Adventures in Onionism

In the last several months I listened to Ghost Wars and Private Empire by Steve Coll, The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, and The Dark Side by Jane Meyer. Private Empire doesn't really fit the pattern, but Ghost Wars had been on my list for a long time, and I heard Coll discuss Empire (which is about Exxon) on Fresh Air and was astonished by one (stylized) fact: Exxon cuts a check to Chad essentially 100 times as large as USAID's analogous check every year. Wow. After finishing both of Coll's books, I'm underwhelmed with his writing, as I find it fairly dry. Yet the topics are so interesting that I managed to finish. It didn't hurt that my roadtrips were so long I caught up on all my podcasts and had nothing else to listen to. I'll say two things about Private Empire : (1) if you're going to do business in a country with a brutal dictatorship, it is impossible to keep your hands clean, and (2) oil companies are just like big banks--lemon socialism...

Continuing on with this post and this post of mine about politicians being able to understand problems they themselves don't have, here's this dKos post : 20 Democrat reps are trying to live for a week on what SNAP provides, in protests of cuts to the program that Republicans are insisting be in the farm bill. Barbara Lee's actually done it before, for real.

A while ago I posted about what I called hypocrisy , in the form of conservatives' inability to imagine what it's like to be underprivileged or underrepresented unless someone in their immediate family brings it home to them. You might consider that a lack of empathy. Now there's a recent essay in The New Yorker called " The Case Against Empathy ." Basically, empathy is horrible at math (read: cost-benefit analysis). Also, conservatives claim they're being empathetic too, just with the over-regulated small business owner instead of the polluted-on inner-city minority, so just claiming we need more empathy doesn't really solve many arguments. And today there's a short bit in The Atlantic about the same thing: military intervention to stop atrocities is really expensive, so likely less cost-effective than other ways to save lives. I suppose it just boils down to your definition of empathy. If you think it's a blind emotion with no reason, sure, ...

NYT: The Beginning of the End of the Census? “We’re spending $70 per person to fill this out. That’s just not cost effective,” he continued, “especially since in the end this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.” In fact, the randomness of the survey is precisely what makes the survey scientific, statistical experts say. Ha ha ha ha! When your idiotic ideology fails you, just eliminate the empirical evidence. Free platitudes for everyone!

I am, of course, referring to Barack Obama. Both generally and specifically. If I had taken my other job offer and was now living in DC, I'd gladly go get arrested protesting the Keystone pipeline, which Obama could prevent with the executive stroke of his pen if he had actually meant anything he said during his campaign. Instead, James Hansen says it's game over for the climate. The only good thing about this situation is my constantly imagining Bill Paxton describing the fucking of the planet. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsx2vdn7gpY ) Read about it on Salon ( http://www.salon.com/news/global_warming/index.html?story=/tech/htww/2011/08/24/obama_s_keystone_problem ) or with a development economics perspective at the Center for Global Development ( http://blogs.cgdev.org/globaldevelopment/2011/08/obama-set-to-lob-canadian-carbon-bomb-at-india.php ).

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Missouri, Black Caucus Chair): "This deal is a sugar-coated Satan sandwich. If you lift the bun, you will not like what you see." Do shit sandwiches or Satan sandwiches taste better? I wish I had even worse Internet access here than I do so that it was impossible to be so well-informed.

Deworming nationwide in Kenya didn't happen in 2010 , despite it being awesome; my friends mentioned. Kenya made a data website . NYT says the World Bank is opening up its data vaults too. The government prosecuted an ultra-runner for small-time mortgage fraud, big fish are all still free.

Greetings from the back corner of the room at the National University of Rwanda School of Public Health and a session on program impact evaluation. After 58 hours of travel, including a long delay at Dulles (and the Worldgate Marriott in Herndon, VA) and an overnight stay at a swanky hotel in Addis Ababa all care of Ethiopian Airlines, I arrived in Kigali yesterday. One of the three channels on the hotel TV is CNN, and there's free slow wifi, so on that note: hooray for helping 32 million people get health insurance. It's not 47 million, but it's something.