Paul Krugman..

.. on the stimulus after Obama struck out with the GOP :

"Aren’t you glad that Obama watered it down and added ineffective tax cuts, so as to win bipartisan support?"

Anyway.. here's a good back and forth about the stimulus, featuring one of Con's professors.

And David Brooks articulates.. I guess.. how I'm feeling about it.

Throughout 2008, Larry Summers, the Harvard economist, built the case for a big but surgical stimulus package. Summers warned that a “poorly provided fiscal stimulus can have worse side effects than the disease that is to be cured.” So his proposal had three clear guidelines.

First, the stimulus should be timely. The money should go out “almost immediately.” Second, it should be targeted. It should help low- and middle-income people. Third, it should be temporary. Stimulus measures should not raise the deficits “beyond a short horizon of a year or at most two.”

Summers was proposing bold action, but his concept came with safeguards: focus on the task at hand, prevent the usual Washington splurge and limit long-term fiscal damage.

Now Barack Obama is president, and Summers has become a top economic adviser. Yet the stimulus approach that has emerged on Capitol Hill abandoned the Summers parameters.

Updike

John Updike died yesterday. He wrote with "a journalist’s sociological eye and a poet’s gift for metaphor."

Here's a good poem he wrote about a dog that my dad read to us at dinner once:

Dog's Death

She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, "Good dog!
Good dog!"

We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.

Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried

To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhoea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.

The [Middle] of Poverty

The history of foreign aid and charitable giving is riddled with examples of well-intentioned westerners making things worse. NYU economist William Easterly has made a career out of pointing this out, highlighting in two books I've (um.. halfway) read about how giant, top-down, state-based aid pushes that get a ton of attention are lazy, ineffectual and often harmful (he supports grass roots, bottom-up approaches instead).. and are essentially reincarnations of messianic colonial motivations.

And now Easterly has a blog:

Today, I foist a new blog called Aid Watch on the blogosphere. The objective is to be brutally honest when aid is not helping the poor, but also praising it when it is.

...

We fiercely debate domestic spending bills that waste affluent taxpayers’ money with a few millions on a bridge to nowhere, so why should we be NICE when the head of the world’s premier aid agency outlines virtually zero accountability for helping the world’s poorest people?

He's an important voice in an interesting conversation.. and he at least partly makes sense.

It makes people feel good when the UN launches a program to cut poverty in half, or when rock star economists like Columbia's Jeffrey Sachs travel the world with Bono and Angelina Jolie touting books like his famous The End of Poverty. People want to believe in big ideas and pushes, especially if someone else (governments) does the dirty work for them. But it doesn't necessarily mean the big ideas work. Every ten years poverty becomes trendy, someone puts on a big concert, countries pledge big money to meet big goals, and planning starts for the next inevitable big concert ten years down the road.

But Sachs is undeniably a heavyweight, and makes several salient counter-arguments. And the debate touched off an ongoing, somewhat contentious (albeit important) back and forth between the two. Other respectable economists we read in development classes jumped in (Jagdish Bhagwati thinks they're both wrong, Amartya Sen thinks Easterly makes good, but overblown points).

The result, if you follow it casually, is a bit dizzying and dismaying. If the world's smartest people can't agree on clear actions for attacking poverty, and if misguided (even if well-intentioned) action can only make things worse, why try?

But at least the blogosphere is making these debates more accessible and dynamic.. and a lively exchange of ideas seems like the right place to start.

The Bright Side

From The Bangkok Post..

Council defends circumcision error

The Medical Council of Thailand has come to the defence of a male nurse at a clinic who mistakenly circumcised a boy who wanted to have an abscess in his mouth removed.

On Thursday, Rattanaporn Manaschuen, the mother of the 12-year-old boy, complained to the Public Health Ministry after her son was circumcised at a clinic in Samut Prakan's Phra Pradaeng district on Monday. She said the boy actually went there for treatment of an abscess in his mouth.

Acting Medical Council president Somsak Lohlekha said it was a case of miscommunication.

Dr Somsak said the doctor at the clinic correctly diagnosed the boy with a mouth abscess and did nothing wrong. The doctor wrote "excision" on an order assigning the nurse to perform the operation.

But the male nurse confused "excision" with "circumcision" and proceeded to cut off the boy's foreskin.

Dr Somsak said the mistake was unintentional.

He said the doctor was not to blame, although the matter would go before a council panel on medical ethics.

"Usually, a circumcision is a minor operation and a doctor can assign a nurse to do it," Dr Somsak said. He said looking on the bright side, the accidental circumcision would help the boy keep his genitalia clean and lower the risk of cancer.

Tous les morts-nes forment une armee

Haiti is a bit of a haunting place. Once while there, we climbed up to a fort atop a mountain to gaze down and try to understand the UN tanks, bribe-hungry cops, colorful culture and charming (if glassy-eyed) people — and to stop and ask what the hell went wrong.

Then I left my camera in a taxi.

Thankfully our friend Chris didn't, and just sent us this picture:

identify please

found in our bathroom:


there are cobras, vipers and kraits all over northern thailand. it would be a good story to have a pet king cobra living in our bathroom, but, sadly, i don't think this is one of them.

first person to identify gets our pet mongoose when we come home.

me too, bro

Weekly Kristof

Nick Kristof on trafficking again, this time with a small bit of good news:

I just returned again to Ms. Khorn’s brothel to interview her, and found something remarkable. It had gone broke and closed, like many of the brothels in Poipet. One lesson is that the business model is more vulnerable than it looks. There are ways we can make enslaving girls more risky and less profitable, so that traffickers give up in disgust.

....

