News That Stays News

The Year in Pictures December 26, 2010

The New York Times collection is here.

A Politico December 25, 2010

When I voted for Kamala Harris to be California’s next Attorney General, I didn’t realize she had ideas like

cracking down on truancy — including charging the parents of chronically truant children with a misdemeanor punishable by jail time and a fine. Civil libertarians and conservatives alike raised questions about the move, but Harris was unapologetic.

“My staff went bananas” at the policy, Harris said, as did school administrators. Citing statistics linking crime and truancy, she argues that she’s nipping a problem in the bud.

“My bottom line is these children have to be in school,” she said.

“There will be outrage when in 10 years they’re a menace to society hanging out on the corner.”

Around Nollywood December 24, 2010

One of those classic Economist pieces- a look at the Nigerian film industry, which is wildly popular throughout Africa. The plots of the films give us a sense of where the popular mind is in Africa:

They often revolve around the travails of new arrivals in big cities—an experience familiar across the continent. The epic film “One God One Nation” portrays a Muslim man and a Christian woman who struggle to marry. “Caught in the Act” shows a wife who is wrongly accused by her own mother-in-law of abducting a child. Nollywood films depict families whose faith has been shattered, whose certainties have been undermined. They show ordinary people struggling to make sense of a fast-changing, unkind world. Aspirations are dashed. Trust is forsaken. The overarching theme of Nollywood films is Africa’s troubled journey to modernity. Because Hollywood films tend to show people at the other end of that journey, they fail to resonate.

So what does an African visual culture look like?

African elites sneer at the frequent displays of witchcraft in Nigerian films. Traditional curses are imposed, spirits wander, juju blood flows. The tribulations of modern life are often shown to be the result of shadowy machinations. Murder and the occult are never far from the surface. “It is the Nollywood equivalent of the Hollywood horror movie,” says Ms Isong, the producer.

Yet tormented characters often find salvation by turning to Christ. A church scene is de rigueur in a Nollywood film. This is hardly surprising. Christianity is on the rise in Africa. The number of evangelicals has grown from some 17m four decades ago to more than 400m. In countries like Liberia and Zambia, Nigerian “owner-operated” churches preach the gospel. Many Nollywood stars are born-again Christians. Film credits usually end with the invocation: “To God Be the Glory”.

Linked December 23, 2010

1. The US government has spent more than $30 billion to clean up an old Atomic site in Washington state. Their job is complicated by the wildlife, who occasionally do their part to spread the radiation:

In 1998, after workers with Geiger counters detected hot spots in a dumpster full of old cantaloupe rinds, Mr. Johnson sent a technician out to investigate.She homed in on a radioactive speck. “Her meter was going up, and all of a sudden the speck flew away,” Mr. Johnson says. “She called and told me about it, and I said ‘Yeah, right.'”

Mr. Johnson soon learned the specks were radioactive fruit flies. His team traced the flies back to a box with pipes used to transfer waste. It was sealed with a sugar-based coating that contained radioactive material. The flies had noshed on the sealant and flown the radiation to the dumpster.

2. Lapham’s Quarterly has the story of Barbara Follett, the rare writing prodigy who published her first novel at 8 and achieved national attention a few years later, before vanishing in 1939 at the age of 24. Her story reminds me of what Virginia Woolf had to say about Shakespeare’s sister.

Credit: The Browser

China Watch December 23, 2010

1. A great article in the New York Review of Books about China and its unhappy relationship with its history. For me, reading it was a time to, as Emerson said in Self-Reliance, “take with shame our own opinion from another:”

Insecurity, the new national mood, extends from laid-off migrant laborers to the men at the top of the Communist Party. The socialist slogans that the government touts are widely seen as mere panoply that covers a lawless crony capitalism in which officials themselves are primary players. This incongruity has been in place for many years and no longer fools anyone. People take it as normal, but that very normality makes cynicism the public ideology. Many people turn to materialism—whether in property or investment—in search of value, but often cannot feel secure there, either; even if they gain a bit of wealth, they do not know when it might disappear or be wrested away.One stopgap that top leaders have used has been to stoke national pride. They have staged an Olympics and a World’s Fair. They arrange to broadcast throughout China that the Dalai Lama is a “wolf” who would “split the motherland.” Such tactics have had some success. Chauvinist sentiment, especially among the upwardly mobile urban young, is easy to provoke, and is sometimes loudly expressed.

Yet in quieter settings, Chinese people continue to make decisions that reflect their lack of confidence in China’s future. Farmers from Fujian province still pay “snakeheads” tens of thousands of dollars to smuggle one person to Sydney, London, or New York. Of the approximately 145,000 Chinese students who go abroad each year for study, only about 25–30 percent return to live in China (and of these, some keep foreign passports tucked away). Even leaders of the Communist Party send their children—and large amounts of their money—to places like Vancouver and Los Angeles.

In the review of Mubei (Tombstone), by Yang Jisheng, we learn the misery of the Great Leap Forward.

People learned not to kill rats immediately; it was better to tie a string to a rat’s leg, follow it to its hole, and kill it then. That way one could eat the rat as well as dig down into its hole to recover whatever grain it might have stored below.

2. In an otherwise-plain Paul Kennedy article about the prospect of American decline, we get one thought that sticks out. I get the feeling that economists would think that this simplistic, but on a rhetorical level it has a natural appeal.

