google
The Communications Revolution
Getting back to business in Somalia
Russia's thirst for imported alcohol
Battle for Mexico's democratic soul
Lifting Europe's 'historic curse'
Piracy on the streets of Peru
Intercontinental Cops; Part One: Fraud and Corruption, Part Two: Stolen vehicles

'Trust Me I'm an Economist', discussion with Tim Harford about his new show; a related article, All is fair in love, war and poker

In the Beginning was the Sound- Reith Lecture

Global Crime Report

More BBC Radio podcasts

Colbert Celebrates World Breast Feeding Week

Some funny videos from Colbert, the Daily Show, etc.;

Tip of the Hat, Wag of the Finger
Hizbullah’s Next Mission
Civil Lights
Macaque
Colbert Interviews Paul Hackett
Give cease a chance
The Stranger

Marilyn Manson on The O'Reily Factor

Talking to Americans- a hilarious Canadian TV Show; Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 (via Boing Boing)

Linguistic Abuse

Stephen Poole, author of Unspeak,

“In December 2002, two prisoners at the US base in Bagram, Afghanistan, died after trauma to their legs of such severity that the coroners compared it to the results of being run over by a bus. The subsequent official investigation was nothing if not creative. The death of one was explained in this way:

'No one blow could be determined to have caused the death,' the former senior staff lawyer at Bagram, Col. David L. Hayden, said he had been told by the Army's lead investigator. ‘It was reasonable to conclude at the time that repetitive administration of legitimate force resulted in all the injuries we saw'.

The logic of this is startling. You may compare it in some ways to the Chinese method of execution, used until 1905, known as 'death by a thousand cuts'. Since no one cut can be determined to cause death, no one is responsible for the killing. Similar is the principle behind the firing squad: everyone fires at the same time and one soldier has a blank, so no one soldier can be sure that he killed his comrade. But at least in these two cases the intention is avowedly to cause death. To use the argument as an excuse for 'accidental' extrajudicial killing is different. It is perhaps more like a sophistic application of Zeno's paradox of motion. Since at every place in the flight of an arrow it can be considered at rest, an infinite number of such points of rest cannot possibly add up to travel, so the arrow does not actually move and can never reach its target. Similarly, no number of 'legitimate' things can ever add up to something that is illegitimate. It's just one of those unfortunate things.

But this is deliberate linguistic misdirection. The insertion of the word 'legitimate' before 'force' aims exactly to pre-empt the question of legitimacy. Even if one allows that some force might be legitimate, you're dissuaded from wondering whether a repetitive sequence of legitimate blows can be illegitimate. That principle is common in other areas of law: repetitively playing your music too loud can add up to a disturbance of the peace. 'Legitimate' force also implies that the victim had been found guilty of a crime deserving of violent punishment; but the dead prisoners had never had a trial.

The argument is weak on a more physical level, too. If I tap you lightly on the head a hundred times, you may become very annoyed, but this will not add up to crushing your skull. Equally, repeated light blows to the thighs will not add up to crushing them as though you had been run over by a bus. The 'legitimate force' in these blows must in truth be fierce. And so the whole defence does nothing but beg the question of legitimacy itself.

In fact the blows to the legs were not mild slaps but what's called 'peroneal strikes', a deliberately disabling strike to the side of the leg, just above the knee, which targets the peroneal nerve. One of the former police officers who trained the guards in this technique said that it would 'tear up' a prisoner's legs if used repeatedly. A military policeman at the base, Specialist Jones, testified as to how entertaining it was to brutalise a detainee in this way and hear him cry out to his god: 'It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out "Allah," he said. 'It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes.'

Inflicting pain for its comic value might not be many people's idea of 'legitimate force'. By the time the man who so amused the Military Police died, most interrogators at the base had concluded that he was an innocent taxi driver.

The word 'administration', meanwhile, is another example of the bureaucratisation of the language of violence. Medicine is administered; civil government is administration. Punishment is administered only after due process. To call the beating of an unconvicted prisoner the 'administration' of force is already to approve of it, by describing it in the language of official sanction. The very phrase 'repetitive administration' is designed to coat the mind in grey cotton-wool, to conjure vistas of endless similar days in fluorescent-lit offices, and thus to mask the reality of brutal violence inflicted for sadistic enjoyment. In the end, the best translation of Colonel Hayden's words is: 'Yes, we beat these men to death, but we have determined that we had the right to do so.'

