Jon Stewart had Liberian president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf on yesterday. I wish Stewart had let her talk more, but she's a remarkable woman doing an impossible job as Liberia rebuilds after decades of war, and worth listening to (as I got to do each morning on UN radio during my short trip there last year).
She's the first female president in Africa. More and more and more I'm seeing that it's women who are best equipped to lead desperate communities/countries to better futures.
Good intentions don't always work with reality (and sometimes make things worse), and I find that fact simply, increasingly, terribly paralyzing.
William Easterly—whose excellent blog I mentioned in this post and who's made a career out of highlighting how aid is often misguided—writes this post about a book about some well-intended NGOs (possibly) making things worse in Sudan:
In brief, he accuses advocacy campaigns like Save Darfur of making the achievement of peace in Darfur more difficult by portraying the conflict simplistically between “bad Arabs” and “good Africans,” and by advocating foreign military intervention.
I’ll repeat just a few points from Mamdani that stuck in my mind, but I encourage you strongly to pick up the book.
The Save Darfur campaign repeatedly ignored and distorted the facts on the ground.
Darfur is an insurgency and an extremely vicious counter-insurgency, but there was never the intent to eliminate any specific group and so the word “genocide” is inappropriate. But the word “genocide” gave the West and the UN a free hand to intervene.
The prospect of foreign military intervention encouraged the rebels to hold out rather than agreeing to a peace deal, while hardening and attracting additional support for the position of the government to “defend national sovereignty.”
There were also terrible atrocities on the “good African” side.
The “good African” side includes one key player, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), that is an opposition Islamist movement that was previously on the “bad Arab” side in the North-South civil war (note: disconcerting, especially if you've read this book) between “bad Arabs” and “good Africans.”
There was a sharp decrease in violence after 2005 just as the Save Darfur campaign picked up steam.
The ICC is not credible to much of the non-Western world as a judge of war crimes since the US itself does not subject itself to the ICC, and since the ICC seems to selectively prosecute US enemies and turn a blind eye to war crimes by US allies.
The Western pressure based on distorted facts has set back attempts within Sudan and within Africa to reach a peace settlement in Darfur, which is the only way the tragedy will end.
None of this is to deny the enormous human tragedy in Darfur. But Mamdani’s analysis makes one wonder: is it possible that ill-informed outsiders with the threat of military power on their side can make things worse rather than better?
Anyone who knows care to comment?
This nothing new—on all levels of aid—even without getting into military complications. Kipling called the worst forms of it the "White Man's Burden." We've met more than one pastor who steals from his own orphanage, and there's a long sad history of governments creating dependent, depowered (it's a word) poor communities. Most of the beggar kids here have pimps watching nearby.
Seems like the world just exploits the human attraction to good v evil, the tendency to reduce things to that which we can understand and act upon, and really horrible realities on the ground that a still, in fact, dying for assistance.
So... how to help when so much aid is ineffective and some runs the risk of impeding progress?
Many people doubt the effectiveness of foreign aid, and a new best-selling book called “Dead Aid” by an African finance expert, Dambisa Moyo, even argues that government-to-government assistance is often harmful to recipient countries. It’s true that aid of all kinds is harder to get right than people usually assume, but the kind that has the best record is grass-roots investment — with strong local buy-in — in health, education, agriculture and microfinance. I’ve repeatedly seen these kinds of programs transform families and communities, from Africa to Afghanistan.
Frankly, this kind of aid is also pretty beneficial to the donor. For my part, I gain far more than $24 a month in psychic value from sponsoring Yuneiris, and my family’s tiny foreign assistance projects also remind my own kids that there is a world out there in which children have needs greater than the latest iPod.
Will my dollars and letters utterly transform Yuneiris’s life? Probably not. Will they make a significant difference? Probably yes. Is it worthwhile? For me, absolutely!
So, I guess... give in faith and obedience and a belief in sovereignty, give with due diligence, give with the right motives, give with realistic expectations about effectiveness, and give in the realization that we're not called to save the world. But... regardless... give, especially where you can't serve (the worst problems in the world, I'm increasingly deciding, are all fueled by and fought with the bottom line).
Thoughts?
Read Con's sorta-similar post (featuring Bono!) here.
