links for 2008-05-17

• Can one 'pin down' electrons? - EurekAlert
• Fed and Bubbles: First, Heal Thyself? - Real Time Economics
• U.S. Planning Big New Prison in Afghanistan - New York Times
• Common Wealth - Jeffrey D. Sachs - Book Review - New York Times
• Eighteenth-century “proto-globalisation” - Vox EU
• Buiter’s warning: Who is the recapitaliser of last resort for the ECB? - Vox EU

Comments

[hari]

VOX - Who will recapitalize ECB?

What the good Prof doesn't understand or recognize is the way policy evolves under EU supra-national system of governance. As a rule, you've to create the intrinsic parameters of the policy- problem inorder to instigate a policy vaccum or resolution of it.

That's what's call incremental development of *ever closer union* under EU Treaty.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/world/africa/17somalia.html?hp&pagewanted=print

May 17, 2008

Famine Looms as Wars Rend Horn of Africa
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

Villagers say hundreds of Somalis are dying of hunger and thirst amid soaring global food prices, skimpy rainfall and rising violence.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/world/asia/17detain.html?hp&pagewanted=print

May 17, 2008

U.S. Planning Big New Prison in Afghanistan
By ERIC SCHMITT and TIM GOLDEN

Officials are scaling back plans to shift prisoners into Afghan custody in a stark acknowledgment that the U.S. is likely to hold prisoners overseas for years.

[Andrew]

Folks here may be interested in a discussion at Crooked Timber titled, Money Ruins Everything.

The central point is that "economic and technical innovation is increasingly based on developments that don’t rely on economic incentive or public provision. The main examples, obvious enough for readers here, include open source software, blogs and associated technical and social innovations, and wikis."

[anne]

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78257

May 16, 2008

Loss of Mangrove Forests Exacerbates Cyclone Deaths
By IRIN

BANGKOK - Cyclone Nargis – and the devastating tidal surge that followed – has highlighted the potential tragic consequences of pursuing rapid economic expansion while neglecting the environment.

In recent decades, farmers in Myanmar’s low-lying Ayeyarwady Delta cleared vast tracts of coastal mangrove forests to expand rice cultivation and - in the past eight years - to make way for export-oriented prawn farming.

However, according to specialists, the loss of these forests – and the protective cover they offered – probably exacerbated the cyclone’s toll.

Masakazu Kashio, a forest resources officer with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), hoped that in the wake of the disaster, Myanmar authorities would recognise the need to preserve and protect its remaining mangrove forest – and to rehabilitate much of the degraded cover.

“I really hope the Myanmar government will take this lesson very seriously, and take more proper action through the participatory approach – listen to people’s voices,” he told IRIN in Bangkok.

“They should establish a proper land-use plan and recognise they need to protect the vulnerable area from disaster from the sea or from flooding water,” he explained.

Most of the thousands of people who perished when Nargis slammed into the country on 2 and 3 May are believed to have drowned in the fierce 3.5m storm surge that swept nearly 40km inland.

The FAO said in a statement on 15 May that the mangrove forests could have cushioned the impact of the sea surge.

“Porous barriers such as coastal trees and forests cannot prevent inundation and inland flooding associated with storm surge,” the FAO said. But, “there is considerable potential for intact and dense coastal vegetation to reduce the impacts of waves and currents associated with the storm surge. Coastal forests can also act as windbreaks in reducing devastation in coastal communities resulting from cyclones.”

The FAO ran a mangrove forest rehabilitation project in the region for nearly a decade, until 2001. But Kashio said, “The pressure to open up more rice production was too strong.” ...

[anne]

http://www.irinnews.org/PrintReport.aspx?ReportId=75833

December 12, 2007

Live-Saving Sundarbans May Take Years to Recover From Cyclone
By IRIN

DHAKA - The world's largest mangrove forest - known as the Sundarbans - instrumental in saving thousands from certain death and destruction when Cyclone Sidr struck Bangladesh last month, may take up to 30 years to recover.

Had it not been for the 140,000-hectare Sundarbans taking the brunt of the storm, experts believe the loss of life and property would have been much higher.

"The Sundarbans is Bangladesh's guardian angel as far as storms and tidal waves are concerned," Chief Conservator of Forests AKM Shamsuddin said in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital. "Had there been no Sundarbans, the cyclone would have caused more havoc in the southern districts."

The Sundarbans are also an important source of livelihoods, some of which are now at risk.

"Though alleviating human suffering caused by the cyclone is naturally the top priority for international support, the salvation of the Sundarbans is also of great importance as several hundred thousand people depend on the forest resources for their livelihood," said Marc Patry of UNESCO's (the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) World Heritage Centre in Paris after visiting the area earlier this month.

