Idiotprogrammer: Texas Literary Blog

Category: World Affairs

  • Don’t Eat Chocolate from Ivory Coast!

    I can’t believe I forgot to blog about this important story. Last February, Christian Parenti broke a great story about the exploitative nature of the chocolate industry. The big cocoa exporters – Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM, Fortune 500), Barry Callebaut and Saf-Cacao – do not own plantations and do not directly employ child workers.…

  • A real Thanksgiving treat…would be freedom

    One of the most appalling things about the Bush Administration is the fact that so many people have been locked in Gitmo for no reason at all. Roger Cohen writes, “Of the 770 detainees grabbed here and there and flown to Guantánamo, only 23 have ever been charged with a crime. Of the more than…

  • Look for the American Flag

    This is not a subject I normally get excited about, but two days I bought the most incredible tennis shoes! Skechers has some incredibly stylish and comfortable shoes. Question: How do you know if a pair of tennis shoes has been made in China? Check for a picture of the American flag or the words…

  • Ron Suskind’s Allegation & Office of Special Plans

    A week or two ago, Tom Tomorrow blogged about Ron Suskind’s allegation that the CIA forged a letter supporting the spurious claim that 9/11 terrorist Attar met with Iraqi intelligence. This letter was leaked to a a British newspaper and later cited as evidence in American media (and alluded to by public officials). Apparently the…

  • Minimum wage is now $6.55

    According to Tony Pugh, the federal minimal wage rose yesterday to $6.55 (It has been in the $5 range for over a decade). Robert Reich thinks the problem lies in depressed worker productivity: But there’s also a limit to how many hours Americans can put into work, so Americans turned to a third coping mechanism.…

  • Crazy Dubai!

    Here are some photos and artist rendering of what Dubai looks like now and will look like in the next decade. This is pretty astounding. For starters, here’s a photo of its underwater hotel (to be finished in 2009).

  • Lowered fertility rates

    Kay S. Hymowitz on Fertility rates and Carrie Bradshaw: Demographers get really excited about shifts like these, but in case you don’t get what the big deal is, consider: in 1960, 70 percent of American 25-year-old women were married with children; in 2000, only 25 percent of them were. In 1970, just 7.4 percent of…

  • Deconstructing Satire

    Tom Tomorrow notes that in the satirical Obama cover for this week’s  New Yorker,  the NYT coverage of the scandal interviewed several TV hosts but no political cartoonists. Here’s his great lesson on how to deconstruct (and degut) a piece of satire . Here’s a good interview with Obama by Farreed Zacharia. I wish someone…

  • Odds and Ends

    Click and clack on how your automobile can use less gas: The softer your tires are, the greater the friction between the road and the rubber, and the harder your engine will have to work to move the car. When we check tire pressure on our customers’ cars, we notice that they are often nowhere…

  • Dividends from Cap and Trade

    Robert Reich proposes an interesting way for citizens to profit from global warming: That’s why it’s important that all revenues from carbon auctions be cycled back to citizens. And rather than launch another endless debate over how and to whom – a payroll tax cut for people earning under the median wage? a cut in…

  • Details of my September Europe trip.

    I’ll be leaving Thursday night from Houston and meeting a Ukrainian student friend of mine  in Stuttgart Germany Friday night. I’ll stay in Germany for 3 days, go to Ireland for 8 days, return to Stuttgart to catch a plane to Tirana (where I’ll spend 8 or 9 days). I plan to visit friends in…

  • E-rotic Europop: Mindless, Sexy and Embarrassing (and very fun!)

    I lived in Albania for 2 years during which I sat in many a bus travelling for hours from one city to another. We were at the mercy of the bus driver’s musical tastes. I remember vividly hearing La Macarena all the time (it was an incessant  banality even in Albania ).  Every bus driver…

  • Burmese News

    Since the Burmese  government for the most part prevents good outside journalism about the cyclone or their politics, the most reliable source of information so far (aside from BBC/ITV sneak-in journalism) is Irrawaddy, an expat newspaper with ample coverage of the subject.  I am seriously thinking of donating some money not to some international aid…

  • Geography Cartoons

      From Intellexual.net

  • There’s something there

    When Robert Reich says that federal bailout of Bear Stearns won’t work  (here’s part 2) and AEI is saying it won’t work (See Peter Wallison’s piece and John Chapman’s piece) , you know something serious is going on. David Frum sums it up: If Ben Bernanke owns a Ouija board, this might be a good…

  • Europe does not have higher oil prices

    From a New York Times article by Steven Weisman  on US currency management: President Bush has appealed to oil-producing countries to increase the flow of oil to put a damper on oil prices. He has been repeatedly rebuffed, however, as oil ministers from the Persian Gulf charge that rising oil prices result more from American…