*First person to explain the title reference gets a prize (your choice between 49 U.S. Military "Saddam Playing Cards" I bought in Burma... and a severed goat head).
Anyway.. BBC has an extraordinary summation, that also explains a lot of the background better than I ever did. If you're confused and curious, read the whole thing:
Three years of intractable political conflict are taking a debilitating toll on Thailand. Emotions are now very raw.
Some of the ugliest scenes in recent days did not involve the army; they occurred when local residents came out to confront the rampaging red-shirts. Shots were fired, two people died, and some were savagely beaten.
It is difficult to explain why Thailand, a country once seen as a paragon of stability and social harmony, has become so polarised.
The division between Red and Yellow cuts across many lines; it is not simply just rural-versus-urban, or poor-versus-rich. Spend long enough with either group and you meet people from very varied backgrounds.
....
[But...]
Go to a red-shirt rally and you will hear the same mantra; "We are grass-roots people, fighting for democracy, against the ruling class".
Go to a yellow-shirt rally and you will almost inevitably hear a different mantra; "We are educated people, fighting against corrupt politicians who abuse democracy".
There appear to be no towering, Obama-like figures in Thailand, who can win the respect of both camps. Certainly not [Prime Minister] Abhisit, who often looks uncomfortably out of place in the rural, red heartlands of the north and north-east.
How he deals with the leaders of the "red uprising" now - and how that compares with the treatment given to last year's "yellow uprising" - will be an important test of his promise to uphold the rule of law impartially.
So the conflict which erupted so spectacularly in Bangkok and Pattaya over the past week will probably rumble on, steadily eroding the confidence of investors, tourists and the Thai people, in a stable future for their country.
ny times: people fight back (click for slideshow).
(update: This blog, which I like, says pretty much the same thing, except with a twist — "But, as Abhisit knows better than anyone else, the royal yellow lesson from 2008 is that thuggery, violence and provocation can reap rich political rewards." — and has a bunch of thoughtful comments that disagree.)
I wonder about how much hearts and minds matter here.
Back in October, during the PAD protests, I was skeptical of what the yellow shirts were demanding, but supported their right to protest. Then they became increasingly radicalized, culminating in the airport sieges that crippled the Thai economy, shutting down the tourism industry during the high season and hurting regular people. I heard from several people who quit supporting the PAD (although I don't really know — they could still be wildly popular).
This seemed to put the red shirts in position to take the high road, and — except for a couple minor instances — they did, putting on massive, peaceful protests and then going home after a day or three. Massive changes are coming in Thailand, and eventually there will be elections again, and the red shirts seemed primed to benefit. I think most democracy-minded Americans would at least tepidly agree with the reds' demands.
But then they started crippling Bangkok by abandoning their taxis at traffic choke points, attacking politicians, (literally) crashing the ASEAN summit, hijacking and threatening to blow up gas trucks in residential areas, and then — last night — allegedly attacking a mosque and opening fire on a group of angry citizens at a market, killing two.
So today the headlines have switched from stuff like "Government fires on protesters" to things like "U.S. condemns red shirt mob violence." A shift in popular opinion? A couple of red shirt leaders turned themselves in this morning, after encouraging protesters to disperse. Prime Minister Abhisit seems to be staging a remarkable (didn't think he'd last until the end of the month two days ago) comeback, and the government might just emerge from all this in tact.
The red shirts don't have the backing of the military and other elite, entrenched power centers like the yellows. So it seems like the only way they'll ever regain power is through popular support — and, as such, should be doing everything they can to hold on to it. It's unfair (and the source of their anger/frustration), but reality. Ghandi and MLK knew what they were doing.
Anyway.. I ask the question because I'm very much on the outside of all this, and am curious how this kind of thing looks for regular, unaffiliated Thais. (I'm not Thai and I'll prolly be gone in two years, but—on some level—someone unaffiliated and limited in understanding, albeit curious like me can bea decent gauge for how well a group's PR efforts are working).
Regardless, it's clear that violence breeds violence, and absolutist mob behavior (whether red, yellow or American partisan) is simply a part of human nature.
Thoughts?