The collective folly of portfolio advisers is compounded by the current congressional baying for China’s currency to get stronger and stronger and stronger. Is that what the United States really wants—to get relatively weaker? At a certain stage in the past 500-year history of currencies and power, the Dutch guilder hustled the Spanish escudo off the scene; then the pound sterling hustled the guilder (and franc and mark) off the scene; then the dollar hustled the pound off the scene. What is Washington risking as it presses for a stronger Chinese currency? My apprehension is that it risks a much stronger Chinese political influence in the world.

Credit: The Browser

Coup in Ivory Coast December 20, 2010

The U.N. isn’t exactly known for having the stones to do this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/20/ivory-coast-eu-travel-ban

I’m not sure what’s exactly going on, but it’s pretty clear that the media doesn’t know either.

John Kerry pwns Mitch McConnell December 20, 2010

A New York Times article about Start with an angry subtext. You can see it in the quotes. First, we have the Russians, who just have to be hopping mad about the standard Senate bullshit the Republicans are slinging:

“I can only underscore that the strategic nuclear arms treaty, worked out on the strict basis of parity, in our view fully answers to the national interests of Russia and the United States,” Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, told the Interfax news agency on Monday. “It cannot be opened up and become the subject of new negotiations.”

Then we have said purveyors of fragrant unguents- Jon Kyl

The Russian statement provoked a sharp response from the leading Republican treaty opponent, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona. “What’s wrong with that?” he asked of returning to the negotiating table to improve the treaty. “Unless you think the U.S. Constitution was really stupid to give the Senate a role in this, it doesn’t seem there’s anything wrong with the Senate saying, ‘You got about nine-tenths of it right.’ ”

and his fearless leader

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, went to the floor on Monday to elaborate on why he would vote against the treaty, a stance he declared on Sunday. He said the treaty’s verification measures were inadequate, citing a classified report by a fellow Republican senator. And he warned that nonbinding language in the treaty preamble could ultimately inhibit development of American missile defense systems.

Mr. McConnell accused President Obama and the Democrats of politicizing the treaty by pressing to ratify it before a new Senate takes office in January, with five more Republicans than the current Senate.

“We should wait until every one of them is addressed,” Mr. McConnell said of his criticisms of the treaty. “Our top concern should be the safety and security of our nation, not some politician’s desire to declare a political victory and host a press conference before the end of the year.”

It’s probably not very balanced for the New York Times to print John Kerry’s response in full, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do.

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, responded heatedly to the notion that the treaty was being rushed. He said that Democrats had already put off consideration of the treaty 13 times at the request of Republicans, and that even after those delays, the Senate had already spent more time debating it than it had the first Start treaty or the Treaty of Moscow signed by President George W. Bush.

“This treaty is in front of the United States Senate not because of some political schedule,” Mr. Kerry said. “It’s because the Republicans asked us to delay it. We wanted to hold this before the election. And what was the argument then by our friends on the other side of the aisle? ‘Oh no, please don’t do that. That’ll politicize our treaty.’ ”

Mr. Kerry added: “Having accommodated their interests, they now come back and turn around and say: ‘Oh, you guys are terrible. You’re bringing this treaty up at the last minute.’ I mean, is there no shame, ever, with respect to the arguments that are made sometimes on the floor of the United States Senate?”

Who do you believe? December 19, 2010

More details about the rape charges against Julian Assange leak out, as reported by the New York Times. The reports make you wonder about Sweden’s rape laws-

But the details in the police report and dozens of interviews in recent months with people in Sweden linked to the case suggest that the Swedish case could be less flawed than Mr. Assange’s supporters have claimed. As for the prosecutors’ actions, interviews with legal experts suggest that it would not be abnormal for such a high-level case to move up the hierarchy of prosecutors, with disagreements over how to apply Sweden’s finely calibrated laws on sexual misconduct.

Still, the police report also provides support for a claim made by Mr. Assange’s supporters that the women involved seemed willing to continue their friendships with Mr. Assange after what they described as sexual misbehavior. The women did not decide to go to the police, the report shows, until they discovered by talking to each other that they had both been sexually involved with him and, by their accounts, had similar experiences.

Is Solitary Confinement a Form of Torture? December 17, 2010

Atul Gawande parses the issue in The New Yorker.

Harlow wondered whether what the monkeys were missing in their Isolettes was a mother. So, in an odd experiment, he gave them an artificial one.

In the studies, one artificial mother was a doll made of terry cloth; the other was made of wire. He placed a warming device inside the dolls to make them seem more comforting. The babies, Harlow discovered, largely ignored the wire mother. But they became deeply attached to the cloth mother. They caressed it. They slept curled up on it. They ran to it when frightened. They refused replacements: they wanted only “their” mother. If sharp spikes were made to randomly thrust out of the mother’s body when the rhesus babies held it, they waited patiently for the spikes to recede and returned to clutching it. No matter how tightly they clung to the surrogate mothers, however, the monkeys remained psychologically abnormal.

In a later study on the effect of total isolation from birth, the researchers found that the test monkeys, upon being released into a group of ordinary monkeys, “usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by . . . autistic self-clutching and rocking.”

On the Separation of Church and State December 16, 2010

A history of political theology, courtesy of the New York Times.  I’m not sure I believe it, but it’s an interesting idea.