Month: February 2011

Stephen Dubner's unusual economic indicator:

To me, one of the best indicators of economic mood is simply what people are talking about, especially what they’re willing to talk about in public — as in, say, what people are willing to put on the cover of a magazine. Check out the cover lines of this week’s Economist and Time. They read, respectively:

Print Me a Stradivarius: The manufacturing technology that will change the world*

2045: The year man becomes immortal

When people are willing en masse to start talking about the future in non-apocalyptic terms, I take that as a good sign that the panic of the near-term past has officially begun to subside.

The Economist distills some sober truths from the World Health Organisation report on global alcohol consumption, published February 11th:

[M]oonshine accounts for almost 30% of the world's drinking. The WHO estimates that alcohol results in 2.5m deaths a year, more than AIDS or tuberculosis. In Russia and its former satellite states one in five male deaths is caused by drink.

"We are caught up in the winds that blow every which way. And in the hullabaloo the thinking man is driven to ponder where he is being blown and to long desperately for some quiet place where he can reason undisturbed and take inventory. It may be that I exaggerate the need for occasional sanctuary, but I do not think so — at least speaking for myself, since it has always taken me longer than the average person to think things out," – explorer Richard E. Byrd from his book, Alone.

A small story from al Ahram, an Egyptian clearly suffering from false consciousness:

Man Names His Newborn Girl Facebook

A young man in his twenties wanted to express his gratitude about the victories the youth of 25th of January have achieved and chose to express it in the form of naming his firstborn girl “Facebook” Jamal Ibrahim (his name.) The girl’s family, friends, and neighbors in the Ibrahimya region gathered around the new born to express their continuing support for the revolution that started on Facebook. “Facebook” received many gifts from the youth who were overjoyed by her arrival and the new name.

Don Surber:

Cries for “democracy” just suddenly popping out of nowhere. To whose benefit?

From Reuters: “Two Iranian naval ships will sail through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean on Monday, a Suez Canal official said, in what will be the first passage of Iranian naval ships through the canal since 1979.”

Oh.

This ain’t about freedom.

This is about its opposite.

Instapundit links to this post also decrying the Egyptian revolt, as an opening for Islamist rule. Torture-defender Andy McCarthy is also disturbed by Sheikh Qaradawi's return. (Dish coverage of Qaradawi here, here, and, more skeptically, here.)

There is, of course, great potential for bad as well as good in these kind of transformative moments in history – the Arab 1848 as it were. We should be vigilant on that score. But it is bizarre to read conservatives who praised the Iraq war that led to the empowerment of al Sadr and the deaths of hundreds of thousands in a country occupied by the US to be now retroactively endorsing the other Saddams of the Middle East.

A new video of protests today in Iran. The huge police presence, and restrictions on the web have not conveyed the intensity of the Green resistance in that country to the West. But the Green Revolution is not dead. And it may gain some new encouragement from the Shiite rebellion in Bahrain.

Morgan Meis admires Al Jazeera’s reporting in spite of their funding:

Al Jazeera, it turns out, keeps afloat with money from the Emir of Qatar. The Emir of Qatar keeps afloat by means of oil money, with some help from natural gas. Qatar has so much of both things that it enjoys one of the highest per capita GDPs in the world. So, there’s an economic model for you. Sustainable? Probably not. Dependent on the whims of an absolute monarchy? You got it. But the economic model upon which the previous century of good journalism was based was no less compromised. It is not the compromised position that matters so much as how you compromise. So far, Al Jazeera has taken their oil money and run straight for the utopia of journalistic integrity.

I was concerned they were going soft on Bahrain for a while, but they came through. And still are.

Readers are very irate that we have been focusing elsewhere and that I have not taken a solid or thought-out position on this boiling public issue. I take the point and was a little glib about it. I've also made an editorial decision to focus on the Middle East's 1848 this weekend, as events there are, by any measure, extraordinary. Nonetheless I have been doing my best to do my homework on Walker, public sector collective bargaining, Wisconsin history and politics, and the intricacies of how this was handled. I didn't know enough, although my general inclination is to be suspicious of public sector unions, their motives and their power. But it was and is precisely because of that prejudice – burned deep in someone who grew up in a country all but destroyed by public sector unions – that I decided not to jump into a very partisan and local matter I knew so little about.

I promise to try and deal with this in more detail very soon. But let me say that as far as the process goes, I find the way this was handled by newly elected governor Walker to be disturbingly high-handed, rushed and crude. This Youtube from a furious Democrat helped me see that. It reminded me of the way Tom DeLay used to run the House.

Nonetheless, according to this WSJ piece, and this paper, 24 states already limit or bar collective bargaining by all or some public sector unions, and so I fail to see why this is a national turning point, rather than a regional one. Democratic governor Doug Wilder signed a very similar bill in Virginia in 1993. And Walker was just elected and has a long and well-known record on these matters and appears to have a majority in the newly elected legislature for his stance. That aspect of democracy counts as much as Walker's high-handed treatment of what could and should have been a more orderly process. Ideology and partisanship seem to have triumphed here over orderly debate and discussion. My own conflicted position to come in more detail soon. Promise.

[Note: this has been corrected from its first version half an hour ago, where I stated that 29 states already barred collective bargaining by public sector unions. TPM has a map showing such limitations or bans in a mere sixteen states, something James Joyner doubts. I'll keep trying to get to the bottom of this. Any sources welcome.]

“We appeal to every Muslim, within the regime or assisting it in any way, to recognize that the killing of innocent human beings is forbidden by our Creator and by His beloved Prophet of Compassion (peace be upon him). Do NOT kill your brothers and sisters. STOP the massacre NOW!” – a statement released by a group of 50 prominent Libyan Muslim religious leaders.