--------------
Here are videos from yesterday. Watch the molotov cocktails, and then the taxi crash through the army line in this one:
And two from Al Jazeera — my new favorite news station:
Backstory (way way oversimplified, leaving the reasons for each side's protests somewhat out of it):
The reds (more democratically numerous) were in power. The yellows (more powerful) launched a non-violent military coup in 2006 to remove them. The reds (with hints of corruption) democratically regained power at the end of the year-long coup. The yellows started mass protests shortly before we arrived here in September, taking over the government house — essentially the White House without the a residence for the PM. Protests escalated (including the big one where Con got hit), and eventually the (increasingly fanatical and cultish) yellows shut down both Bangkok airports, crippling the Thai economy but making their point. The courts responded by booting out the (almost visibly relieved) red PM (who visited us in the hospital) on corruption charges ushering in a new yellow PM (who seems competent, but obviously gained power under dubious circumstances).
The reds regrouped and started mass protests around New Years. Then, following events I don't really understand, the protests escalated this past week, demanding the removal of the current PM.
There's been like 23 coups since 1900, or something. So this is just the latest in a long complicated history of sorta-instability (would rather have this than what's happening in Burma).
If anyone who knows wants to fill in holes or tell me I'm wrong.. feel free.
(note: for updates as this all escalates, I'm following this site — support his analysis by visiting his sponsors. And a twitter feed here. And another blog here and here.).
It's sort of amazing. I'm in Chiang Mai, where the Songkran (see second video in previous post) festivities are in full swing. I've never seen so many people smiling at once outside of a sporting event (even if some are red shirts riding around with propoganda on loudspeakers). Everyone gets to be kids for a few days.
Yet...
The police and military finally started pushing back against the Red Shirts late last night in Bangkok, using tear gas and the threat of live rounds shot (only—according to the government) into the air (yeesh...) to disperse protesters from one traffic choke point in Bangkok. The protesters have done their share to incite the violence, driving a bus into a riot line, hurling molotov cocktails and (according to the government) shooting a few of soldiers. They've also started hijacking/parking/threatening to blow up gas trucks (wtf!). Protesters quickly regrouped nearby, proving that this is going to be a long, drawn out mess.
This round of protests is different than the ones in October — more widespread, strategic and unruly. Seems like they are already approaching the height of the PAD's (October yellow shirts) mob mentality. There are groups blocking intersections in several parts of the city, and — now, in response to the crackdown — major highways all over the country.
And the introduction of violence will only cement the zealotry on all sides. I hate group think/mob mentality. People have full rights to protest. And the government needs to be able to control things (see their ridiculous inability to secure the Asean summit). But it seems like there are tipping points...
Also.. Stewart, our BangkokPastor who lives in central-ish Bangkok somewhat close to the action, has a post upshowing how a state of emergency in Thailand almost always means life as usual for most people (although they forced the closure of our favorite mall — shame!).
I can just picture the prime ministers/crowd control gurus of China and Burma sitting there snickering, feeling validated.
About half of the leaders at the meeting were evacuated by helicopter, including those of Vietnam, Myanmar and the Philippines, Thai officials said. Some officials fled by boat.
Abhisit Vejjajiva, the embattled Thai prime minister who has faced a week of large-scale street demonstrations, declared a state of emergency to secure the departure of leaders from Southeast Asia, China, South Korea and Japan. The emergency decree was lifted once the leaders had safely left Pattaya, a resort town about 90 miles east of Bangkok, officials said.
The cancelation of the meeting, involving leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, was deeply embarrassing for Thailand and a missed opportunity for Asian leaders to discuss the severe economic downturn that is causing some of the region’s export-dependent economies to contract.
I just finished Somaly Mam's book about the realities of trafficking and prostitution in Cambodia. It's enlightening and terrible. She writes beautifully, and I finished it in a daze.
In the past when I’ve seen Somaly and her team in Cambodia, I frankly didn’t figure that she would survive this long. Gangsters who run the brothels have held a gun to her head, and seeing that they could not intimidate Somaly with their threats, they found another way to hurt her: They kidnapped and brutalized her 14-year-old daughter.
Three years ago, I wrote from Cambodia about a raid Somaly organized on the Chai Hour II brothel where more than 200 girls had been imprisoned. Girls rescued from the brothel were taken to Somaly’s shelter, but the next day gangsters raided the shelter, kidnapped the girls and took them right back to the brothel.
