The Night of the Gun

Me and My Girls

The Gift of Time

The Gift of Time-Letters from a Father
By Jorge Ramos

Blaming Monica Goodling

Poverty Measurement

a sensible way to measure poverty?

Top Reformer goes at it again

Moments after President Bush appeared at the Rose Garden to say that the Pentagon would begin a humanitarian aid mission to support Georgia, Mr. Saakashvili was on the phone with a Western reporter, talking fast. “This is a turning point,” he said. Soon he appeared on national television, his tousled hair combed back flat and wearing a freshly pressed suit, assuring his country that the worst had passed.

No matter that Russian troops were 30 miles away, milling on the road outside the capital, meeting no resistance. Mr. Saakashvili was in cocky form in an interview later in the evening with reporters, expounding on Nazi propaganda, Orwell and the film “Dr. Strangelove.”

“Russians should see that this is not a demoralized, you know, nervous panicking capital that is just scared,” he said. “Shops are open. There are no lines for gas stations. Prices are not up.”

He added, “We will fight to the end, until the last Russian soldier leaves Georgian soil and this country is not going to be brought to the knees anymore. We are not surrendering, no matter what.”

Mr. Saakashvili’s latest show of bravado came only a day after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that she and a special State Department envoy had explicitly and repeatedly warned him not to take any military action against Georgian separatists that might provoke Russia, cautioning that the United States was not prepared to back him militarily if he did. He also appeared to exaggerate the Pentagon’s planned relief operation, making it seem larger and further developed than it was.

“We already saw U.S. Air Force landing in Georgia despite Russians controlling the airspace,” he said, after a C-17 had touched down. “And we will see U.S. military ships entering Georgian ports despite Russians blocking it. That we will see.” He added, “These will be serious military ships.”

Q & A on Georgia

Economics … by John McCain

Podcasts

The great grammar debate
Is learning formal grammar essential to becoming a good writer and communicator? Or is it more important to develop a feeling for language that can be applied in different contexts?

John Milton: 400 Years On

Restructuring secondary education

Being your own therapist - Buddhist style

Is being gay in your biology?

Cuba: socialism with salsa

Post traumatic stress disorder

Oral cancer

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

Pole to Pole: A vet on the ice with seals

The Wallace-Darwin papers on biological evolution - 150 years ago

Buckminster Fuller

Chinese contemporary art

State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century

Goldman Says Economic Recovery Requires More Saving

Public Bailout of Bank’s Recklessness
In response to the ongoing sub-prime crisis, the recently published Crosby Report recommends that the Government uses public money to swap bank’s seriously damaged mortgage-backed securities for pristine government bonds. Matthew Watson from the Department of Politics and International Studies at Warwick University talks about these recommendations, and how the global ‘credit crunch’ is affecting Labour’s popularity with the electorate.

Chilli, Chocolate, and Chips: Foods that Originate from the New World

South Korea’s Cram Schools

“Min-ju, do your best! Fighting!” Mr. Chung shouted as his daughter disappeared into the building. Min-ju turned around and raised a clenched fist. “Fighting!” she shouted back.

South Koreans say their obsession to get their children into top-notch universities is nothing short of “a war.” Nowhere is that zeal better illustrated than in cram schools like Jongro Yongin Campus, located in a sparsely populated suburb of Yongin, 25 miles south of Seoul.

Most Jongro students are “jaesoo sang,” or “study-again students.” Having failed to get into the university of their choice, they are preparing relentlessly for next year’s entrance examination. Some try and try again, for three years running after graduating from high school.

The Jongro school pursues a strategy of isolation, cut off from competing temptations of any sort. Its curriculum is so tightly regulated and the distractions so few that students say they have no option but to study.

“Sending Min-ju here was not an ideal, but an inevitable choice,” said Mr. Chung, a 50-year-old accountant. “In our country, college entrance exams determine 70 to 80 percent of a person’s future. It’s a sad reality. But you have to acknowledge it; otherwise you hurt your children’s future.”

