Snapler

March 10, 2010

President Ahmadinejad: “7/11 Isn’t Real”

In international news, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has publicly denounced 7/11, claiming that the American mini-mart chain is merely a figment of people's imaginations, and if it did exist, it would most certainly serve mediocre coffee and stale donuts.

"7/11 is just a capitalist scheme to trick Americans into thinking that there is a place that sells oversized cups full of sugary, slushy drinks at 4 AM when they're too drunk to even know what they're doing," said President Ahmadinejad. "But don't be fooled, there is no such place. How could there possibly be a store that sells USA Today, hotdogs, and condoms? It's impossible -- but then again, the United States will use anything as a means spread their rhetoric throughout the Middle West."

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March 9, 2010

Michelle Obama To Deliver Three Commencement Addresses

Three educational institutions will host a rather famous commencement speaker: the first lady of the United States, the White House announced on Tuesday.

Here's the press release:

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Fauxmocracy

"We are not only culturally confused, our confusion makes it difficult for us to even imagine our confusion." -- Introduction, The Populist Moment, Lawrence Goodwyn

I've been re-reading Lawrence Goodwyn's The Populist Moment at the suggestion of the brilliant George Goehl from National People's Action, though it seems lots of people I talk to are reading it right now, and for good reason. I'll write more soon about the general lessons I've taken from the book for mass mobilization in today's environment, but in the meantime, I'm thinking about the recent elections in Iraq and the recent turmoil between Obama and the Democrats and the left. Goodwyn describes how once-agrarian and revolution-prone nations like the United States sought through industrialization to centralize power and covertly quash any democratic impulses. The tool of such subtle domination is culture--"the creation of mass modes of thought that literally make the need for major additional social changes difficult for the mass of the population to imagine." Today, despite stolen presidential elections, Supreme Court rulings handing more political buying power to big business, and health care reform legislation that is fundamentally a good idea but repeatedly sunk by the greedy insurance industry, that we the people continue to buy into the modern myth of democracy simply allows oligarchy to persist unchallenged. As a populace, we are complicit in our silence.

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DO WE REALLY NEED TO BLOW UP THE PLANET FIVE TIMES OVER?

Can the nearly bankrupt United States afford to spend billions more of borrowed money on nuclear weapons that are unlikely to ever be used, and which serve no useful military purpose?

That is the weighty question confronting President Barack Obama as he prepares his overdue Nuclear Posture Review. Each new American president must by law review his nation's nuclear weapons and strategy.

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Holland, Michigan, Happiest Because Of Giving Nature?

Despite harsh winter conditions and high levels of unemployment, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index rates the small Michigan town of Holland-Grand Haven as one of the happiest in the United States. The index ranks Holland as second only to Boulder, Colo. in terms of "well-being," a term which includes the physical and mental health of residents, as well as job satisfaction and other measures of happiness.

So what's making these Michiganites so happy? As ABC News has recently pointed out, Holland also ranks as the second most generous town in the country. Holland residents are committed to regularly giving back, whether it's lending a helping hand to a neighbor or volunteering with a local organization -- and that just might explain what keeps them smiling.

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Oldest Person To EVER Live: Jeanne Calment Holds World Record, Living To Be 122 Years Old

The oldest person to ever live - that can be verified at least - is Jeanne Calment, a French woman who lived to be 122 years old.

Mary Josephine Ray, the oldest person living in the United States, died today at 114 years, 229 days, prompting some to be curious of the world record.

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March 8, 2010

China Lassoes Its Neighbors

With the Doha Round of negotiations of the World Trade Organization in limbo, the heavy hitters of international trade have been engaged in a race to sew up trade agreements with smaller partners. China has been among the most aggressive in this game, a fact underlined on January 1, 2010, when the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area (CAFTA) went into effect.

Touted as the world's biggest Free Trade Area, CAFTA will bring together 1.7 million consumers with a combined gross domestic product of $5.9 trillion and total trade of $1.3 trillion. Under the agreement, trade between China and Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore has become duty-free for more than seven thousand products. By 2015, the newer members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) — Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar — will join the zero-tariff arrangement.

The propaganda mills, especially in Beijing, have been trumpeting the FTA as bringing "mutual benefits" to China and ASEAN. In contrast, there has been an absence of triumphal rhetoric from ASEAN. In 2002, the year the agreement was signed, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo hailed the emergence of a "formidable regional grouping" that would rival the United States and the European Union. ASEAN's leaders, it seems, have probably begun to realize the consequences of what they agreed to: that in this FTA, most of the advantages will probably flow to China.

At first glance, it seems like the China-ASEAN relationship has been positive. After all, demand from a Chinese economy growing at a breakneck pace was a key factor in the Southeast Asian growth that began around 2003 after the low growth following the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and 1998. For Asia as a whole, in 2003 and the beginning of 2004, "China was a major engine of growth for most of the economies in the region," according to a UN report. "The country's imports accelerated even more than its exports, with a large proportion of them coming from the rest of Asia." During the current international recession ASEAN governments, much like the United States, are counting on China — which registered an annualized growth rate of 10.7 percent in the last quarter of 2010 — to pull them out of the doldrums.