Virgin sales are the profit center for many brothels in Asia (partly because they stitch girls up and resell them as virgins several times over), and thus these sales are their economic vulnerability as well. If we want to undermine sex trafficking, the best way is to pressure governments like Cambodia’s to organize sting operations and arrest both buyers and sellers of virgin girls. Cambodia has shown it is willing to take at least some action, and that is one that would strike at the heart of the business model.

Sexual slavery is like any other business: raise the operating costs, create a risk of jail, and the human traffickers will quite sensibly shift to some other trade. If the Obama administration treats 21st-century slavery as a top priority, we can push many of the traffickers to quit in disgust and switch to stealing motorcycles instead.

Note about nick: He mentions in this column his experience buying and liberating a pair of sex workers (actually when I first remember reading his column). You can read that riveting series of columns starting here.

In my last column, I described the sex trafficking in places like Cambodia as a modern form of slavery, and I believe that. But the scene that unfolded next underscored the moral complexity of a world in which some girls are ambivalent about being rescued and not all brothel owners are monsters. Some brothel owners use beatings and locked rooms to enslave their girls, but most use debts and ostensible kindness to manipulate them -- and the girls are often so naïve, so stigmatized by everyone else and so broken in spirit that this works.

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Noble Beast

You can stream Andrew Bird's new album on NPR here.

Red Shirt Rumble

The New Mandala, an excellent blog I follow, has an interesting post up about the recent red shirt protests. It sheds light on some key differences that emerged in the most recent unrest, and it's semi the kind of post I went to the October 7th protests to write (if only I had had more than an ounce of understanding of Thai politics then, plus a better camera and a blog worth reading. But still.. indulging curiosity about how movements happen and how societies function and fail).

Background: During the previous administration, the yellow-shirted PAD didn't like the Takshin/Samak/Somchai prime minister succession and had a nasty habit of surrounding parliament and government houses and besieging airports in order to express as much. The previous government fell (some say by corruption charges; others by a judicial coup), which pissed off the red-shirted Takshin/Samak/Somchai supporters (who had democratically elected said PMs) and brought the red shirts out into the streets in full force (they had been counter-protesting for a long time.. but never really with the direct intention of stunting governmental procedure).

Last Tuesday, Constance and I attended a ceremony where the government apologized and gave compensation to the people injured in the October 7th PAD protest. The day before, the red shirts replicated the PAD's parliament siege in order to keep the new government from starting work, and the protest peaked on the Tuesday when we were nearby receiving our apology.

It made us nervous. I tried to keep Con away from TVs. Thousands of riot police were stacked up and pushing back against the thousands of red shirted protesters, and the whole thing just made me sick as I knew it could only escalate.

It didn't. From The New Mandala:

It was a welcome change to be walking away from a street protest without a feeling of disgust and sadness; without feeling on edge from the mess that I had seen and photographed.

The last day of the Parliament siege by the Red Shirts saw a few lightly injured people. Most of them had fainted during the pushing at the side gate of Parliament when the police unsuccessfully tried to open it.

We know about the potential for violence in any street protest group, including the Red Shirts. Yet this protest was very carefully controlled by the Red Shirt leadership. Violent incidents were the absolute exception, and were immediately stopped by the leadership who were constantly at the frontline. The rhetoric on the stages was a careful balance of edging people on, humour and constant reminders to stay within the confines of the law. At night, Red Shirt leaders took turns singing songs on the stage. The protesters sang along and danced.

I don't want to sink into red shirts are all good/yellows are all bad sentiment. Both movements have worthy complaints to bitch about, and both movements display all the maddening side effects of groupthink and moral absolutism and cultish/end times rhetoric. The red shirts are likely to restart their protests after the holidays, and violence could ensue.

But..

The police and the red shirts showed incredible restraint last week in ways that the PAD increasingly didn't as their various demonstrations escalated. And for that, the police and the red shirts should both be commended.

nick kristof tells the world like it is (updated)

a friend of ours in bangkok got to visit a brothel a couple weeks ago where the girls were locked and presented in glass cages. it really is this bad.

anyway.. here's kristof on sex slavery. watch the video attached to the article. sigh.

(update: i think i unintentionally implied that i'm friends with kristof. our friend in bangkok is not kristof.)

Yes, I know it’s hard to read this. But it’s infinitely more painful for Pross to recount the humiliations she suffered, yet she summoned the strength to do so — and to appear in a video posted online with this column — because she wants people to understand how brutal sex trafficking can be.

Pross was 13 and hadn’t even had her first period when a young woman kidnapped her and sold her to a brothel in Phnom Penh. The brothel owner, a woman as is typical, beat Pross and tortured her with electric current until finally the girl acquiesced.

She was kept locked deep inside the brothel, her hands tied behind her back at all times except when with customers.

Brothel owners can charge large sums for sex with a virgin, and like many girls, Pross was painfully stitched up so she could be resold as a virgin. In all, the brothel owner sold her virginity four times.

And from Kristof's previous column..

As in many brothels, the torture of choice was electric shocks. Sina would be tied down, doused in water and then prodded with wires running from the 220-volt wall outlet. The jolt causes intense pain, sometimes evacuation of the bladder and bowel — and even unconsciousness.

Shocks fit well into the brothel business model because they cause agonizing pain and terrify the girls without damaging their looks or undermining their market value.

After the beatings and shocks, Sina said she would be locked naked in a wooden coffin full of biting ants. The coffin was dark, suffocating and so tight that she could not move her hands up to her face to brush off the ants. Her tears washed the ants out of her eyes.

She was locked in the coffin for a day or two at a time, and she said this happened many, many times.