Admission to the right university can make or break an ambitious young South Korean. The university that students attend in their 20s can determine the jobs they get and the money they make in their 50s. The top-tier schools — Seoul National, Korea and Yonsei Universities, collectively known as SKY— may hardly register on global lists of the best in higher education. But here, their diplomas are a ticket of admission, an envied status symbol and a badge of pride for graduates and parents.

The life of a South Korean child, from kindergarten to high school, is dominated by the need to excel in standardized entrance examinations for college. The system is so demanding that it is credited with fueling the nation’s outstanding economic success. It is also widely criticized for the psychological price it exacts from young people. Among young people 10 to 19, suicide is the second most common cause of death, after traffic accidents.

-A Taste of Failure Fuels an Appetite for Success at South Korea’s Cram Schools

Mahmoud Darwis' Legacy

Parenting advice from Michael Phelps' Mother

As he entered public school, he displayed what his teachers called “immature” behavior. “In kindergarten I was told by his teacher, ‘Michael can’t sit still, Michael can’t be quiet, Michael can’t focus,’ ” recalled Ms. Phelps, who was herself a teacher for 22 years. The family had recently moved, and she felt Michael might be frustrated because the kindergarten curriculum he was getting in the new district was similar to the pre-K curriculum in their old district.

“I said, maybe he’s bored,” Ms. Phelps recalled saying to his teacher. “Her comment to me — ‘Oh, he’s not gifted.’ I told her I didn’t say that, and she didn’t like that much. I was a teacher myself so I didn’t challenge her, I just said, ‘What are you going to do to help him?’ ”

In the elementary grades at their suburban Baltimore school, Ms. Phelps said, Michael excelled in things he loved — gym and hands-on lessons, like science experiments. “He read on time, but didn’t like to read,” she said. “So I gave him the Baltimore Sun sports pages, even if he just read the pictures and captions.”

She will never forget one teacher’s comment: “This woman says to me, ‘Your son will never be able to focus on anything.’ ”

His grades were B’s and C’s and a few D’s.

It was a tough period. Ms. Phelps and her husband, a state trooper, were divorcing. She had just gone back to school to get a master’s degree to become an administrator, she said, and at the same time she had to be the 24/7 parent.

Michael grew like crazy, but not evenly — his ears looked huge, and when he ran, his arms swung below his knees. (He was on his way to being 6 feet 4 inches tall with an arm span of 6 feet 7 inches.) Kids bullied him, and when he whacked one on the school bus, he was suspended from the bus for several days....

At age 9, Michael was put on Ritalin, a stimulant used to treat hyperactivity.

His mother thinks it helped a little. “He seemed to be able to focus longer,” she said. “He could get through homework without moving around so much.” She said he was still a middling student. “It might have raised some C’s to B’s,” she said. But if a homework assignment had to be at least four sentences, she said, “he’d just do four sentences.”

After two years, Michael asked to get off the meds. He had to go to the school nurse’s office to take a pill at lunch, she said, and felt stigmatized. “Out of the blue, he said to me: ‘I don’t want to do this anymore, Mom. My buddies don’t do it. I can do this on my own.’ ”

“I was always stern as a parent,” she said, “but from Day 1, I included my children as part of the decision process. So I listened.” After consulting with Dr. Wax, Michael stopped medication.

-Phelps’s Mother Recalls Helping Her Son Find Gold-Medal Focus

Assorted on Iran

Bueno de Mesquita on Iran and Threats to U.S. Security;

