Live Not By Lies is thought to be the last thing that Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote before he was arrested for the last time. As such, it is a bit of history. But it also addresses an issue that is timeless.
The Feb. 21 attack on police headquarters in coastal Zihuatanejo, which injured four people, fit a disturbing trend of Mexico’s drug wars. Traffickers have escalated their arms race, acquiring military-grade weapons, including hand grenades, grenade launchers, armor-piercing munitions and antitank rockets with firepower far beyond the assault rifles and pistols that have dominated their arsenals.
The title is sarcastic for those who have trouble with such things.
From the Belmont Club on Sunday…..
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s government continues to implode. The VOA reports that it has put a former Prime Minister under arrest and sealed off the capital against protesters.
Only he did not stay in jail very long. This from Economist today….
IF PAKISTAN’S president, Asif Zardari, had ever wondered who rules the roost in Punjab, the country’s most populous province, he found out on Sunday March 15th. As an angry crowd gathered outside the house—and temporary prison—of Nawaz Sharif, Mr Zardari’s great rival, the provincial police melted away.
With a roar of sports utility vehicles, Mr Sharif, the “lion of Punjab”, then swept forth to lead a protest march to Islamabad. “This is a prelude to a revolution,” he declared. Faced, at least, with a continuation of political unrest that had included a small riot that day in Lahore, Punjab’s capital, Mr Zardari proceeded to bow to his rival’s main demands.
A post from the Danger Room on how the US is making new advances in using emp effects to destroy enemy electronic hardware. But the US had better hope the technology does not spread or they will be the ones who are hurt the most by it.
A post from A Fistful of Euros on how Russia is trying to keep things calm in Ingushetia. Just a friendly little reminder that Russia is always one step away from falling apart. That is why historically Russia has favored strong autocratic leaders.
Speaking of strong Russia leaders, here is a story from the Telegraph on the growing rivalry between Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev. If the story is accurate, Medvedev is a fool. How may assassins owe their loyalty to him? As Mao said, power flows from the barrel of a gun, and there is no evidence that the people with the guns are about to follow Medvedev.
In the last couple of weeks it has seemed like the Economist was not worth the time it took to read. But this week I was reminded of why I read the magazine. Some of the highlights…..
The article on Japan called Rebalancing act. The article suffers from the usual Economist foible of trying to spin something as positive what is a total disaster. Take this paragraph, for example. . .
JAPANESE households used to be among the world’s biggest savers and, as a result, the country ran a massive trade surplus. But no longer. They now save less of their income than American households, and Japan’s trade balance moved into deficit last year (see top chart). A long-overdue—and painful—economic rebalancing is under way.
Rebalancing is such stupid word for spending down your savings in the face of economic disaster. For years I have had to suffer through listening to fools arguing that Japan’s problem was that its people saved too much. Now that the savings rate in Japan is practically zero (see the charts in the article) things are going just dandy, right?
But if you can get past the fact that the facts presented in the article are completely at odds with the idea that Japan is going through some kind of positive “rebalancing,” the article is a very interesting read.
Another interesting read is the article entitled The bees are back in town . You can read the article as both refuting some of the wilder fears about the collapse of the honey bee population and as a warning on the dangers of extreme mono cultures. Though it is clear that the writer’s intent is only the former and not the latter.
The article entitled About face was also interesting. It made me wonder how creditworthy I looked. It also made me think of Abraham Lincoln’s famous contention that after a certain age you could blame a man for how he looked (meaning their moral character would start to show through, not that people should all be handsome. He had enough self knowledge to know that nobody could accuse him of being handsome).
Those are only the highlights of this week’s Economist. There were other articles that I found interesting as well. But you can scan what is in this week’s edition for yourself if you are so inclined.
My apologies for anyone who struggled through reading this before I whacked off his worse grammatical errors. Please remember that even the brilliant Albert Einstein occasionally forgot where he lived; just because our Ape Man cannot always remember the difference between “passed” and “past” does not necessarily indicate he is in the habit of drooling. We apologize for the technical difficulties, and we hope that you will find his ideas worth reading in spite of his occasional struggles with coherency.
Sincerly,
The Troll
PLANS TO refurbish Trident nuclear weapons had to be put on hold because US scientists forgot how to manufacture a component of the warhead, a US congressional investigation has revealed.
The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) “lost knowledge” of how to make a mysterious but very hazardous material codenamed Fogbank. As a result, the warhead refurbishment programme was put back by at least a year, and racked up an extra $69 million.
Rumor has it that China stole everything there was to steal when it came to making of the US strategic arsenal. Maybe they can help use remember how to make Fogbank.
Alina Lungu, 30, said she did everything necessary to ensure a healthy pregnancy in Romania: she ate organic food, swam daily and bribed her gynecologist with an extra $255 in cash, paid in monthly installments handed over discreetly in white envelopes.
She paid a nurse about $32 extra to guarantee an epidural and even gave about $13 to the orderly to make sure he did not drop the stretcher.
But on the day of her delivery, she said, her gynecologist never arrived. Twelve hours into labor, she was left alone in her room for an hour. A doctor finally appeared and found that the umbilical cord was wrapped twice around her baby’s neck and had nearly suffocated him. He was born blind and deaf and is severely brain damaged.
This week’s rant of the week is Accounting for California’s Suicide.
It was Democrats who stuffed an estimated $524 million in defense earmarks that the Pentagon did not request into the 2008 appropriations bill, about $220 million more than Republicans did, according to an independent estimate. Of the 44 senators who implored Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in January to build more F-22 Raptors — a fighter conceived during the Cold War that senior Pentagon officials say is not suited to probable 21st-century conflicts — most were Democrats.
And last July, when the Navy’s top brass decided to end production of their newest class of destroyers — in response to 15 classified intelligence reports highlighting their vulnerability to a range of foreign missiles — seven Democratic senators quickly joined four Republicans to demand a reversal. They threatened to cut all funding for surface combat ships in 2009.
Within a month, Gates and the Navy reversed course and endorsed production of a third DDG-1000 destroyer, at a cost of $2.7 billion.