Link Banana

Zimbabwe’s been under the thumb of Robert Mugabe for over two decades. The difficult-to-read election this coming weekend will determine if his time is up. I’ve been saving stuff on this topic for a week, looking to avoid flooding readers with it. Now here it.

From The Economist’s massive — and well done — article:

And yet, despite this stack of advantages, Mr Mugabe is plainly on the defensive. He must fear that Zimbabwe is in a state of such economic and political ruin that he needs more of a head-start than the 20% or so of votes provided by the standard forms of rigging. For Zimbabweans, however, there are two worries. One is that Mr Mugabe steals the election. The other is that he just fails to, especially if that means the president is forced into a run-off. In that case, he may resort to outright violence. “The violence has so far been contained, more or less,” says a former ZANU-PF minister who has joined Mr Makoni, “but if the election goes to two rounds it’ll go right up.”

Also:

• In a review, The Economist tackles the making of Mugabe
• The Financial Times says Mugabe’s denying his opponents food
• The Guardian says the opposition had to eat it’s campaign poster (via BB)
• The BBC reports that Mugabe won’t let the opposition MDC win during his lifetime
• Newsweek has a story about the country’s hyperinflation

So says “Wolcott”:

“One hundred years from now, dessert items are made by flash-freezing beads of cream with liquid nitrogen, then storing them in subzero conditions. People enjoy these treats with great regularity, and often remark upon how delicious they taste.”

Also of note: a dispatch from the robot dominated future. (via BB)

Megan Stack has an interesting story in today’s LA Times about Shabtai von Kalmanovic, a Russia oligarch who’s spending a lot of money to get underpaid WNBA players to play for a team and a league that no one seems to care about. [Insert obvious crack about the WNBA here.]

Nobody is making money off Spartak. On the contrary, it’s better described as an extravagance than a business: Kalmanovic has to pay Russian television to air the games, and they often end up being broadcast in the middle of the night. Nobody even bothers to sell tickets to the games. Too much bureaucracy, Kalmanovic says. The spectators are mostly schoolchildren, soldiers and locals looking for a free night of entertainment.

(via brijit)

Jim Webb (D-Va.) is trying to make the GI Bill cover the cost of a modern education. Writing in support, Anna Quindlen makes a few good — if heavily barbed — points:

The source of the opposition is shocking: the Department of Defense, whose leaders argue that offering enhanced educational opportunities to soldiers would hurt retention. Military brass apparently tremble at the notion that multiple deployments, starvation wages and inadequate medical care might not be enough to hold on to their people.

Of course, this is the military brass who have had to lower age and ability standards despite spending billions to try to entice young men and women to join up. It does not seem to have occurred to them that a better long-range plan would be to offer true educational incentives so that more focused and ambitious people would enlist.

(via brijit)

The Economist is — with some justification — rather pessimistic about the possible impact of sky-high commodity prices on Asian politics. The introduction:

THE soaring price of rice and dwindling stockpiles of Asia’s staple food are causing anxiety across the continent. In particular the Philippines, a big, hungry country which cannot grow enough to feed itself, could be in trouble. The front pages of Manila’s newspapers scream about a “rice crisis”, as politicians float drastic solutions, such as forcing the country’s top 100 companies to take up rice farming. Farmers in Thailand, the world’s largest rice exporter, are delighted with the price surge, although some were this week said to be hiring guards to protect their valuable crops against “rice bandits”.

And the bleak conclusion:

The region needs a new green revolution, especially if it wants to avoid revolutions of the blood-stained variety.

Line Rider was quite popular about a year ago. I remember wasting far too much time drawing lines and trying not to kill the helpless little sledder. I never did anything even 1% as impressive as this though.

(via kottke)

I’ll leave the analysis of this interesting data to Mr. Yglesias:

You’ll see that Los Angeles, despite its reputation, is surprisingly dense. Conversely, transit-friendly Portland isn’t especially dense (less so than Houston or Dallas or Las Vegas) which goes to show how much smart policy matters — if all 23 denser-than-Portland cities on the list were as savvy as Portland about bikes, pedestrians, and transit we’d have a much better environmental situation in the country without constructing any new, denser urban areas.

Though it’s still completely impossible to call Saudi Arabia a friend of human rights, and though it’s moving at a snail’s pace, the Christian Science Monitor says that some have found reason to hope.