Yet Somaly continued her fight, and, with the help of many others, she has registered real progress. Today, she says, the Chai Hour II brothel is shuttered. In large part, so is the Svay Pak brothel area where 12-year-old girls were openly for sale on my first visit.
“If you want to buy a virgin, it’s not easy now,” notes Somaly, speaking in English — her fifth language.
....
In her book, Somaly recounts how she grew up as an orphan and was “adopted” by a man who sold her to a brothel. Once when Somaly ran away, the police gang-raped her. Then her owner, on recovering his “property,” not only beat and humiliated her but tied her down naked and poured live maggots over her skin and in her mouth.
Yet even after that, Somaly occasionally defied him. Once two new girls, about 14 years old, were brought in to the brothel and left tied up. Somaly untied them and let them run away. For that, she was tortured with electric shocks.
.....
The world’s worst trafficking is in Asia, but teenage runaways in the United States are also routinely brutalized by their pimps. If a white, middle-class blonde goes missing, the authorities issue an Amber Alert and cable TV goes berserk, but neither federal nor local authorities do nearly enough to go after pimps who savagely abuse troubled girls who don’t fit the “missing blonde” narrative. The system is broken.
I had an idea for a website. It was going to be huge.
Our western (farang food) options are limited in Phayao, but I'm usually happy with some sort of peanut butter, lychee wine, chocolate chip and coffee power shake. Constance disagrees that this either "resourceful" or "tasty," and as such moans a lot about food.
So I was staring at our kitchen, wondering if there was something creative or interesting I could cook for my wife using the limited ingredients we had (plus the 15 or so things I knew we could get at Tesco). Lightbulb! Carl Jung! Recipes for foodies who love cooking but who don't want to go to Whole Foods before dinner, or who can't because they live in a tiny cheese-allergic village in Northern Thailand!
Enter the ingredents you have. Website tells you what you can make.
I'd use it—even if only for idle time wasting and searching for the world's most ridiculous recipes (what could I make with singha beer, ham, deep fried crickets, olive oil and green curry paste?). We'd just need to build a base of content, design and market it well, and eventually thrive off user-generated recipes.
My google-averse father has a long and distinguished history of inventing things that have already been invented. He once received a patent rejection after he couldn't get the 40-45th candles lit on my mother's birthday cake without getting burned, and came up with self-lighting candles with wicks tied together by dental floss. Last year he started laying the groundwork for a global tree-planting initiative that already existed... under the same name.
So I inherited that gene, but at least we try.
But now I don't get the website, and I've lost my excuse for serving my wife mustard fish ball sandwiches.
I was going to join the Black Rabbits, this local motorcycle gang:
The moto came with a pink seat and pink handlebars. But it didn't come with a license plate, and we didn't realize that meant we couldn't ever get a license plate for it — ensuring inevitable confusing, awkward, hand-flapping run-ins with the local bribe-happy cops who care about that sort of thing.
So after riding it just a handful of times (including one long, glorious dash through countryside backroads during which I ran out of gas in the middle of a rice farm), we sold it back yesterday to Dong — the guy with the motorcycle shop in our front yard.
I never even named it. The Black Rabbits approve of my municipal obedience.
Great article in SI last week about athlete fiscal incompetence, with a bunch of alarming stats:
"• By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce.
• Within five years of retirement, an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke.
• Numerous retired MLB players have been similarly ruined, and the current economic crisis is taking a toll on some active players as well. Last month 10 current and former big leaguers—including outfielders Johnny Damon of the Yankees and Jacoby Ellsbury of the Red Sox and pitchers Mike Pelfrey of the Mets and Scott Eyre of the Phillies—discovered that at least some of their money is tied up in the $8 billion fraud allegedly perpetrated by Texas financier Robert Allen Stanford. Pelfrey told the New York Post that 99% of his fortune is frozen; Eyre admitted last month that he was broke, and the team quickly agreed to advance a portion of his $2 million salary."
And some incredible anecdotes that..well.. explain it:
"A few years ago, Butowsky recalls, he met with a former high-round NFL pick whose adviser, also a former player, said that he couldn't reveal how much he was charging to manage the athlete's tax-exempt municipal bonds "because of the Patriot Act." According to Butowsky, he was taking $146,000 every year."