A More Complex Picture



But is the Chinese locomotive really pulling the rest of East Asia along with it, on the fast track to economic nirvana? In fact, China's growth has in part taken place at Southeast Asia's expense. Low wages have encouraged local and foreign manufacturers to phase out their operations in relatively high-wage Southeast Asia and move them to China. China's devaluation of the yuan in 1994 had the effect of diverting some foreign direct investment away from Southeast Asia. The trend of ASEAN losing ground to China accelerated after the financial crisis of 1997. In 2000, foreign direct investment in ASEAN shrank to 10 percent of all foreign direct investment in developing Asia, down from 30 percent in the mid-nineties.

The decline continued in the rest of the decade, with the UN World Investment Report attributing the trend partly to "increased competition from China." Since the Japanese have been the most dynamic foreign investors in the region, much apprehension in the ASEAN capitals greeted a Japanese government survey that revealed that 57 percent of Japanese manufacturing transnational corporations found China to be more attractive than the ASEAN-4 (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines).

Snags in a Trade Relationship



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Game Change…God’s Work?

In their unsourced but verisimiltudinous book, “Game Change,” full of confidences and quotes, some ribald and some purple, from a number of our nation’s most prominent men and women, authors John Heinemann and Mark Halperin recount the incredible seat-of-the-pants process by which Sarah Palin was chosen to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency of the United States. Not only did the episode reveal that Sarah Palin was unfit for the Presidency, it also made clear that McCain and his immediate advisers were unfit for choosing a vice president.

Sarah Palin was an eleventh-hour choice, chosen, to be more precise, less than a week before the opening of the Republican Convention in August 2008. McCain and his advisers didn’t know what they were getting into. They assumed that Governor Palin would have the average knowledge of the outside world that a typical governor of an American state would have. (But she was up on the frontier).

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March 6, 2010

Michigan Man Robs Bank With To-Do List

As a native of Michigan, I know what recession means. Michigan was deeply rooted in a recession way before it became the hip thing to do everywhere else in the United States. When the economic bubble burst over a year ago, residents of Michigan watched the rest of the country panic with scorn. "Recession? That was so eight years ago." We saw how America worked. When the movie 8 Mile was made it was greeted with an "Oh, those poor souls in Detroit. Let's nominate them for an Academy Award for their plight." But when 8 Mile came to a neighborhood near you, suddenly it was a crisis.

Desperate times, as the cliché goes, call for desperate measures, but it also invites opportunity. When there's nothing but gloom and bad news surrounding you -- as is the case in Michigan -- the likelihood a hero will present him or herself arises. And, after years of waiting, our hero has finally come in the form of Donald Evans from Battle Creek, Michigan.2010-03-06-donald_evans.jpg

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The Real Threat to Israel’s National Security

It is time for the Israeli government to be realistic with the changing political conditions in the Middle East. The national security paranoia that has defined its policy toward the Arab world is dated, and no longer helps Israel in dealing with its regional threats: in fact, this paranoia is serving only to obstruct what is left of a lagging peace process. The current conditions on the ground are ripe for the establishment of a just and sustainable peace: The Arab League is endorsing renewed efforts by the United States to facilitate a peaceful two-state solution with normalization of relations with Israel through the Arab Peace Initiative, the Palestinian Authority's Salam Fayyad has begun implementing a non-violent plan to build successful state institutions in the West Bank, and the US and EU are both invested in a direct path toward a secure and viable two-state solution. These reasons, coupled with Israel's unquestioned military ability to defend itself in any future confrontation, make Israel's continued argument for national security less valid. Israel must sooner than later chose between either continued occupation, which is bound to explode time and again and paradoxically undermine Israel's national security interests or peace with security with the Arab states.

Whereas incessant Arab hostilities and violence from Palestinian militant groups has justified the occupation for many Israelis on the grounds of national security, the Arab states' position has dramatically changed in the past decade, a fact which is not reflected in current Israeli policy. Moreover, Israel has failed to demonstrate, especially since 2000, how the occupation has in any way enhanced its national security, when in fact it has promoted further enmity, instability and violence, not to mention the astronomical cost in treasure and blood. Despite the relative socio-economic and security improvements in the West Bank, recent low-level violent clashes between Israel and the Palestinians in East Jerusalem and Hebron are feared to constitute a forerunner of another major violent outbreak that could torpedo any prospect for a peaceful solution in the foreseeable future. For this reason, 43 years later, the international community recognizes no correlation between occupation and national security, and views Israel's continued occupation not only as a security liability for Israel but the single most serious impediment to peace and regional strife.

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