"This is the message I tried to get across during my meeting with multilateral and bilateral donors," he added.

Over 3,500 people were killed and millions more were left homeless when the category four storm slammed into southwestern Bangladesh off the Bay of Bengal on 15 November. Packing winds in excess of 220kmph, the cyclone devastated much of the country's coastal belt, impacting more than 8.5 million people and leaving almost 1.5 million homes damaged or destroyed, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

World heritage site

Lying at the mouth of the Ganges river and spread across southwestern Bangladesh and West Bengal in India, the Sundarbans was designated as a world heritage site by UNESCO in 1997. About 6,000sqkm of the 10,000sqkm forest is in Bangladesh.

Teeming with fauna and wildlife, including 300 different types of bird, the Royal Bengal tiger, spotted deer, crocodiles, boars, fish, snakes, and monkeys, the area is one of the largest mangrove ecosystems of its kind.

A breeding ground for fish, shrimp, and crab, the area also provides livelihoods for hundreds of thousands of people living in the area: Char Dubla, a low-lying island at the extreme south of the forest, is the largest fishing and manual fish processing centre in Bangladesh today.

Additionally, much of the country's wood, grass, honey and `goal pata' (leaves used to make thatched roofs) come from the forest.

Three million trees affected

According to UNESCO, some 40 percent of the site was seriously damaged by the cyclone, which struck at the heart of the East Sundarbans, the biologically richest part of the Bangladeshi World Heritage property - stripping foliage off over 30 percent of the trees and felling a large number....

[anne]

I thought immediately, where were the trees? But, trees were rice.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/world/asia/17detain.html

May 17, 2008

U.S. Planning Big New Prison in Afghanistan
By ERIC SCHMITT and TIM GOLDEN

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is moving forward with plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex on the main American military base in Afghanistan, officials said, in a stark acknowledgment that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come.

The proposed detention center would replace the cavernous, makeshift American prison on the Bagram military base north of Kabul, which is now typically packed with about 630 prisoners, compared with the 270 held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Until now, the Bush administration had signaled that it intended to scale back American involvement in detention operations in Afghanistan. It had planned to transfer a large majority of the prisoners to Afghan custody, in an American-financed, high-security prison outside Kabul to be guarded by Afghan soldiers.

But American officials now concede that the new Afghan-run prison cannot absorb all the Afghans now detained by the United States, much less the waves of new prisoners from the escalating fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/world/asia/16kandahar.html

May 16, 2008

Hunger and Food Prices Push Afghanistan to Brink
By CARLOTTA GALL

While there have been no riots yet in Afghanistan over spiraling food prices, the economic pain and hunger are hitting the poor and unemployed, aid agency officials are warning.

[Who will have won when we win?]

[Teeny Tiny Down Payments]

WSJ..."But they are giving more weight to the view, which they have always given some credence, that prudential supervisory policies could have some role to play."

Politics may prevent adequate supervision. The WSJ had an article entitled, "Fannie Is Poised to Scrap
Policy Over Down Payments". The article showed how Fannie has again lowered lending standards in response to lobbying pressure by industry trade groups. Tiny down payments are back, so extreme leverage is back with them.

[kthomas]

Can one 'pin down' electrons? - EurekAlert

Great article. And to think there's been layoffs at Lawrence. Shame on you, Sen(s). Boxer and Feinstein.

When Einstein rejected quantum theory (I personally don't believe that guy rejected anything accept evil people) and said “spooky long-range interaction”.....was this his way of expressing fear in the possibilites? of...for example...teleportation (he was already considered crazy by many, so I can see him shying away from such sci-fi fanatasy back then) Based on what I've read, I can see applications in power transmission (no more cables or wires) and possibly a new way to transmit data and store data dynamically. Hillarious that both theories are correct. Those funny electrons.

Not looking for any replies, but such articles are like rays of vitamin D-rich photons to me.

[anne]

http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/05/cheap_talk_1.php

May 16, 2008

Cheap Talk
By Matthew Yglesias

I think the thing you have to understand about the surge of pundits wanting to invade Burma is that it's the very absurdity of the idea that makes it such an appealing op-ed thesis. It's self-righteousness without responsibility. Advocate an invasion of a country you don't know anything about and have it happen and, well, all kinds of things might go awry in a way that's embarrassing. But since everyone knows there's not going to be an invasion of Burma, you can say there ought to be one and then make up a nice story about how well it hypothetically went. You can even show your thoughtful seriousness about matters of war and peace by chalking up the tragic failure to invade as yet another disastrous consequence of the war in Iraq.