Ahmadinejad is the President of Iran, but virtually all power there is held by the Supreme Council. Has veto power, can remove people from office; all people elected including Ahmadinejad serve at the pleasure of the Supreme Council. Interviews, Ahmadinejad ranked 18th in terms of power. At odds with most people's public perception. Maybe he's 17th or 19th; but he's not 3rd or 4th. He is a very outspoken man, says many outrageous things, so he gets a lot of news coverage. Came to power by election from being mayor of Teheran by carving out a constituency of not-very-well educated who saw in him someone who would advance Iranian nationalist sentiment. His power has faded and his party keeps losing by elections. Media attention also because American media has poor or no access to Ali Khamenei, head of the Supreme Council, most powerful person in Iran. Putin had audience with Khamenei; Western leaders only get to see Ahmadinejad. Why would Khamenei want Ahmadinejad in power? Good for floating trial balloons, has a salutary effect in terms of foreign policy; has convinced some people that the Iranian leadership is irrational, and in doing so have attained a certain amount of deterrent clout. Very Schellingesque (Thomas Schelling, Nobel Prize winner), soft application of game theory to national security problems, brinksmanship. Strategy that if you convince the other guy that you'll drive off the cliff, the other guy gets pretty nervous about it.

Iranian interior minister's fake Oxford diploma

When the the obviously faked diploma hit the Web, it caused a popular firestorm in Iran, with calls for Kordan to step down immediately if he can't produce the real thing. The Iranian Web site that first revealed the bogus document has now been blocked inside the country. Some analysts even think Ahmadinejad may have set Kordan up to embarrass his likely rival in the next presidential race, Ali Larijani. Kordan is a former aide to Larijani, who is also speaker of the parliament and looking slightly worse for the wear as the controversy continues.

New Ministers in Iran May Quash Ahmadinejad’s Economic Plans

Incredible America

The census calculates that by 2042, Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will together outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Four years ago, officials had projected the shift would come in 2050.

The main reason for the accelerating change is significantly higher birthrates among immigrants. Another factor is the influx of foreigners, rising from about 1.3 million annually today to more than 2 million a year by midcentury, according to projections based on current immigration policies.

“No other country has experienced such rapid racial and ethnic change,” said Mark Mather, a demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, a research organization in Washington.

-In a Generation, Minorities May Be the U.S. Majority

Assorted Economic Podcasts

Allan Meltzer Says Fed Failing to Control Inflation

Harvard's Feldstein Says Fed Slow to Recognize Credit Crisis

James Poterba Says U.S. Consumer `Likely' to Retrench

What Would Nixon Do on U.S.-Cuba Relations?

Related;
Nixon Center

More on Georgia

Professor Padma Desai and Nina Kruscheva



Russia Blog Readers Comment on Conflict

Next Big Thing on the Web?

Fire Eagle

Related;
Yahoo Unveils Platform for Location-Based Services

Force feeding little girls

A deeply disturbing habit from Mauritania;

Big is often regarded as beautiful in Mauritania, but the controversial act of force-feeding is still practiced in some parts of the country.

Assorted

Why Are Exchange Rates So Difficult to Predict?

Building a Better World: Infrastructure's Role in Economic Growth

Clearing the Roadways: The Case for Congestion Pricing

Why the U.S. Treasury Began Auctioning Treasury Bills in 1929

Poverty in New York City, 1969-99:
The Influence of Demographic Change, Income Growth, and Income Inequality

The Changing Nature of the U.S. Balance of Payments

Early warnings of inflation in India'

World Free of Poverty on Vacation

World Bank's Poverty and Growth blog goes on vacation.

Photo of the Day

via Boing Boing- Pieter Hugo's Nollywood Series

Related;
Nigerian films are so successful that the government wants to get involved;

Today, filmmaking employs about a million people in Nigeria, split equally between production and distribution, making it the country's biggest employer after agriculture, according to the National Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB). The industry has sales of $200m-300m a year....

The films cost anywhere between $15,000 and $100,000 to make, and the money comes directly from the market. Producers, or “marketers”, as they are known, use some of the profits from one film to pay for the next. Banks do not lend to Nollywood, as there are no statistics from which they could estimate likely returns

Free Reads

Looking Backward and Forward: Policy Issues in the Twenty-first Century
Author: Charles Wolf Jr.

