links for 2008-05-09

• Blogonomics: Judging Bloggers - Felix Salmon
• What's bugging locusts? - EurekAlert
• Candy weighing demonstration - the unwisdom of crowds - Andrew Gelman
• Ethanol Fantasy Fuels a Food-Price Nightmare - John M. Berry
• At Least They're Consistent - Tom Bozzo
• High Prices for Staple Foods Dip, but Volatility Persists - New York Times
• The Lucrative Art of War - New York Times

Comments

[anne]

http://www.juancole.com/2008/05/sadr-city-residents-warned-to-leave.html

May 9, 2008

Sadr City Residents Warned to Leave
By Juan Cole

The Iraqi military has warned civilians to leave * the vast slum of Sadr City, apparently in preparation for a massive government assault on the Mahdi Army militia based there. Since slum dwellers notoriously lack the means to leave their slums, this call seems more likely to be for the sake of appearances than a realistic expectation. When thousands are massacred in the course of a military attack on a densely packed civilian area, the authorities will be able to say that they gave fair warning. Although the US demonizes the Mahdi Army, Many Sadr City residents view it as in part a charitable organization, and they also are often grateful for the security it provides. It is not as if the federal government is providing security.

Saddam Hussein was the Iraqi leader who invented the technique of ethnically cleansing rebellious populations as a way of making his rule stick. He did it to the Marsh Arabs in the south and also to Kurds in the north. The US has already either conducted or allowed ethnic cleansing in Falluja and West Baghdad. It now seems set to empty out the east of the capital.

Apparently the fractious, RPG-wielding slum dwellers are getting in the way of the planned Green Zone golf course, ** so they have to be removed.

You know some British colonial administrators were still planning new cricket fields in India in 1946.

* http://www.mcclatchydc.com/iraq/story/36436.html

** http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/06/iraq

[anne]

http://www.juancole.com/2008/05/sadr-city-residents-warned-to-leave.html

May 9, 2008

Babylon & Beyond
By Juan Cole

Tina Susman of the Los Angeles Times has some fun with the Bush administration's fixation on Iran * as a source of weapons and trouble in Iraq. She notes a major embarrassment last week when a cache of supposedly Iranian weapons seized in the Shiite holy city of Karbala turned out to be no such thing. The US military had just taken the word for it of local Karbala police. She says that this week when the Pentagon gave its overview of captured weapons, all of a sudden there was no mention of Iran at all.

* http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2008/05/iraq-the-elusiv.html

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/world/asia/09general.html

May 9, 2008

Pentagon Drops Post in Pakistan for Top General
By ERIC SCHMITT

The Pentagon has canceled the assignment of Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood to a top position in Pakistan after the Pakistani media excoriated him for his previous job as commander of Guantánamo Bay.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/science/09sahara.html

May 9, 2008

Shift From Savannah to Sahara Was Gradual, Research Suggests
By KENNETH CHANG

Six thousand years ago, northern Africa was a place of trees, grasslands, lakes and people. Today, it is the Sahara — a desolate area larger area than Australia.

Lake Yoa, in northeastern Chad, has remained a lake through the millennia and is still a lake today, surrounded by hot desert. Although little rain falls, Lake Yoa's water is replenished from an underground aquifer.

By analyzing thousands of layers sediment in a core drilled from the bottom of this lake, an international team of scientists has reconstructed the region's climate as the savannah changed to Sahara.

In Friday's issue of the journal Science, the researchers, led by Stefan Kröpelin, a geologist with the Institute of Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Cologne in Germany, report that the climate transition occurred gradually. In particular, the changing types of pollen that fell on the water and drifted to the bottom tell a story of how the surrounding terrain shifted from trees to shrubs to grasses to sand — "where today you don't find a single piece of grass," Dr. Kröpelin said.

The findings run counter to a prevailing view that the change happened abruptly, within a few centuries, about 5,500 years ago, marking the end of the "African Humid Period" when monsoon rains poured down on the region. That view arises from ocean sediment cores drilled off the coast of Africa, to the west of Mauritania. In 2000, analysis of the cores by researchers led by Peter B. deMenocal of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory showed a sudden rise in the dust blown off Africa at that time.

Dr. Kröpelin did not dispute the ocean core data, but said it had been "overinterpreted."

Data about what was happening on land is sparse, because sands blow around and do not preserve a clear geological record the way lake sediments do. But at Lake Yoa, the water that filled underground aquifers during the humid period, which began 14,800 years ago, is still flowing out into the 80-foot-deep lake. The groundwater is enough to offset the six meters of water that evaporates out of the lake every year, Dr. Kröpelin said. Only a few millimeters of rain fall a year.

Dr. Kröpelin said he hoped to return to Lake Yoa next year to drill a deeper core that could trace the climate history back 12,000 years....

[CO2]

"...there literally isn't enough arable land to grow the corn needed to supply the mandated increases..."

Rain forests are being cut down in South America to grow ethanol crops. This puts carbon into the air. Large homes are mandated to people who would choose smaller homes if allowed. Large homes use lots of extra fuel to heat, which puts more carbon into the air. If you people are concerned about CO2, why do you vote for such things?

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/opinion/09fri2.html

May 9, 2008

The Lucrative Art of War

Congress is finally moving to shut one of the more egregious forms of Iraq war profiteering: defense contractors using offshore shell companies to avoid paying their fair share of payroll taxes. The practice is widespread and Congressional investigators have been dispatched to one of the prime tax refuges, the Cayman Islands, to seek a firsthand estimate of how much the Treasury is being shorted.

No one will be surprised to hear that one of the suspected prime offenders is KBR, the Texas-based defense contractor, formerly a part of the Halliburton conglomerate allied with Vice President Dick Cheney. According to a report in The Boston Globe, KBR, which has landed billions in Iraq contracts, has used two Cayman shell companies to avoid paying hundreds of millions in payroll, Medicare and unemployment taxes.

Unfortunately right now there is nothing illegal about this. The House has approved legislation to plug the dodge by treating foreign subsidiaries of defense contractors as what they are — American employers required to pay taxes. The Senate must quickly follow suit and not buy the contractors' line that listing American workers at offshore companies is a cost saving passed on patriotically to the war effort. No less insulting, the Cayman dodge has been blocking Americans from the protection of labor and anti-discrimination laws.

The House has taken on another shamefully common abuse: voting to deny future government contracts to any company that fails to pay its corporate taxes, including an estimated 25,000 defense contractors keeping billions due the Treasury. The Senate should approve that legislation as well....