Related;
Listen to the above podcast.
Steven Poole explains his book.
Bjorn Lomborg’s false dichotomies
In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths
Army Faltered in Investigating Detainee Abuse
Two Point Scales
We must talk
Fiasco- Interview with the author (listen to his comment about one excellent senior military official named McMaster and his approach in the unit, around the middle of the program);

“I was struck at how successful the 101st Airborne was in Mosul in 2003-04. And some units showed remarkable improvement--the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment had a mediocre first tour of duty in Iraq, but when it went back in 2005 for a second tour, it did extremely well. Col. H.R. McMaster, the regimental commander (and author of a very good book about the Vietnam War, Dereliction of Duty) told his troops that, "Every time you disrespect an Iraqi, you are working for the enemy." I was especially struck by how his regiment handled its prisoners--it even had a program called "Ask the Customer" that quizzed detainees when they were released about whether they felt treated well. This recognized the lesson of past wars that the best way to end an insurgency is to get its leaders to put down their guns and enter the political system, and to get the rank-and-file to desert or switch sides. But it will be harder to discuss the sewage system with the new mayor next year if your troops beat him in his cell when he was your prisoner last year.”

A New Maldives in Pictures

Photos via ZERO X.

It is heartening to see that democratic space seems to be widening. But the trend these days of authoritarian leaders seem to be let individuals and small groups express their anger- the motto goes something like this, ‘you can express discontent but just don’t get organized’

Related;
Government Ends Hulhudelhi Dispute With Promise Of New Harbour; predictably another island is now demanding a new harbour.
Government Accuses MDP Of Breaching Westminster House Agreement
How Not To Hold Talks
Photos of recent demonstration in the south of the country

A History of Boredom

“When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.”- Joseph Brodsky

A review of the book A Philosophy of Boredom by Lars Svendsen;

“Any concept that attracted comment from Kant, Goethe, and other giants accomplished enough to be identifiable by one name must be complex, profound, and worthy of attention even in a sweltering August.

(If you immediately think, "Wait, there's probably some other concept that's drawn attention from other single-named giants such as Beyoncé, Madonna and Brittany - like bling - that's utterly simpleminded," then you possess a genuine philosophical aptitude and should continue reading.)

"Very few people," writes the witty Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen, "have any well-thought-out concept of boredom." That hasn't stopped folks from trying to capture it in a phrase or tossed-off digression.

Kierkegaard declared it "the root of all evil," following on church fathers who condemned its forerunner, the sin of acedia. Svendsen, a professor at the University of Bergen, cleverly updates that, noting that boredom has been accused of causing such modern ills as "drug abuse, alcohol abuse, smoking, eating disorders, promiscuity, vandalism..."

Schopenhauer thought boredom "a tame longing without any particular object." For Kafka, it was "as if everything I owned had left me, and as if it would scarcely be sufficient if all of it returned." Theodor Adorno blamed boredom on alienation at work. Russian poet Joseph Brodsky suggested boredom taught us "life's most important lesson... that you are completely insignificant."

Via Distributed Presses and 3 Quarks Daily

Experts in Boredom;

“Politicians are experts in boredom. To sit through a select committee on local transport issues needs superhuman boredom defences, or a vat of Red Bull. And the aura of boredom is the mark of death to a politician. Some have tried to turn their own lack of lustre to advantage. “I am a quiet man,” Iain Duncan Smith said, attempting to disguise his own worthy dullness under a thin euphemism. From that moment, IDS was toast. “What’s wrong with being a boring kind of guy? ” wondered President George Bush Sr, shortly before he was ousted from the White House. Nothing is more hilarious than the spectacle of a naturally tiresome politician attempting to make himself seem interesting by, say, wearing an amusing hat.”

Related;
The Nature of Belief : Australian Science Festival Debate; Why do you believe what you do? Is the human mind an organ designed for belief? Why are we so convinced of the existence of things we can't prove or see? Are some beliefs healthy and others pathological? Margaret Wertheim, author of Pythagoras' Trousers, and The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace; cognitive scientist Professor Max Coltheart, co-editor of Pathologies of Belief, and theologian, film-maker and cult-buster, Reverend Dr David Millikan, join Natasha Mitchell to unravel the perplexing power of belief.

