Category: Current Affairs
*The New Yorker* on Qaddafi, 2006
He believes in desert culture, even though the desert has no culture,” one cosmopolitan resident of Libya’s capital, Tripoli, told me. “He is trying to take life to its childhood.”
Here is the full story, and for the pointer I thank Stan Tsirulnikov.
Not From the Onion: The CIA, the NYTimes and Playboy
In Hiding Details of Dubious Deal, U.S. Invokes National Security the NYTimes today reports on how easily the US government was conned out of millions of dollars for software that could supposedly decode secret al-Qaeda messages being transmitted via bar codes in Al-Jazeera broadcasts. You may recall the terror alert of Christmas 2003 when President Bush ordered dozens of trans-atlantic flights to be cancelled and we were told:
A surge in recent terrorism intelligence points to the possibility of a spectacular attack that terrorists abroad "believe will rival or exceed the scope and impact of those we experienced on Sept. 11,'' said Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary.
Apparently the December scare was based on a hoax and not even an elaborate hoax. The con man, a heavy gambler with no serious background in computer science, never gave anyone in the CIA, the Air Force, or Special Operations Command his software or explained his algorithms and no one else ever found any secret messages in Al-Jazeera broadcasts. Moreover, despite the fact that this information went right to the top, few people stopped to ask the obvious questions such as why the hell would al-Qaeda do something ridiculous like embed messages in Al-Jazeera broadcasts? Wouldn't, you know, say an email or obscure web page work better?
On a lighter note this sentence in the NYTimes piece caught my eye:
Hints of fraud by Mr. Montgomery, previously raised by Bloomberg Markets and Playboy, provide a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of government contracting.
Playboy?!!! Determined to investigate further, I discovered that the NYTimes is being somewhat duplicitous since Playboy broke the story and provided a lot more than hints. The Playboy story is in fact quite a bit more detailed than the NYTimes gloss (need I warn you, however, that the adverts make it NSFW?).
Are you surprised that Playboy would break such an important story? I was, that is, until I remembered that Playboy has been uncovering fakes for a long time.
Egypt fact of the day
Just as important as the skills deficit, however, is the trouble that many Egyptians have using their skills in the country’s sclerotic economy. Three researchers – Michael Clemens, Lant Pritchett and Claudio Montenegro – recently found a novel way to measure how well various countries use the workers they have. The three compared the wages of immigrants to the United States with the wages of similar workers from the same country who remained home.
A 35-year-old urban Egyptian man with a high school education who moves to the United States can expect an incredible eightfold increase in living standards, the researchers found. Immigrants from only two countries, Yemen and Nigeria, receive a larger boost. In effect, these are the countries with the biggest gap between what their workers can produce in a different environment and what they are actually producing at home.
The article is interesting throughout.
The Pharaoh and the Commanding Heights
The Egyptian military is, for now, looking like a force for democratization. It should not be forgotten, however, that the military is an oligarchy which controls huge swaths of the Egyptian economy.
SFChronicle: It owns companies that sell everything from fire extinguishers and medical equipment to laptops, televisions, sewing machines, refrigerators, pots and pans, butane gas bottles, bottled water and olive oil.
Its holdings include vast tracts of land, including the Sharm el-Sheikh resort, where ex-President Hosni Mubarak now resides in one of his seaside palaces. Bread from its bakeries has helped head off food riots.
Another source of the military's untold wealth is its hold on one of this densely populated country's most precious commodities: public land, which is increasingly being converted into gated communities and resorts. The military has other advantages: it does not pay taxes and does not have to deal with the bureaucratic red tape that strangles the private sector.
…The revenue streams from its various holdings help the military maintain the lifestyle its officers have grown accustomed to, including an extensive network of luxurious social clubs as well as comfortable retirements – all of which helps ensure officer loyalty.
Not surprisingly, the military has opposed privatization and economic liberalization. The Egyptian military currently commands a great deal of respect in Egypt but what happens when a nascent democracy tries to reform an entrenched oligarchy?
Articles for our times
The Politics of Military Reform in Post-Suharto Indonesia: Elite Conflict, Nationalism, and Institutional Resistance, by Marcus Mietzner. The abstract:
Since the fall of Suharto's New Order regime in 1998, Indonesia has launched a number of initiatives to reform its previously omnipotent armed forces. The extent to which these reforms have resulted in real political change, however, has been subject to heated debate in Indonesia and in capitals of Western donor countries. The two camps have often advanced highly antagonistic accounts of the military reform process. Human rights groups and political activists, on the one hand, have contended that despite formal reforms, there has been almost no change in the way the armed forces operate. They maintain that the military continues to influence, and even dominate, political and economic affairs. The opposing view, which is frequently argued by foreign proponents of restoring full military-to-military ties with Indonesia, states that the armed forces are now fully subordinated to civilian democratic control, and that substantial progress has been made in imposing international human rights standards on the troops.
This study presents an evaluation of military reform efforts in Indonesia eight years after Suharto's resignation. Applying the two-generation model of military reform developed by Cottey, Edmunds, and Forster, it proposes that Indonesia has made remarkable progress in advancing first-generation military reforms, which include extensive changes to the country's institutional framework, judicial system, electoral mechanisms, composition of representative bodies, and the responsibilities of security agencies. In combination, these reforms have successfully extracted the armed forces from formal politics, have undermined many of their institutional privileges, and have produced a polity in which the military arguably no longer holds veto power to overturn decisions made by the civilian government.
You can start the rest of your reading here. The Wikipedia version is here.
Stagnation is not just about technology
According to data based on students who graduated in June, 2009, 5.1 percent of Rochester students who entered high school in the 2005-06 school year graduated school prepared for college or a career.