Lenin's Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives
Author: Paul R. Gregory

Bits, Bytes, and Balance Sheets: The New Economic Rules of Engagement in a Wireless World
Author: Walter B. Wriston

George Washington on Leadership

Richard Brookhiser

Explainer of the Day

Gasoline prices

Was the Top Reformer stupid?

Interesting observations on the Russia and Georgia war from Belgravia Dispatch;

Which brings me to a fifth point, and perhaps a more proximate causal factor contributing to this explosion of misfortune in Georgia, namely, that of stupidity, or at least, severe miscalculation. Saakashvili, an apparently quite idealistic 40 year-old former NY lawyer, seems to have erred too much in thinking that giddy summitry with Western big-wigs might pay dividends (or too his far too excited involvement in the Iraq adventure which, incidentally, looks to be coming to a quite precipitous end) but unfortunately, insufficiently appreciated the disastrous waning in U.S. power these past years, despite his constant hankering for NATO membership (which a resurgent Russia will never accept regardless of Kosovo or whatever else, best I can tell), and thus has fallen short with regard to better appreciating a variable which would have been more apropos, namely, a harsh dose of realpolitik. And this despite Putin having warned Saakashvili rather pointedly: "On April 21, Mr. Saakashvili called the Russian leader to demand that he reverse the decision [possible Russian recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia]. He reminded Mr. Putin that the West had taken Georgia’s side in the dispute. And Mr. Putin, according to several of Mr. Saakashvili’s associates, shot back with a suggestion about where they could put their statements. Mr. Saakashvili, prudent for once, shied from uttering the exact wording, but said that Mr. Putin had used “extremely offensive language,” and had repeated the expression several times." Permit me to be less prudent than Mr. Saakashvili, who appears perhaps to be a poor prioritizer of where to be prudent and where not. Mr. Putin told him that he could (and excuse the crudity) stick American and Western European assurances regarding the territorial disputes in question up his rear end, I suspect, and I'm afraid that's not a too inaccurate assessment, if a bit biting and brusque (save if McCain trumps Obama and decides to ride the NATO cavalry up from Kabul to Tbilisi a few months hence--perhaps on the back of some more WaPo interventionist rhapsodizing--devoid of the merest smidgen of appreciation for historical context and subtlety, leading to another toweringly idiotic 'Washington consensus' of some sort).

NYT's The Lede has more coverage.

Germans and Poles start a fight

Nudist war on the German-Polish border!

Georgia the Model?

World Bank's Doing Business blog seems to have more posts on Georgia than any other country. For example;

Top Reformer Wins Election in Georgia

The new mandate will allow further reforms. Mr Saakashvili vows to increase Georgia's GDP from $10 billion to $30 billion and use the new wealth to help the poorest third of the population.

The Next Singapore?

Assorted on Russia and Georgia

American officials and a military officer who have dealt with Georgia said privately that as a result, the war risked becoming a foreign policy catastrophe for the United States, whose image and authority in the region were in question after it had proven unable to assist Georgia or to restrain the Kremlin while the Russian Army pressed its attack.

-In Georgia and Russia, a Perfect Brew for a Blowup




In Russia-Georgia Conflict, Balkan Shadows

Taunting the Bear

Georgia-Russia Clash: A 'Bump' or 'Turn' in Road?

Assorted

A Tale of Two Charts

More Reasons Not To Take The Candidates' Budget Proposals Too Seriously

Make Diplomacy, Not War

Anne-Marie Slaughter on China;

One of the best books I read on China was Susan Shirk’s “Fragile Superpower,” which argues that for all its energy and emerging power, China is fragile precisely because its political system is just one layer deep. If the Communist Party were to lose power, there is no back-up in place — only the specter of in-fighting fragmentation, chaos, and even civil war. Which is precisely why the government is so worried to stamp out any spark that could potentially ignite wider unrest.

The fragility extends to the economy. If ordinary Chinese suddenly cannot get jobs, or can’t get jobs that will allow them to put food on the table or gas in their motorbikes in an era of rising food and energy prices, there are no years of experience with the business cycle of expansion and recession to cushion the shock of unemployment and belt-tightening. Our current development has happened over decades, fairly steadily since the Depression, but with plenty of bumps along the way. Those psychological layers, just like the layers of our infrastructure, create resilience and strength.

