Global News: May 2008 Archives
Los Angeles Times - China's powerful weakness
Francis Fukuyama considers the Chinese central government's lack of control over local bureaus: "Americans traditionally distrust strong central government and champion a federalism that distributes powers to state and local governments. The logic of wanting to move government closer to the people is strong, but we often forget that tyranny can be imposed by local oligarchies as much as by centralized ones. In the history of the Anglophone world, it is not the ability of local authorities to check the central government but rather a balance of power between local authorities and a strong central government that is the true cradle of liberty." He cites England, pre-revolutionary France, and the Jim Crow South as contrasting examples.
CNBC: Pickens: Oil Going to $150, So Move to Gas
T. Boone Pickens is a peak-oil believer? "The President wasted his time to go to Saudi Arabia.... They can't give any more oil...they're stacking up the money as fast as they can stack it up.... Eighty-five million barrels of oil a day is all the world can produce, and the demand is 87 million. It's just that simple." (Via Crunchy Con.)
Burma's Unnatural Disaster - WSJ.com
Dictatorship deepens disaster's impact: "Even before Cyclone Nargis hit early Saturday morning, nongovernmental organizations such as World Vision were warning of the impending disaster. Radio Free Asia and Voice of America broadcast news of the storm's approach. Burma's ruling generals, by contrast, did nothing to prepare their people for the cyclone." (Hat tip: John Eagleton.)
Some of the same Democratic senators who voted against oil exploration in ANWR and the Gulf of Mexico are "demanding that President Bush tell OPEC nations to increase their oil supplies or risk losing arms deals with the United States." (Hat tip: John Eagleton.)
The Conservative Revival - New York Times
David Brooks on the revival of the British Conservative Party after a decade in the wilderness, with a Burkean emphasis on the "little platoons" that make society work: "These conservatives are not trying to improve the souls of citizens. They're trying to use government to foster dense social bonds. They want voters to think of the Tories as the party of society while Labor is the party of the state. They want the country to see the Tories as the party of decentralized organic networks and the Laborites as the party of top-down mechanistic control." (Via Crunchy Con.)
Hot Air: Dems go to opposite extreme on war funding
"Nancy Pelosi has decided to push through a supplemental war-funding bill that will keep operations in Iraq going until 2009, without withdrawal timetables.... MoveOn says that Democrats have no choice but to capitulate on the war, despite having a majority, but they never explain why. The truth is that a precipitous withdrawal has never been a popular position, and it has grown even less so over the last year."
The Associated Press: Ex-Iranian president: Fomenting violence abroad 'treason'
Iran former President Khatami hints that current regime is sponsoring bombings and sabotage abroad. (Via Ace.)
"When Afghan farmers plow under their poppy fields to grow grain because cereal is becoming more lucrative than heroin; when The Wall Street Journal suggests 'it's time for Americans to start stockpiling food' -- and they're not smiling; when CNN reports that 'riots from Haiti to Bangladesh to Egypt over the soaring costs of basic foods have brought the issue to a boiling point and catapulted it to the forefront of the world's attention'; then this is the world's big story.