Rochester's graduation rate for that period was 46.6 percent, but because few of those graduates passed regents exams with scores of 80 or higher in math and 75 or higher in English, they were not deemed college or career ready.
The story is here. In Syracuse and Buffalo, the readiness rate was a much higher fifteen percent. Of course when it comes to gdp, all of these expenditures on their high schools are valued at cost.
Is Los Angeles in trouble?
For over a decade, Gregg Donovan, former valet to Bob Hope, greeted tourists on the street in a top hat and red tailcoat and yelled "Welcome to Beverly Hills!" His original assigned job was to counter the impression — often derived from the Julia Roberts movie Pretty Woman — that Rodeo Drive was full of snooty sales clerks. He often would escort people into the shops by hand and ease their way into the culture and show them how friendly the place really is.
Now he has been laid off, another casualty of the recession. His image will live on:
Mr. Donovan has come to represent the city so thoroughly that there is now a debate over the rights to his likeness.
As part of the separation agreement sent to Mr. Donovan, the Conference and Tourism Board sought the right to continue to use his image on promotional materials. Mr. Donovan has refused to sign the agreement, his lawyer said.
It turns out Donovan is supposed to give up his personal rights to use his image in the job, which he does not want to do.
Elsewhere, Watts Towers — one of my favorite American landmarks — is facing budget cuts. The three city workers who look after the towers have been laid off, so there is an attempt to recruit the Los Angeles County Museum to do the work and also to renovate the site.
The culture that is Sweden
In recent decades, successive waves of immigrants have been coming to Sweden, and many avail themselves of the laws and take Swedish-sounding names to hasten their integration.
Mr. Ekengren recalled a case a few years ago in which an immigrant family requested permission to be called Mohammedsson.
“Permission was granted,” he said.
The article is interesting throughout.
Let’s empty out Belarus
Employers in many sectors of the German economy are facing labor shortages, under the dual pressures of an aging population and inflation-fighting measures that have kept wages low in comparison with its neighbors.
The problem was thrown into sharp relief on Tuesday with the release of official figures showing that Germany’s unemployment rate was the lowest in 18 years. While a jobless rate in single digits would be cause for celebration in many countries, in Germany it is the sign of a critical lack of workers.
Here is more.
Let us Now Praise Non-Famous Men
Charles H. Kaman, an innovator in the development and manufacture of helicopter technology and, following a wholly different passion, the inventor of one of the first electrically amplified acoustic guitars, died on Monday in Bloomfield, Conn. He was 91.
Here is more. This bit is neat:
Mr. Kaman, a guitar enthusiast, also invented the Ovation guitar, effectively reversing the vibration-reducing technology of helicopters to create a generously vibrating instrument that incorporated aerospace materials into its rounded back. In the mid-1960s he created Ovation Instruments, a division of his [aerospace] company, to manufacture it.
And this:
With his second wife, Roberta Hallock Kaman, Mr. Kaman founded the Fidelco Guide Dog Foundation, which trains German shepherds as guide dogs for the blind and the police. Since 1981, Fidelco has placed 1,300 guide dogs in 35 states and four Canadian provinces, said Eliot D. Russman, the foundation’s executive director.
“It came down to the helicopters, guitars and dogs,” Mr. Kaman’s eldest son, C. William Kaman II, said in a telephone interview.
It is a well-written obituary.
Hernando de Soto on Egypt
†¢ Egypt's underground economy was the nation's biggest employer. The legal private sector employed 6.8 million people and the public sector employed 5.9 million, while 9.6 million people worked in the extralegal sector.
†¢ As far as real estate is concerned, 92% of Egyptians hold their property without normal legal title.
†¢ We estimated the value of all these extralegal businesses and property, rural as well as urban, to be $248 billion–30 times greater than the market value of the companies registered on the Cairo Stock Exchange and 55 times greater than the value of foreign direct investment in Egypt since Napoleon invaded–including the financing of the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam. (Those same extralegal assets would be worth more than $400 billion in today's dollars.)
Is a charter city coming to Honduras?
David Wessel reports:
Honduras is interested. Two weeks ago, with only one "no," its Congress voted to amend the constitution to allow for a ciudad modelo.
(No filibuster there!) And:
In early January, Mr. [Paul] Romer went to the capital, Tegucigalpa, to meet privately with various groups, then make his case at a public gathering. "You can't change the rules in the middle of the game," he said, flashing a photo of a soccer game on a screen. "Create a new playing field and see if anyone wants to play." Think big, he pleaded. Build an airport big enough to be a hemispheric hub, he said, turning to his father Roy, former governor of Colorado, to tell the story of how Denver got its big airport.
Ireland fact of the day
A single bank, Anglo Irish, which, two years before, the Irish government had claimed was merely suffering from a “liquidity problem,” faced losses of up to 34 billion euros. To get some sense of how “34 billion euros” sounds to Irish ears, an American thinking in dollars needs to multiply it by roughly one hundred: $3.4 trillion. And that was for a single bank.
That is from the new Michael Lewis piece on Ireland, hat tip to Daniel Lippman.
What do the betting markets say?
Over at www.intrade.com, the price for Mubarak's departure from the post of President, before the end of Februrary, is currently at 73.5.
For the pointer I thank David Shor.
China “tiger mother” fact of the day?
Under a proposal submitted last Monday by the Civil Affairs Ministry to China’s State Council, adult children would be required by law to regularly visit their elderly parents. If they do not, parents can sue them.
“Before, the courts did not accept this kind of lawsuit,” Wu Ming, a deputy inspector for the ministry, told The Legal Evening News this month. “But from now on, they will have to open up a case.”
It is not obvious that the proposal is going to pass:
“The national delegates are rational enough,” Mr. Jing said.
China, by the way, has the world's third highest elderly suicide rate. The article is interesting throughout.