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The same day the NY Times called for withdrawal from Iraq, John Burns, the best reporter on the scene, files an optimistic report from Anbar Province.
SUNNI merchants watched warily from behind neat stacks of fruit and vegetables as Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno walked with a platoon of bodyguards through the Qatana bazaar here one recent afternoon. At last, one leathery-faced trader glanced furtively up and down the narrow, refuse-strewn street to check who might be listening, then broke the silence.
“America good! Al Qaeda bad!†he said in halting English, flashing a thumb’s-up in the direction of America’s second-ranking commander in Iraq.
Until only a few months ago, the Central Street bazaar was enemy territory, watched over by American machine-gunners in sandbagged bunkers on the roof of the governor’s building across the road. Ramadi was Iraq’s most dangerous city, and the area around the building the most deadly place in Ramadi. Now, a pact between local tribal sheiks and American commanders has sent thousands of young Iraqis from Anbar Province into the fight against extremists linked to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. …
George Will picks up on some of Amity Shlaes new book on the Great Depression.
Some mornings during the autumn of 1933, when the unemployment rate was 22 percent, the president, before getting into his wheelchair, sat in bed, surrounded by economic advisers, setting the price of gold. One morning he said he might raise it 21 cents: “It’s a lucky number because it’s three times seven.” His Treasury secretary wrote that if people knew how gold was priced “they would be frightened.”
The Depression’s persistence, partly a result of such policy flippancy, was frightening. In 1937, during the depression within the Depression, there occurred the steepest drop in industrial production ever recorded. By January 1938 the unemployment rate was back up to 17.4 percent. The war, not the New Deal, defeated the Depression. Franklin Roosevelt‘s success was in altering the practice of American politics.
This transformation was actually assisted by the misguided policies — including government-created uncertainties that paralyzed investors — that prolonged the Depression. This seemed to validate the notion that the crisis was permanent, so government must be forever hyperactive. …
Christopher Hitchens on the doctors plot.
Make any presumption of innocence that you like, and it still looks as if the latest cell of religious would-be murderers in Britain is made up of members of the medical profession. When I was growing up, the expression “Doctors’ Plot” was a chilling one, expressing the paranoia of Stalin about his Jewish physicians and their evil conspiracy; a paranoia that was on the verge of unleashing an official pogrom in Moscow before the old brute succumbed to death by natural causes just in time. Now it seems that there really was a doctors’ plot in London and Glasgow and that its members were so hungry for death that they rushed from one aborted crime scene to another in their eagerness to take the lives of strangers. …
Gabriel Schoenfeld the same.
What is the difference between an Islamic Doctors’ Plot and a Jewish Doctors’ Plot?
It sounds like the opening line of a joke, but it’s not.
So far, in the Islamic Doctors’ Plot now being unraveled by Scotland Yard, eight people have been arrested in connection with two failed car-bombings in London and a third at the Glasgow airport. Seven are doctors, and the eighth is a laboratory technician. They are all suspected of planning or participating in a mass casualty attack, using gas canisters, gasoline, and nails to inflict maximum carnage on innocents civilians, as part of a broader worldwide campaign of terror in the name of Islam. …
… The Jewish Doctors’ Plot is another kettle of fish altogether. On January 13, 1953, the Soviet Communist party newspaper Pravda published an article under the headline “Vicious Spies and Killers under the Mask of Academic Physicians.†It told of a vast plot by a group of doctors who “deliberately and viciously undermined their patients’ health by making incorrect diagnoses, and then killed them with bad and incorrect treatments.†…
William Easterly, NYU prof, says Africa needs trade, not handouts.
JUST WHEN IT SEEMED that Western images of Africa could not get any weirder, the July 2007 special Africa issue of Vanity Fair was published, complete with a feature article on “Madonna’s Malawi.” At the same time, the memoirs of an African child soldier are on sale at your local Starbucks, and celebrity activist Bob Geldof is touring Africa yet again, followed by TV cameras, to document that “War, Famine, Plague & Death are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and these days they’re riding hard through the back roads of Africa.”
It’s a dark and scary picture of a helpless, backward continent that’s being offered up to TV watchers and coffee drinkers. But in fact, the real Africa is quite a bit different. And the problem with all this Western stereotyping is that it manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of some current victories, fueling support for patronizing Western policies designed to rescue the allegedly helpless African people while often discouraging those policies that might actually help. …
… Today, as I sip my Rwandan gourmet coffee and wear my Nigerian shirt here in New York, and as European men eat fresh Ghanaian pineapple for breakfast and bring Kenyan flowers home to their wives, I wonder what it will take for Western consumers to learn even more about the products of self-sufficient, hardworking, dignified Africans. Perhaps they should spend less time consuming Africa disaster stereotypes from television and Vanity Fair.
Kofi Bentil, an African doesn’t like the message in Live Earth. He looks forward to using fossil fuels.
… Even if we accept that global warming may have a significant effect on our climate, limiting the use of fossil fuels in Africa would be counterproductive. Respiratory infections are the leading cause of childhood deaths on my continent, mainly from inhaling the smoke produced by burning wood and dung in our quaint mud huts. …
Adam Smith posts on Zimbabwe.
We often complain about the effect of government interference on our lives, but spare a thought for those less fortunate than ourselves.
The people of Zimbabwe are under the heel of one of the most autocratic and incompetent governments in the world. Top of the list of catastrophic mistakes made by the Mugabe government is its handling of the economy. Price increases ran at an annual rate of 4,500 percent in May of this year and the hyper-inflationary spiral shows no sign of stopping. …