…another sign of what some Saudis describe as an expanding awareness of human rights among the public and government officials. They cite increased discussion in the media and private blogs of such issues as child marriage, domestic violence, and treatment of foreign laborers.

“The big achievement is that it’s no longer taboo to talk about human rights,” one Saudi says privately.

While the Dalai Lama has gotten a lot of flack for urging moderation and nonviolence, another Buddhist monk embraces violence as necessary to defend the people against Sri Lanka’s rebels.

“Am I an extremist? Sometimes I am. Sometimes I am not,” Rathana said over green tea, when asked about reports from foreign human rights groups that accuse his party of hindering peace talks. “The point is that we need to end this war. And we are forced into a military solution.”

(via Passport)

I’m a sucker for graphs. If someone made Crime and Punishment a graph I probably would have read it — and all those other books — in high school. My favorite lines on this one are about candy.

I hate presenting “yesterday’s Op-Eds today,” but that’s what happens with I get behind. Monica Prasad made some interesting — and sure to be controversial — claims in yesterday’s New York Times.

What did Denmark do right? There are many elements to its success, but taken together, the insight they provide is that if reducing emissions is the goal, then a carbon tax is a tax you want to impose but never collect.

This is a hard lesson to learn. The very thought of new tax revenue has a way of changing the priorities of the most hard-headed politicians — even Genghis Khan learned to be peaceful, the story goes, when he saw how much more rewarding it was to tax peasants than to kill them. But if we want lower emissions, the goal of a carbon tax is to prompt producers to change their behavior, not to allow them to continue polluting while handing over cash to the government.

This is such a simple idea I’m amazed I’ve never heard of it before. The BBC has a new nature documentary filmed in India’s Perch National Park with hidden cameras, and a few attached to elephants (I wonder if that constitutes animal cruelty?). Looks interesting. More pictures at The Daily Mail.

(via BB Gadgets)

It’s an interesting name, and an obvious reason. I’d like my name to stand for such a great idea.

This is a pretty interesting little tool. It maps how (geographically) the world is seen by some prominent newspapers and their editors-in-chief.

(via Boing Boing)

In last weekend’s New York Times Magazine Paul Wachter has an interesting history of mixed martial arts fighting and one such fighter.

I asked Smith why he spent so much of his youth looking for trouble. I expected some sort of clichéd, though possibly true, explanation — a difficult childhood or a Napoleon complex. What I didn’t expect him to say was, “You know, bro, the sexual-preference thing.”

Smith is gay, and I know of no other professional fighter who is openly so. “I was always scared that my mom and dad would find out and wouldn’t like me, and my brothers wouldn’t like me,” he said. “I was petrified, because I didn’t want anyone to find out. And I would try to be the toughest person around. That way, no one would suspect, no one would ever say it, no one would think it.”

I’ll just let the Washington Post’s Tom Ricks explain:

Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey has long had a reputation for audacity, both on the battlefield (during 32 years in the Army, he received three Purple Hearts, two Distinguished Service Crosses and two Silver Stars) and in his thinking. Here, in a briefing for a military audience last week, he predicts what lies around the bend in international relations. It made me wonder why anyone would want to be president.

His predictions strike me as mostly reasonable, which makes some of them all the more troubling.

(via Passsport)

Tomorrow Ford is supposed to announce the sale of its high-end Jaguar and Land Rover brands to India’s Tata Motors — the company that recently announced a $2500 car. We truly live in a changing world.

Tata is likely to pay about $2bn (£1bn) in the deal, although analysts will be keen to see the exact price and terms.

The agreement will bring to an end a lengthy sale process which started last June when Ford announced its intention to sell the companies as a package.

Wake Up Later put together a sequence of what a number of high profile websites used to look like. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but I’m a real sucker for this stuff.

(via kottke)

Related: Ben Tesch’s Magnetbox is nine today, and has a compilation of how it used to look.

Twitter — that 140 character “microblogging” engine — officially became the least romantic way to propose when it was recently used for that purpose by Greg Rewis.

This article from The Economist’s a little long and dry, but I did find it’s conclusion rather intriguing.

Evolutionary biologists tend to be atheists, and most would be surprised if the scientific investigation of religion did not end up supporting their point of view. But if a propensity to religious behaviour really is an evolved trait, then they have talked themselves into a position where they cannot benefit from it, much as a sceptic cannot benefit from the placebo effect of homeopathy. Maybe, therefore, it is God who will have the last laugh after all—whether He actually exists or not.