Month: August 2008

Getting The Story

George Packer has a great post of reporting about Burma:

…it’s a very difficult place to work. Impossible to talk to officials or visit a school, a hospital, a government office. Travel outside Rangoon is restricted by checkpoints, the secret police, and a pervasive network of informers. Phones and e-mail are believed to be under surveillance, even if the regime’s capacity isn’t as great as the people’s fear. In dozens of conversations, I met only two people who were willing to go without a pseudonym, and they had the defiant air of desperados.

One Burmese man I spent a great deal of time with always called me “G,” even when we were alone. Meetings were arranged in code, in out-of-the-way bars and private homes; one woman didn’t trust her own gardener and kept me out of view for the two hours of our interview. Burmese wrap themselves in an ever-shifting array of nicknames, pen names, and e-mail monikers; among the young, these often come from their intellectual heroes from the West. Least of all do they trust one another.

Yet for all their secretiveness and repression, not a single Burmese refused to talk to me. (It was expatriates who were reticent—especially the scholars, who fear losing their access.) People were not just willing but eager to speak, and in the most casual encounters—with a trishaw driver in Mandalay, my seatmate on a domestic flight—ordinary Burmese offered their views unprompted, with the calm, straightforward despair of people long used to going unnoticed and unrescued. There often came a moment when my conversation partner suddenly asked me for advice, an opinion on the future. When would things change? What should they do? I had no good answers, but I’ve never been anywhere I liked the people more and the government less.

I was there two decades ago and felt exactly the same way.

Obama And Abortion

I confess that the details of this controversy, even now, I find hard to keep entirely straight. The NYT has a decent summary as does Jeremy Manier. The critical issue appears to be, per the NYT, whether two sequential bills were presented as a package or not; per Manier, the question relates to previously existing Illinois-specific interpretations of the law protecting fetuses who survive abortions. Neither side seems to me to have a a clear-cut case on this – which suggests that some of the hysteria on this is due to culture war posturing rather than to the details of the matter at hand.

The Economy

I’m getting a new mortgage so I’ve had a tiny glimpse into the new credit environment. The hurdles today are immensely greater than I recall in the past (which is undoubtedly a criticism of the past more than the present). And then you read a story like this, suggesting that Fannie Mae is essentially doomed and this, suggesting that a very big bank may go under in the near future, and you wonder if, from the long view, historians will look back at this time and see a looming freight-train that we haven’t quite focused on yet. I don’t know. But it doesn’t look good.

Drunk Nerds

Ezra Klein supports lowering the legal drinking age to 18, with one catch:

21 is, of course, a bizarre marker. Demanding that kids refrain from drinking for three years after they become legal adults and, in most cases, leave their parent’s supervision, is a bit odd. "Welcome to adulthood, except when it comes to beverage choice!" But this could point the way towards a grand new education policy scheme: Drinking age is 18…if you attain a college-worthy GPA. Otherwise, 21. Implement that and you’ll blow those other, way lamer, educational attainment proposals out of the water.

Genius.