For the most part I sided with the protesters of the Olympic games. China's human rights record is abysmal, and their stance towards Tibet is obviously unjust and should be reversed by any means necessary. But, I'm also a pragmatist and Fareed Zakaria's suggestion that the protests could have some dire unintended consequences has made me pause.

In his words: "Diplomacy can be scoffed at, but every multinational business that has had success in persuading the Chinese government to change course will testify that public humiliation does not work nearly as well on the regime as private pressure."

Martin Luther King Jr: "only when it is dark enough can you see the stars"

• Because of rising food prices and the gnawing hunger borne of widespread poverty, many Haitians have recently begun protesting their government and have even stormed the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital.
• One person died during riots caused by rising food-prices in the West-African country, Ivory Coast. “The protests are linked to the high price of oil, the growing demand for bio-fuels and the expanding economies of Asia and Latin America, our correspondent says.” To explain: bio-fuel, that more-or-less clean-burning source of energy, is made from corn, palm oil, sugar, and some other crops. So with a greater demand for bio-fuel, there’s been a corresponding increase in the price of those food items. So, people already hovering around the poverty line are now starving. But there may be a way out. “One solution: make biofuel from nonfood crops. DaimlerChrysler, for example, is promoting jatropha, a thorny plant that grows on marginal land in Latin America, Africa and India. With intensive labor, it yields high-quality biodiesel without boosting food prices. In fact, it has no value as food; it's poisonous.”
• Bio-fuel is not the cause of all the current food ills in the world though. There have been dramatic increases in the cost, and decreases in the supply, of rice in places like the Philippines for very different reasons.
• Burma is officially a military dictatorship and, after the monks led a protest against the state only to find their selves imprisoned, tortured, and killed, it made perfect sense many Burmese would flee. But sadly, some have left one cell for another. In neighboring Thailand, they are granted very few rights as migrant workers and experience regular abuse. Here: “Unregistered migrant workers often face poor working conditions, low wages, exploitation by employees, and are prey to extortion by authorities and deportation to Burma if caught. While there is a bilateral agreement between the Thai and Burmese governments on managing labor migration, it has yet to be fully implemented, and the formal process is slow, expensive, and restrictive to certain occupations.”
• The Chinese government has sent a clear message it wants to keep its more outspoken citizens in line, stiff and quiet, in the lead-up to the Olympics, by sentencing the prominent human rights activist, Hu Jia, to jail for “inciting subversion of state power”. If the International Olympic Committee granted China the honor of hosting the 2008 Olympic Games because the added attention would soften and civilize their approach to dissidents, as some have said, they might tragically be wrong.

what gives me panic attacks

A reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog posted this passage on the force of infinity from James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I thought I would share it:

For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away, and if the bird came again and carried it all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun.

notes on Iraqi refugees

A Vancouver based writer and journalist, Deborah Campbell, wrote an interesting article on a relatively under-reported development, which was published in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine. The piece is called “Exodus: Where will Iraq go next?” and it covers the state of Iraqi refugees.

The Iraq war and the sectarian violence, between Sunnis and Shiites, have created unimaginably unlivable conditions for Iraq’s inhabitants. Many have been displaced – 2.5 million within Iraq, and 2.5 million from Iraq. Most of those displaced from Iraq have gone to Syria, although you can find large numbers spread throughout the Middle East. Yet, these refugees haven’t escaped their troubles upon reaching Syria. The Prime Minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, in concert with the Bush administration’s goal of feigning progress and stability in Iraq, has tried to bring the refugees back to Iraq. He wants Syria to close its borders to the influx of Iraqis searching for safety, and for Syria to stop handing out the residency permits Iraqi refugees use to stay temporarily out of the Iraq war. By bringing the refugees back, and claiming they were able to do so because of a renewal of stability, Bush and the Iraqi government can unjustifiably maintain what Campbell calls a “narrative of impending triumph”. Many Iraqis in Syria have eventually lost their residency permits, thus forced to return again; and many have returned because they had run out of money. But why didn’t they have anywhere else to go?

