By Dave Anderson:
Via the BBC, an interesting and useful map of what cartels are dominant where in Mexico:
[...]edited by: Mike Landfair,
Oregon Editor
By Dave Anderson:
Via the BBC, an interesting and useful map of what cartels are dominant where in Mexico:
[...]By Dave Anderson:
Changing policy to benefit entrenched, well-connected and well-funded interests is easy. That is the basic story behind Bush's tax-cuts. He wanted to give money to the well-connected and the elite. They were willing to take the money and to use their access and power to convince people that [...]
By BJ Bjornson
At this point I don't give a damn about Obama. If he's going to govern like Clinton or a Republican we might as well have a Republican.
Ron Beasley from I agree with Howard
Sure, Republicans will be worse, but only by degree and not categorically worse.
Dave Anderson from [...]
By Dave Anderson:
1) Get your knees up
2) Relax
3) Think of England
That is good advice in two situations. The first is in the fraction of a second before one is hit by an oncoming car as becoming a reed flexing in the wind (or through the windshield) is far safer than [...]
By Dave Anderson:
I am at best a believer in the weakest form of the mostly, sort of, kind-of eventually efficient market hypothesis --- namely that Stein's law is in effect and that sooner or later, valuations will roughly reflect reality but day to day price fluctuations are mainly noise. Strong' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
I have been puzzled as to why the Mexican cartels have not begun to attack the Mexican government's cash flow. The Mexican economy has five main sources of foreign currency; hydrocarbon exports, light manufacturing in the border zone, tourism, remittances and smuggling into the United States. The cartels' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Ian Welsh summarizes politics 101:
Bad policy = bad outcomes for ordinary people. Bad outcomes for ordinary people when you control the House, Senate and White House make them figure they should try the other party. (See, 2006, 2008).
Dem politicos need to get this tattooed on their butt, [...]
By Dave Anderson:
That is where Tony Blair should be going anyways for a trial on the crime of waging aggressive war. He indicts himself this morning as the LA Times reports:
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he would have found a justification for invading Iraq even without the [...]
By Dave Anderson:
I have long thought that the primary cartel goal in Mexico is not a collapsed state, as we see that Somalia is too dysfunctional for large scale, complex criminality in the anarchic south, but a hollow state that maintains the pretenses and appearance of sovereignty but not [...]
By Dave Anderson:
I've been tough on Altmire and I still think that he faces an uphill battle for re-election as I have a very hard time seeing where he will get his doorknockers to rouse an apathetic Democratic base in a Tea Party friendly district. He has voted against' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
The Security Crank points out claims that a significant portion of the entire Chechan population is supposedly in Warizistan:
At some point, this kind of thing moves beyond parody.
According to the reports Haji Akbar Ali Mehsud, a 55-year-old resident of Zinda village in District Sararogha received, there [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Carbon taxes and cap and trade are both attempts to create price incentives to reduce carbon emissions. The goal is to raise the dispersed and mostly externalized cost of pollution into a concentrated and internalized cost for the polluter. From here, most polluters will seek to reduce emissions [...]
By Dave Anderson:
How much has piracy impacted Egypt? The main impact on Egypt is the loss of trade from ships that would otherwise have landed at an Egyptian Red Sea port but no longer or not as frequently and the loss of revenue from the Suez Canal. The first group [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Voice of America reports on a large series of attacks in Baghdad:
Iraqi police say a series of car bombings across the capital, Baghdad, has killed at least 112 people and wounded nearly 200 others....
Tuesday's attacks were the worst in the Iraqi capital since late October when twin car bomb [...]
By Dave Anderson:
One of the great structural problems that faces the United States is that our elites are insulated from their stupidity. There is sufficient wealth and social amnesia that being wrong is at most a minor inconvenience instead of a career killer unless the "wrongness" involves stating the unpleasantly [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Just a few things that I have seen about Somalia during the past week.
The Wall Street Journal reports on a partial decapitation strike on the Somali "government" that is completely dependent on foreign guns that are insufficient to secure the capital city:
A suicide blast at a [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Budgets are moral documents as they are the practical implementation and prioritization of plans and values.
Ezra Klein notes where the priorities of the American elite lie:
As Annie Lowrey points out, Obey isn't trying to make the Iraq and Afghanistan wars deficit-neutral. He's not even trying to [...]
By Dave Anderson:
The Typepad iteration of the Newshoggers has just put up its 5,000th post. We opened the doors here in April 2007 and have been writing up a storm since then. We are averaging a touch more than eight posts per day. Going back through the blogger 'Hog, the' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
From Jonathan Schwartz:This is from the recent HBO documentary about Barack Obama's campaign. Watching it now made me angry all over again on behalf on people who believed in him, worked on his campaign and spent a big chunk of their lives getting him elected. You can say they were' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
The Somali piracy season is in full swing. Two tankers have been targeted this week, including the one that was captured at the start of the week.
Somali pirates have captured a tanker carrying oil to the US, officials say.
The
Greek-owned Maran Centaurus was about 1,300km (800 miles) off [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Training the trainers is a high value activity for consultants and specialists. Being able to impart knowledge and the structure to students to effectively redeliver and expand the knowledge sphere is a tough skill set. It looks like the US policy of training paramilitary forces for counter-drug efforts [...]
By Dave Anderson:
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is trying to put on a happy face to the region's gambling revenue declines. There are gains, month over month, as long as one neglects to mention the G-20's effective closure of the Pittsburgh casino, or admit that some months have more days than [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Brad DeLong asks why good long-term macro policy is not politically popular. I think the answer is one of the distribution of visible and discrete benefits versus the visible and discrete costs. He asserts the following:By Dave Anderson:
The Carnegie Endowment's Gilles Dorronsoro has an interesting take on the emerging conventional wisdom of COIN and its futility in Afghanistan:
The so-called ink spot strategy—subduing a large hostile region with a relatively small military force by establishing a number of small safe areas and then pushing out from' [...]