These Olympics, Americans will compete as hard as we possibly can for the gold. Those of our athletes who lose, however, will know that they or their successors will have the chance to compete again; that the nation’s honor does not rest once and for all on their shoulders. America has hosted the Olympics before and will again.

For China, the veneer is much thinner and the stakes are much higher. Beijing has built fantastic Olympic buildings and will put on a dazzling show to tell all the world that it has resumed its rightful place on the global stage. But for all China’s accomplishments, and they are accomplishments, the architecture, infrastructure, economy and even the political system are only one layer deep.

Podcast of the Week

Bueno de Mesquita on Iran and Threats to U.S. Security

Deterrence. Fashionable at the moment for people to think the Israelis will take out the Iranians or that the Iranians are crazy and will attack Israel if they have a chance. Look at world history: very, very large number of international disputes since the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, many of which rose to the level of wars. Divide world into subgroups depending on possession of nuclear weapons or access to them via allies, etc. and plot probability of their becoming violent, see virtually nothing at the nuclear level; you only get war when there is no nuclear deterrence. Unlikely Iran would be different. Iranian leadership has been in power almost 30 years; little evidence of their irrationality. Shah. Muammar Gaddafi, depicted as irrational, rolled tanks to the border of Libya but didn't go over. Know how to stay in power but don't take undue risks. Much of U.S. foreign policy has been focused on making sure that no one else gets a nuclear weapon that doesn't already have one. Should we be so vigilant? 1982, article joint with William Riker, "Assessing the Merits of Selective Nuclear Proliferation", took positive rather than normative position--how does the world work as opposed to how should it work--to explain mutual deterrence. Why is the U.S. opposed to nuclear proliferation? Answer was that either you believe in deterrence or you believe you are willing to sacrifice deterrence to have the U.S. be in a dominant political position. If we have the bomb and they do not, that's an advantage. Usual argument to oppose it is window dressing.

Turkey Fact of the Day

Turkey's gender gap in years of schooling (of women relative to men) has also been consistently lower than other Muslim countries.

via Iyigun Blog

Not Related;
Turkey Problem

Obama Fact of the Day

His favorite Harry Potter character may be Dumbledore (he won’t comment when it’s mentioned that the headmaster of Hogwarts may be gay.) He favors the Rolling Stones over the Beatles and Batman over Iron Man.

-Obama Talks About His Girls

Personal Productivity Links of the Day

Five Best To-Do List Managers

Team Effectiveness MindMap Templates

The Teen Brain

Dictators and binding revolution constraints

The dictator’s approach to electoral patterns;

Democracies rarely repress their own citizens but authoritarian and totalitarian regimes do. According to one estimate (See Table 1), of the 110 million persons repressed by Marxist-Leninist regimes in the twentieth century, more than 90% were their own citizens. In democracies, less than 0.5% of victims were own citizens. It is statistics, such as these, that suggest some "generality" in Stalin's behaviour. Empirical studies also suggest that totalitarian regimes generate more "violence" than democracies (Mulligan, Gil, Sala-I-Martin, 2004)...

Our model suggests that the number of eliminations depends on the probability of correctly identifying enemies, the number of enemies, and the “threat” that the enemy poses. Although we are unable to “prove” our model based on the stylised facts of the three repressions, we can show that the model is consistent with these facts. The model makes one prediction that is consistent with Stalin’s observed behaviour that is far from intuitively obvious. A rational dictator will deliberately eliminate innocent citizens and will eliminate more innocents when enemies are difficult to identify. Stalin’s slaughter of innocents is cited by historians as a sign of his mental derangement, but in our model it is the predicted behaviour of a dictator facing a binding revolution constraint.

Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian poet

this poet--was put under house arrest by the Israeli military occupation for close to a decade and only because he wrote poetry that offended Israeli occupiers of Palestine

- Angry Arab

Related;
Links to Darwish's poems

Your Next Vacation Destination

Make it Bolivia

Blast from the Past

Northwoods Memo via Angry Bear

Macro Podcasts

Former Director Reinhart Says U.S. Asking Too Much of Fed

Parry Says Fed Is Facing `Serious' Policy Challenges

Related;
With Fannie and Freddie, is the government mistaking a ‘first-generation’ crisis for a ‘second-generation’ crisis?;

There are two main types of crises. In a “first-generation” or fundamentals-based crisis, investors choose to flee from a currency, or actively speculate against it, because they correctly recognize that the country’s policies will not support a fixed exchange rate forever. Leaving the fixed exchange rate regime is inevitable, but the timing can be forced by market participants when they sense the government’s vulnerability. In the corporate world, if a company’s debt service is so rickety that eventually it will become insolvent, investors will flee as soon as they realize that. They will not wait until the corporate cupboard is bare.

In a “second-generation” or self-fulfilling crisis, speculators are in the driver’s seat. A country’s resources might be sufficient to maintain an exchange rate peg indefinitely, as long as the country is not forced to pay an unduly high risk premium in markets. But if investors come to doubt its ability to defend the peg, those doubts become self-fulfilling and the risk premium balloons. In other words, the peg does not hold because investors doubt that it will.

Similarly, a company might be viable as long as it can roll over maturity debt. If investors trust the firm to be viable, it can access markets. However, if its survival comes into doubt, the markets will be shuttered and, eventually, so too will the firm.

Secretary Paulson has been working on the assumption that the travails of Fannie and Freddie stem from a self-fulfilling speculative attack: in other words, that this is a “second-generation” crisis. If that is true, those speculators can be beaten back by an overwhelming show of force. Thus, the Federal Reserve has thrown open its discount window to the GSEs and the Bush administration has sought from Congress an unlimited authority to lend to Fannie and Freddie. The Fed and the White House hope this will convince market participants that GSE debt will always be honored and that all maturing obligations can be rolled over at narrow spreads to Treasuries. The mere possibility of a massive governmental infusion of funds should squash the crisis of confidence without any need for disbursement.

Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has prohibited the “naked” short selling of the shares of certain financial firms, including those of Fannie and Freddie. (A naked short sale involves selling an equity you do not have in your possession.) In addition, the SEC is apparently becoming more aggressive in dealing with rumor-mongering among traders.

Again, the assumption is that the financial woes of the GSEs derive from speculative withdrawal rather than from weak fundamentals. But this assumption might be wrong. Fannie and Freddie are called the two housing giants for a good reason: they own or guarantee over $5 trillion worth of U.S. mortgages—more than half the market. Which means they have a large, under-diversified exposure to a sector that has plummeted.

Mistaking a “first-generation” crisis for a “second-generation” crisis is a lot like countersigning a loan for a relative who turns out to be feckless. Three unfortunate developments ensue.

Messages from Merrill’s Misfortunes;

Perhaps more firms will follow Merrill’s path and seek to raise new capital. But aggregate financial losses may wind up dwarfing private-sector resources. In that case, the health of the U.S. economy may require an injection of government funds into the financial sector. One lesson of the savings-and-loan debacle of the late 1980s—and also a lesson of banking crises worldwide—is that delaying such a government capital injection will raise the overall tab. With federal resources already stretched thin and many national priorities unfulfilled, the idea of sinking still more money into large financial firms seems distasteful. But we must accept the fact that our national economy is hostage to the financial system.