Iraqis trying to move abroad have faced other obstacles. Campbell mentions the “material support ban” on immigrants who have supported terrorist groups, financially or otherwise. A very reasonable ban, to be sure. But, it has been so loosely defined as to become unfair to a lot of innocents seeking asylum.

The ban is so broadly applied that any Iraqi who has paid ransom to such groups – and rare is the Iraqi who has not had a friend of relative kidnapped – is considered to have materially supported terrorists and is thus, along with his or her spouse and children, ineligible for resettlement.

Those Iraqis remaining in Syria, bracing the financial strain and the realization they are not for the most part wanted in the West, and somehow unbowed in the face of pressure to return home (if you could call it home anymore), are once again experiencing exactly the kind of sectarian violence and constant intimidation they tried to leave behind. In the Syrian suburb where Campbell spent time, Sayeda Sainab, Iraqis were locked in a tragic fate Sisyphus would have understood:

Stories were circulating of young girls being sold as brides to rich men in the Gulf. An Iraqi widow was strangled by a family member in an “honor killing” for engaging in prostitution to support her children. A wealthy Iraqi man was kidnapped from his home in Damascus and forced to pay a $100,000 ransom, and three Iraqi ex-generals were discovered bound and strangled in an apartment in Sayeda Zainab. Another ex-general, a neighbour, fled as soon as the bodies were discovered, and no one knows where he went or where he will go next.

And so, like an Escher sketch, we return to the beginning, the article’s subtitle: “Where will Iraq go next?”

brown eyed angels

Many people use awareness-ribbons to display a mostly feigned concern for issues they know little about, as this great review discusses.*

*Note: If you're on facebook, the act of joining facebook groups that advocate this social cause or that political movement might be your most immediate way to forming flattering fabrications - of constructing your own personal counsel of angels.**

**Abraham Lincoln: If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how - the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what's said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Be truthful because life is short; and know that we are only the sum of our actions.

patty is a meathead

Writing about the Jeremiah Wright controversy, Pat Buchanan comes awfully close to saying African-Americans should be glad they were kidnapped and made slaves in the United States:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

I wonder why no one is talking about this strange essay, penned by a man that is not, in most ways, a peripheral figure.

There is a new religion in our midst and it is Environmentalism. Like many doctrines, it tends towards the absolute and perfectionist - naturally to the detriment of other commitments. Read here, here, and here.

Be a little more pragmatic and a lot less rigid.

"Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream..."

I should begin meditating.

Malcolm X on the CBC. The first 4 minutes are not increadibly compelling, so pass them by if you're under the clock.

The weak get even, and the great get over it

I have a nasty tendency of remembering, and obsessing over, every slight and offense against me. Because their memory never escapes me, dug as they are deep in my bones, I have a very difficult time forgiving those people that I feel have done me wrong.

I should heed the words of this author, and just get over my self.

During the last few weeks, there was much talk about how placebos may be as effective as Prozac and other SSRI's in combating depression, anxiety, etc.

Being very anti-pharma, I was happy with this. Well, it turns out there are some complications. Read here:

That said, the study does come with one big caveat: the trials it analyzed are all 6-8 weeks long. In that short time frame, Prozac is often no better than a placebo. (Keep in mind that SSRI's rarely produce any positive benefits for the first several weeks, a phenomenon known as the Prozac lag.) However, the performance gap between placebos and SSRI's tends to widen the longer a person is taking the drug. After a while, the placebo effect tends to wear off, which is why people on an "active drug" are less likely to relapse.

