Mangrove loss ‘put Burma at risk‘ BBC
Shifting Priorities at the Wheel Science News. More on the perils of multitasking while driving.
Kaiser Security Guard Strike Dave Johnson, Seeing the Forest. The writer reports a “near blackout” on the strike, and indeed, a Google News search shows it only in a few local newspapers and sympathetic outlets.
The Giant Pool of Money Ira Glass. NPR (hat tip drathiel). On the housing bubble. The main themes are familiar, but some of the interviews are riveting.
Frank-Dodd Bailouts: Arithmetic, Not Ideology Dean Baker
Big Rescues Can Work. Just Ask New York. Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times talks to Felix Rohatyn about the city’s fiscal crisis. The thing Morganson misses, which fellow New York Times writer Floyd Norris identified in an earlier article, When Bankers Fear to Act, is that the housing crisis has many diffuse participants, far too many to gather in a room and knock heads together. Low friction, anonymous investing has high hidden costs.
This will likely be fixed by the time most readers see this, but right now, the irony is rich. On the business summary page, the New York Times has a link to Fundamentally: How to Tell if a Rally is Real. The link takes you to a page that is blank save advertising.
Taxing the Harvard Endowment Felix Salmon
Churchill and His Myths Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The New York Review of Books
Antidote du jour:
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I’m no Churchill-worshipper, but I object to this: “..the war cabinet was discussing the merits of poison gas (whose use against “uncivilised tribes” in Iraq Churchill had defended in 1920)”. What Churchill and others called “poison gas” in the 20s is what we now call tear gas. I suspect that the meaning of the phrase was changed for ever by Nazi practice. Any writer who doesn’t tell his readers this is a very naughty boy. As for the end of the Western Empires: well, that was FDR’s ambition. He didn’t mind the Russian Empire, though. It has occurred to me that it was ship-borne Empires that he objected to, rather than horse-borne, for obvious reasons.