"About five years ago, Hunter says, he invested almost $70,000 in an invention: an inflatable raft that would sit under furniture. The pitch was that when high-rainfall areas were flooded, consumers could pump up the device, allowing a sofa to float and remain dry."
*also notice the 90 day entry stamp. we came to malaysia to apply and fork over a bunch of money for a 3 month visa back into thailand. malaysia gave us three months just for showing up. we're considering a move...
I am an "Editor and Community Manager" for this travel site, started in part by the guys who started twitter. And I am (edit: was until a couple days ago I just noticed) the featured writer this month.
It's a fun site with a different spin on web-based travel guides, and it's been a nice to write just a little bit about a lot of what I've gotten to see/do while running around the world for the past couple years. So.. look around.
From a development perspective, I've found Thailand to be a great example of both the potential and the problems that come with a high-growth emerging economy.
There's a well-developed infrastructure, good rural roads, consistent power, some social safety nets, a growing middle class and a very-visible high society (featuring all the modern touches — Lamborghinis and Ferraris for sale in a Bangkok mall — that come with them). But there's also a large chunk of the population living on a couple bucks a day, plaguing political turmoil, corruption and mistrust, abhorrent treatment of refugees and minorities and a huge slum in the shadows of the Bangkok high-rises.
It's healthy democracy and capitalism next to Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, but waste and inefficiency next to Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
And it's why the sex trade is so bad here — Thailand is poor enough to make it a "sending" country (poor girls to fuel the trade) but rich enough to have a robust business/expat/tourist "receiving" community (men to buy them).
I pulled up right beside him and passed him. As I went by I looked over my shoulder as if to say "eat my dust".
How you might ask did this happen? He was stuck in traffic on Rama IV road and I was on a motorbike which can (carefully) weave in and out of stopped traffic.
We live in a world where generally the wealthier you are, the faster you go, the higher you climb, the less dust you have to inhale. What surprised me was how satisfying it was to pass the guy.
....
The motorbikes have a kind of camaraderie. There is an unspoken bond over and against the car drivers. Motorbikers of the world unite! Again, what's amazing to me is that I didn't really know about this world until I drove a bike myself.
Jesus over and over again said that one way to "test" the authenticity of our faith is to see how we treat the most vulnerable people around us. (See Matt 25 for example) So I'll take my encounter with the Lamborghini this morning and the feelings it stirred up as a reminder of how different the world looks depending on whether you are on the top (luxury cars), in the middle (Motorbikes) or on the bottom (traveling on foot or by bus).
I'm not ready to say that all Christians need to join the bottom (sell our cars and motorbikes). Although there are stories about Jesus that suggest that wouldn't be such a bad idea. What we are obligated to do though is to pay attention, be sympathetic and offer friendship and help to those who struggle to meet life's basic needs.
Extraordinary interview here with Jon Stewart grilling Jim Cramer, if you don't watch the Daily Show. It's just delicious.
The failure of journalism (especially cable news, which.. I guess.. is journalism) in the current financial crisis is all too similar to its failure in the run up to Iraq, and indicative of a much larger cultural problem. Stewart's genius — and public service — is that he gets this.
"Yes, it is cliched to praise Stewart as the "true" voice of news; and, yes, it is too pinata-like to join the smacking of CNBC.... But I found this -- the Stewart/Cramer slaughter -- incredible. I thought Stewart, without excessive showboating, did the journalistic sensibility proud.
Just before leaving China -- ie, two days ago -- I saw with my wife the pirate-video version of Frost/Nixon, showing how difficult it is in real time to ask the kind of questions Stewart did. I know, Frost was dealing with a former president. Still, it couldn't have been easy to do what Stewart just did."
My mom and dad are in Thailand. Took mom to a market where they slaughter frogs, which scream before getting whomped upside the head by this lady. Something squirted out of one, hitting mom in the eye.
I'll read every column David Brooks writes, and this is why:
In the age of Rush and Hannity, here's Brooks explaining his careful opposition to the economic approach currently being taken by Obama, without belittling, demonizing or polarizing those he's criticizing.
These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell.
These writers - some left, some right - had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know.They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.
...