Is This What Happiness Looks Like?

Lionel Tiger on Pursuing Pleasure

Poverty’s Effect on the Brain

An interesting paper on the effects of childhood poverty; Childhood poverty: Specific associations with neurocognitive development- abstract;

“Growing up in poverty is associated with reduced cognitive achievement as measured by standardized intelligence tests, but little is known about the underlying neurocognitive systems responsible for this effect. We administered a battery of tasks designed to tax-specific neurocognitive systems to healthy low and middle SES children screened for medical history and matched for age, gender and ethnicity. Higher SES was associated with better performance on the tasks, as expected, but the SES disparity was significantly nonuniform across neurocognitive systems. Pronounced differences were found in Left perisylvian/Language and Medial temporal/Memory systems, along with significant differences in Lateral/Prefrontal/Working memory and Anterior cingulate/Cognitive control and smaller, nonsignificant differences in Occipitotemporal/Pattern vision and Parietal/Spatial cognition.”

Via Neurocritic.

Related;

Rushton, J. P., & Jensen, A. R. (2005). Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability

In the mind of the child soldier; Northern Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Sri Lanka, Columbia. Some of the world's conflicted countries where young children are recruited, or violently abducted, to serve as soldiers. Two psychologists at the coalface, and a teenage abductee, join Natasha Mitchell to discuss the complex psychology of child recruitment, reintegration and repatriation. Little innocents or self-aware agents? A confronting issue that's not straightforward. Stories of hope prevail too. Listen to podcast.

False memories and young minds; Your memory is your personal archive. But it can trick you too - sometimes with serious consequences. Are children more susceptible to false memories, or adults? Striking new research has important implications for how we handle children in courts and therapy, and for our understanding of this fallible human talent. Here is the podcast.

Insults as Education

Alex Tabarrok is running some Gordon Tullock insults- my favorites from the list;

“The other day Gordon asked me to read one of his papers and I pointed out a few typos. "Excellent," he said, "this will surely be your greatest contribution to economics."

From Eric Crampton;

"Tullock and I share a birthday. Walking over to Buchanan House for a seminar, I told him we had something in common. He replied, "We'll have to do something about that, won't we." When I later asked what he'd planned on doing about it, he informed me that he'd contacted some folks from upstate who'd arranged to have me shot. At his 80th birthday celebrations, I thanked him for throwing me such a great birthday party; he laughed and told me I'd be receiving the bill for the event in the mail.

My favorite Tullock insult, though, was levied at Walter Block. Block was presenting a paper at the Southerns in 1999. The paper was coauthored with Tom DiLorenzo; Walter, in his preamble to the presentation, noted that since his coauthor wasn't there, all the errors in the piece were his. Tullock shot up, pointed at Walter, and said "DiLorenzo wrote the whole thing then, didn't he!"

From Tyler Cowen;

"Every day (we are both in) Gordon passes my door and barks out "Work harder!" That's just one of many..."

For Comment; Is Tullock's little book, ‘The Economics of Non-Human Societies’, worth a read/does he give any original insights in the book?

Related;
Milton Friedman insults Gary Becker
Our colleague Gordon Tullock
You're not politically viable!!!
Economic Freedom and Economic Growth
James Buchanan the Great
James M. Buchanan—The Creation of Public Choice Theory
James Buchanan on Conservatives and Liberals
The Quotable Gordon Tullock
Tullock Festschrift
Interview with Tullock
Rothbard as a Teacher
Gordon talks with Milton Friedman on education reform (video)

Race for the Republican presidential nomination of 1896

Only a Bait; T. C. P. "If this don't fetch trade, then I don't understand the hucksterin' business."

Via HarpWeek, Cartoon of the Day

“Cartoonist W. A. Rogers features presidential hopeful Thomas C. Platt, former and future senator from New York, as a huckster peddling "presidential water-melon" to his rivals for the Republican nomination of 1896. Platt cleverly hopes to make the "boys" sick from eating too much of the sweet fruit, so that he can claim the crown himself. Governor Levi P. Morton ("L.P.M") of New York, former vice president (1889-1893), in lace collar and boater, is already gorging himself; Congressman Thomas Reed of Maine (left), former and future speaker of the house, wearing a clownish polka-dot shirt, looks on curiously; and, Governor