Month: December 2008

Curzon looks at projected changes in world age structure:

The emergence of new economic tigers by 2025 could occur where youth bulges mature into “worker bulges.” Experts argue that this demographic bonus is most advantageous when the country provides an educated work force and a businessfriendly environment for investment. Potential beneficiaries: Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Morocco, Algeria, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Meanwhile, current youth bulge states of Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Yemen will remain on rapid-growth trajectories. Tentative conclusions? These countries will remain chaotic, poorly governed, with poor economies not based on steady or stable production.

… when this obit appears in the NYT:

The blogger Tanta, an influential voice on the mortgage collapse, died Sunday morning in Columbus, Ohio.

Ms Dungey, RIP, had the right tude:

Tanta liked to chew on the follies of regulators, the idiocies of lenders and — a particular favorite — clueless reporters, which according to her was just about all of them. She did not approve, she once wrote, of “parading one’s ignorance about mortgages in an article full of high-minded tut-tutting over ignorance about mortgages.”

Anna Husarska draws welcome attention to the conflict in Congo:

…even at times when fighting is less intense, Congo suffers from the indirect effects of the war. A mortality survey conducted by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and released earlier this year demonstrates that this conflict is the most deadly crisis since the second world war: an estimated 5.4m people have died as a consequence of the war and its lingering effects in the last decade. Today, a quarter of a million people are on the run, almost half of them on territory under rebel control and with almost no access to aid. They need food and shelter, clean water and latrines, medical care, and education. Women and girls need protection from sexual violence, which flares up when families are forcibly displaced.

"Truth does not do as much good in the world as the semblance of truth does evil," – Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 64.

Saletan makes an obvious, unsettling point:

As the latest Reuters report notes, over the last four decades, U.S. life expectancy has climbed from 70.8 to 77.8 years. By 2015, it’s on track to hit 79.2 years. Meanwhile, unlike other industrialized democracies, the United States has replaced pensions with 401(k) plans. So your retirement-income pie can suddenly shrink—as, for example, it’s doing right now—and, at the same time, the longevity you’ve gained from all this lovely industrialization requires you to carve that pie into more and more annual pieces.

Waterworld – The Musical:

A blast from the primary past.

A cautionary tale about believing the first sales data.

A reader writes:

This response is a little late for the post on the Kristol editorial lionizing Bush administration torturers, but where are the medals for the low-level patsies who took the fall for those brave CIA agents in the Abu Ghraib scandal?  Shouldn’t he throw some kind of bone to the Lindie Englands of that sorry episode?  I don’t recall any attempt by Kristol to forgive their actions at the time or now.  I’d really like to know what makes them different in his eyes?

What’s so interesting is how most of the photographs from Abu Ghraib that stunned and shocked the world were simply the same torture techniques that Bush insisted the CIA retain in the 2006 Military Commissions Act. Hauling around a Muslim on the end of a leash is and was Bush policy. It is a tactic favored by Bill Kristol. In fact, much of the current campaign to exonerate and immunify Bush administration officials is over techniques exactly like Abu Ghraib: stress positions, hoods, hypothermia, mock executions.

Remember this: Bill Kristol wants the techniques of Abu Ghraib to be legal, standard operating procedure. He just wants to imprison reservists for it – the show trial – while giving the men who designed and authorized such methods medals of freedom. In that double-standard, you learn so much about just how self-serving much of Washington is. And how morally bankrupt.

That’s how long the post-9/11 recovery lasted:

The previous expansion of the 1990s lasted 120 months.