Readers of this column know that I am a great admirer of Barack Obama and those around him. And yet the gap between my epistemological modesty and their liberal worldviews has been evident over the past few weeks. The people in the administration are surrounded by a galaxy of unknowns, and yet they see this economic crisis as an opportunity to expand their reach, to take bigger risks and, as Obama said on Saturday, to tackle every major problem at once. ...
If Obama is mostly successful, then the epistemological skepticism natural to conservatives will have been discredited. We will know that highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change. If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity.
It’ll be interesting to see who’s right. But I can’t even root for my own vindication. The costs are too high. I have to go to the keyboard each morning hoping Barack Obama is going to prove me wrong.
Humble. Introspective. Respectful. Intellectually curious. Willing to be wrong. Aware of the limits of his understanding about the world. THIS IS HOW POLITICAL DISCOURSE SHOULD BE.
Scott and Jenni, who spent a week with us this month after two weeks playing plumber in India, put up some gorgeous pictures from their trip to the subcontinent (know on this blog as "The Most Interesting Place in the World").
Phayao really is a perfectly beautiful place, and I love the mountains around our town. Unfortunately, it hasn't rained since October and there are like a billion forest fires burning throughout the north. Add in that most of the rice farmers (I think) burn their fields around this time of year.. and suddenly the mountains are gone.
September (gorgeous!):
Two weeks ago (gone!):
I spent a lot of time apologizing to both the Japanese and Scott and Jenni (our friends here two weeks ago) and explaining the pyro rice farmer dilemma. I don't think anyone blames me for making the mountains disappear, but I do it anyway.
It's also going to be 100+ all week, which is odd since the lack of rain has all the leaves turning red. So it looks like October and feels like June and smells like camping (it's like a dream!).
So.. sorry Mom and Dad (visiting in less than a week). Actually — they live in Houston but grew up in Northern California, so whether we get smog or mountains, they'll feel right at home.
I think a lot of people have been struggling (myself included) with the "moral hazard" of the gov bailing out of those who either perpetuated the banking crisis and those who took on risky mortgages who had no business doing so. Obviously no one wants to reward mismanagement, stupidity and greed. And no one wants to enable or encourage such repeat behavior with prescedent for future government intervention.
But no one wants the entire system to collapse either, and this isn't an individual economic crisis.
So.. with housing plan and bailout II debates heating up, here are a couple good ones from over the weekend that added a bit of clarity to this.
David Brooks (more or less a conservative) who says dwelling on punishment isn't the answer:
Our moral and economic system is based on individual responsibility. It’s based on the idea that people have to live with the consequences of their decisions. This makes them more careful deciders. This means that society tends toward justice — people get what they deserve as much as possible.
...
Personally, I hate the idea of 10 guys sitting around in the White House trying to redesign huge swaths of the U.S. economy on legal pads.
But at least they seem to be driven by a spirit of moderation and restraint. They seem to be trying to keep as many market structures in place as possible so things can return to normal relatively smoothly.
And they seem to understand the big thing. The nation’s economy is not just the sum of its individuals. It is an interwoven context that we all share. To stabilize that communal landscape, sometimes you have to shower money upon those who have been foolish or self-indulgent. The greedy idiots may be greedy idiots, but they are our countrymen. And at some level, we’re all in this together.If their lives don’t stabilize, then our lives don’t stabilize.
And the New Yorker's James Surowiecki, who says the moral hazard isn't as big a risk as you might think:
Why might the effects of moral hazard be smaller than expected? To begin with, most bailouts aren’t like deposit insurance, which is certain and quick. Financial bailouts are uncertain and messy, and they typically occur only after institutions have already suffered extensive damage. Bear Stearns, for instance, was “saved” only after its shares had fallen almost ninety-five per cent from the previous year, and it seems unlikely that either its laid-off workers or its battered shareholders came out of the experience anxious to engage in more foolhardy behavior.
....
The patchiness of the moral-hazard argument doesn’t mean that we should simply rubber-stamp another bank bailout; that may be both unjust and a poor strategy for whipping the financial sector into shape. But it does mean that the failure of Lehman Brothers was an unnecessary and costly sacrifice to moral-hazard fundamentalism. It also means that we should not sit quietly by because we fear that government action today will lead to reckless market behavior years from now. Moral hazard has its costs. But, so far, our fear of it has proved much more expensive.