Repel the calls to contain competitive marketsBy Alan Greenspan

The Iraq Surplus

In Iraq, Far From a Deficit

Related Report;
Stabilizing and Rebuilding Iraq: Iraqi Revenues, Expenditures, and Surplus;

Iraq has an estimated 115 billion barrels of crude oil reserves, the third largest in the world. Oil export revenues are critical to Iraq's reconstruction, accounting for over 90 percent of the Iraqi government's revenues. In June 2008, GAO reported low 2007 spending rates by the Iraqi government for some critical sectors in the face of declining U.S. investments in these sectors. This report examines (1) Iraq's estimated revenues from 2005 through 2008, (2) Iraq's estimated expenditures from 2005 through 2008, (3) Iraq's financial deposits through 2007 and budget surpluses, (4) U.S. cumulative expenditures on stabilization and reconstruction activities in Iraq since 2003, and (5) factors affecting Iraq's efforts to accelerate spending. GAO analyzed relevant data and reviewed documents, including Central Bank of Iraq oil receipts data, International Monetary Fund's (IMF) reports, translated copies of Iraqi budget and expenditures, and U.S. agency funding data and reports. GAO also interviewed officials from the Departments of Defense (DOD), Energy, State, Treasury, and the IMF. This report contains no recommendations. Treasury agreed with the report's findings and stated that Iraq has adequate funds to make and maintain capital investments that deliver services and foster economic growth. State provided technical comments. DOD had no comments.

From 2005 through 2007, the Iraqi government generated an estimated $96 billion in cumulative revenues, of which crude oil export sales accounted for about $90.2 billion, or 94 percent. For 2008, GAO estimates that Iraq could generate between $73.5 billion and $86.2 billion in total revenues, with oil exports accounting for between $66.5 billion to $79.2 billion. Projected 2008 oil revenues could be more than twice the average annual amount Iraq generated from 2005 through 2007. These projections are based on actual sales through June 2008 and projections for July to December that assume an average export price from $96.88 to $125.29 per barrel and oil export volumes of 1.89 to 2.01 million barrels per day. From 2005 through 2007, the Iraqi government spent an estimated $67 billion on operating and investment activities. Ninety percent was spent on operating expenses, such as salaries and goods and services, and the remaining 10 percent on investments, such as structures and vehicles. The Iraqi government spent only 1 percent of total expenditures to maintain Iraq- and U.S.-funded investments such as buildings, water and electricity installations, and weapons. While total expenditures grew from 2005 through 2007, Iraq was unable to spend all its budgeted funds. In 2007, Iraq spent 80 percent of its $29 billion operating budget and 28 percent of its $12 billion investment budget. For 2008, GAO estimates that Iraq could spend between $35.3 billion and $35.9 billion of its $49.9 billion budget. As of December 31, 2007, the Iraqi government had accumulated financial deposits of $29.4 billion, held in the Development Fund for Iraq and central government deposits at the Central Bank of Iraq and Iraq's commercial banks. This balance is the result, in part, of an estimated cumulative budget surplus of about $29 billion from 2005 to 2007. For 2008, GAO estimates a budget surplus of between $38.2 billion to $50.3 billion. If spent, a proposed Iraqi budget supplemental of $22 billion could reduce this projected surplus. Since fiscal year 2003, the United States appropriated about $48 billion for stabilization and reconstruction efforts in Iraq; it had obligated about $42 billion of that amount as of June 2008. U.S. agencies spent about $23.2 billion on the critical security, oil, electricity, and water sectors. From 2005 through April 2008, Iraq spent about $3.9 billion on these sectors. U.S. government, coalition, and international officials have identified a number of factors that have affected the Iraqi government's ability to spend more of its revenues on capital investments. These factors included the shortage of trained staff; weak procurement and budgeting systems; and violence and sectarian strife. The United States has funded activities to help build the capacity of key civilian and security ministries to improve Iraq's ability to execute its capital project budget.

From Russia with bombs

UN Plaza: Georgia on Our Mind-from Blogging Heads

Related;
Georgia update
A Time for ‘War,’ and Also ‘Peace’
Eyewitness: Scenes of panic in Gori
War erupts in Georgia;

As Russian gets involved in the war with Georgia, the disposition of political forces within the Kremlin itself may shift. Russia’s prime minister Vladimir Putin, who is in China, indicated that Russia would retaliate against Georgia’s aggression. Mr Medvedev may not be best pleased to start his presidency with a war in Georgia: it suggests that he may have to submit to the wishes of the hard-line military and security services. But Mr Putin has a fierce dislike of Mr Saakashvili, Georgia’s maverick president, and seems determined to replace his government.