This passage from an article in the Walrus reminded me of Hillary Clinton's tendency to mock Barack Obama's gift for speech making:

Our low regard for rhetoric may make traditional eloquence impossible. “Mere rhetoric” is the favoured putdown, implying that any verbal conceit or flourish cloaks a lack of substance or even sincerity. Politicians strike folksy notes as a result, preferring to err on the side of faux humble.

a dilemma

Nicholas D. Kristof, a New York Times columnist, once purchased the freedom of a couple of modern day slaves. In his article on the experience, he acknowledges the complexity of the transaction. Yet, he seems not to realize the wider complications arising from the practice of buying the freedom of slaves. Read here for some notes on a conceivable quagmire. Since it's hard to find on that page I'll just paste the section I'm talking about here:

Should you buy freedom for slaves? Readers of The New York Times Op-Ed page will know that Nicholas Kristof has recently purchased the freedom of two young girls in a brothel. It appears that the young girls were held there against their will and tricked or coerced into joining in the first place.

As an economist of course I wondered whether buying slaves will lower net enslavement. I can think of at least two general mechanisms suggesting that Kristof's purchase will increase the number of slaves in the longer run, or at least not lower the number of slaves:

1. Slaveholders and brothel owners presumably hold profit-maximizing inventories. Depletion of inventory will lead to replacement under a variety of assumptions.

2. I suspect that Kristof, a Westerner, overpaid for the two slaves. Slave owners expect such higher prices in the future, which may lead to more slaveholding. Furthermore the cash flow may stimulate investment in more slaves. Even for firms in advanced economies, current cash flow predicts investment better than does real interest rates.

Overall we can think of the slaveholder as more able and more eager to get more slaves. That being said, the marginal slaves will be harder to trick or capture than the previous slaves. So we cannot be sure whether net slavery will go up or down. Kristof's efforts also have a publicity effect, which may either help or hurt the slave trade. On one hand the Cambodian government may be embarrassed and crack down. On the other hand, the slaveowner has received amazing free publicity. On net, Kristof's actions may be less heroic than they would appear at first glance.

This is an interesting example of the social world's complexity. Unlike, say, physics, we cannot keep other variables constant while we tinker and experiment. One practice, although good and prudent prima facie, will doubtless cause unexpected effects. It makes the world infinitely interesting and wonderful, but also uncontrollable.

For all her talk of "experience" it appears Hillary Clinton has very little of it when it comes to foreign policy. Read here for a summary of her inadequacy.

I am because you are

I was moved by what Bill Clinton says at the end of this clip:

The world is too small, our wisdom too limited, our time here too short, to waste any more of it in winning fleeting victories at other people's expense. We have to now find a way to triumph together.

Hugo Chávez, the disappointment

"I must be going now, for there go my people and I am their leader." - Gandhi

Look here:

Obama sketched out a different theory of social change than the one Clinton had implied earlier in the evening. Instead of relying on a president who fights for those who feel invisible, Obama, in the climactic passage of his speech, described how change bubbles from the bottom up: "And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world!"

For people raised on Jane Jacobs, who emphasized how a spontaneous dynamic order could emerge from thousands of individual decisions, this is a persuasive way of seeing the world. For young people who have grown up on Facebook, YouTube, open-source software and an array of decentralized networks, this is a compelling theory of how change happens.

Clinton had sounded like a traditional executive, as someone who gathers the experts, forges a policy, fights the opposition, bears the burdens of power, negotiates the deal and, in crisis, makes the decision at 3 o'clock in the morning.

But Obama sounded like a cross between a social activist and a flannel-shirted software CEO - as a nonhierarchical, collaborative leader who can inspire autonomous individuals to cooperate for the sake of common concerns.

animated debates

Here's an interesting bit of political analysis. The writer of this article sees parallels between the Democratic candidates, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and two of the most famous Loony Toons, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. Obama is Bugs Bunny; Clinton is Daft...oops, Daffy. This bodes well for Obama's campaign. It turns out candidates like Bugs Bunny (calm, restrained, and confident) always defeat those with a little Daffy Duck in them (the hostile, suspicious, and defensive candidates).

initiation with ants

I saw this video of the initiation process Sateré-Mawé men go through. It looks extremely painful, but they insist there is a payoff. The chief puts it this way: "if you live your life without suffering anything, or without any kind of effort, it won't be worth anything to you." I hope he's right.

very funny article on George W. Bush's remaining days in office