Customers and shopkeepers in India's capital face jail sentence or stiff fine for using polythene bags
Carry a plastic bag in Delhi and you could be imprisoned for five years. Officials in India's capital have decided that the only way to stem the rising tide of polythene is to outlaw the plastic shopping bag.
According to the official note, the "use, storage and sale" of plastic bags of any kind or thickness will be banned. The new guideline means that customers, shopkeepers, hoteliers and hospital staff face a 100,000 rupee fine (£1,370) and a possible jail sentence for using non-biodegradable bags.
Delhi has been quietly filling up with plastic bags in recent years as the economy boomed and western-style shopping malls sprang up in the city. There are no reliable figures for bag use but environmentalists say more than 10m a day are used in the capital every day. Not only are the streets littered with them, but polythene takes hundreds of years to decompose and creates demand for oil, which is used to make plastics.
At first the ban will be lightly implemented, giving people time to switch to jute, cotton, recycled-paper and compostable bags.
Newspapers in India quoted city officials as saying that the authorities did not "want people to be harassed and no prosecution will take place immediately; [once they] understand that by using plastic bags they will be in contempt of court, they will start using other material". The first targets in Delhi will be the industrial units that manufacture the plastic bags in the capital, which officials say will be closed down.
Civil servants said that punitive measures were needed after a law prohibiting all but the thinnest plastic bags – no thicker than 0.04mm – was ignored.
Although the government had originally concluded that plastic bags were too cheap and convenient to be disposed of, the authorities appear to have been swayed by environmentalists who pointed out that used bags were clogging drains and so providing breeding grounds for malaria and dengue fever.
I remember signs discouraging plastic bag use around downtown Delhi. Here in Thailand (relatively clean) they give you a bag and a straw with every bottled coke you buy at a 7/11. It just gets habitual, so in a place like Delhi overflowing with trash — good for them.
Living/traveling through smoggy emerging economies does make me both thankful for a strong environmental lobby in the US, and realize just how much of America's industrial pollution has simply been pushed overseas.
As a Valentine's Day card smoldered, more than 100 members of the Hindu extremist group Shiv Sena gathered in central New Delhi chanted "Death to Valentine's Day" and "People who celebrate Valentine's Day should be pelted with shoes!"
...
This is a conspiracy to misguide the young people of our country," said Jai Bhagwan Goel, chief of the Shiv Sena's north India branch.
In his hand the card, with its image of a Victorian couple pictured in a tepid peck under a parasol, went up in flames.
"We have come to know that in America, even unmarried girls as young as 11 or 12 years have become mothers ... and every second man there is divorced," Goel told reporters after reducing several greeting cards to a small pile of ash. "This is their culture - it cannot be accepted here."
...
Weather intervened to stop Hindu extremists in the northern city of Lucknow from carrying out their threats to beat couples found kissing, hugging or even holding hands in public. With torrential rains pouring down, young lovers stayed out of the parks where the usually seek privacy.
Still, even if some lovers stayed out of sight, they made their desires known, placing ads on special Valentine's Day pages in newspapers.
"My heart is like a cabbage," declared a man named Manoj to some lucky lady. "Divided into two; the leaves are for others and the heart for you."
Scott and Jenni, world-class canoodlers who just spent a week with us in Thailand, spent Valentine's in Mumbai. Hope they're ok.
During church in Chiang Mai today, a pastor mentioned this article from The Times of London subtitled "Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem — the crushing passivity of the people's mindset."
"But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.
Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good."
The author (obviously an atheist) writes from experience throughout southeast Africa about the charitable work done by missionaries, but also (more interestingly) the large-scale psychological affect Christians can have on rural communities.
It's fantastic. I love the way this guy thinks. Read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt:
Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.
How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.
To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.
Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.
Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.
It's not that we don't have a bunch of friends/relationships/kids following us around in Thailand. It's just that with the nature of Con's foundation/my job/the culture here/our speaking Spanish instead of Thai.. well.. ok we don't. And it's definitely not the integrated, dynamic community we had in the Dominican Republic.
So.. with that in mind.. our dear friend Robin, who runs things in the DR, set up some Skype time (her pictures here) with the kids we miss most from last summer.
And Ruben, about whom I will one day publish a short story:
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