Mr Putin may also want to deal with Georgia in good time before Russia hosts 2014 winter Olympic games in Sochi, a Black-sea resort town only few miles from the Abkhaz border. A military conflict in Georgia will also derail for a long time Georgia’s aspiration to join NATO—something that Russian finds deeply unpalatable.

Ad Wars

Get Some Nuts

Mr T's Snickers advert axed after US human rights groups complain of homophobia

When was the last time you cried?

BBC's Friday Night Comedy- The latest Now Show is great, covering Olympics, credit crunch and more.

Download the podcast.

Coming Monday! Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on Iran

Coming Monday on Econ Talk! Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on Iran and Threats to U.S. Security

Related;
The Economist who can predict the future

The New York University political science professor has developed a computerized game theory model that predicts the future of many business and political negotiations and also figures out ways to influence the outcome. Two independent evaluations, one by academics and one by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, have both shown that about 90 percent of his predictions have been accurate. Most recently, he has used his mathematical tools to offer approaches for handling the growing nuclear crisis with Iran...

Former CIA analyst Stanley Feder says that he has used Bueno de Mesquita's model well over a thousand times since the early 1980s to make predictions about specific policies. Like others, he has found it to be more than 90 percent accurate. In situations where predictions of the model differed from experts' predictions, the model always turned out to be correct.

"I'm always stunned that it works so well," Bueno de Mesquita says. "This 90 percent is not my assessment."

The main reason that the model generates more reliable predictions than experts do is that "the computer doesn't get bored, it doesn't get tired, and it doesn't forget," he says. In the analysis of nuclear technology development in Iran, for example, experts identified 80 relevant players. Because no individual can keep track of all the possible interactions between so many players, human analysts focus on five or six key players. The lesser players may not have a lot of power, Buena de Mesquita says, but they tend to be knowledgeable enough to influence how key decision-makers understand the issues. His model can keep track of those influences when a human can't.

"Given expert input of data for the variables for such a model, it would not surprise me in the least to see that it would perform well," says Branislav L. Slantchev, a political scientist and game theorist at the University of California at San Diego. Predictions based on game theory can fail in a context where people don't act rationally, but in Buena de Mesquita's work, Slantchev says, rational action mostly means that the players are promoting their own perceived interests as best they can, something humans tend to do.

Kick the Balls

Kick the Balls: An Offensive Suburban Odyssey
by Alan Black

Realted;
Swearing Festival

Governance is worsening in Africa? Do we need more aid?

Mauritania junta's promise of democracy in doubt

Female is nature's default gender setting

A must see talk for all parents;

The Female Brain;

We, meaning doctors and scientists, used to think that gender was culturally created for humans but not for animals. When I was in medical school in the 1970s and '80s, it had already been discovered that male and female animal brains started developing differently in utero, suggesting that impulses such as mating and bearing and rearing young are hardwired into the animal brain. But we were taught that for humans sex differences mostly came from how one's parents raised one as a boy or a girl. Now we know that's not completely true, and if we go back to where it all started, the picture becomes abundantly clear.

Imagine for a moment that you are in a microcapsule speeding up the vaginal canal, hitting warp drive through the cervix ahead of the tsunami of sperm. Once inside the uterus, you'll see a giant, undulating egg waiting for that lucky tadpole with enough moxie to penetrate the surface. Let's say the sperm that led the charge carries an X and not a Y chromosome. Voilà, the fertilized egg is a girl.

In the span of just thirty-eight weeks, we would see this girl grow from a group of cells that could fit on the head of a pin to an infant who weighs an average of seven and a half pounds and possesses the machinery she needs to live outside her mother's body. But the majority of the brain development that determines her sex-specific circuits happens during the first eighteen weeks of pregnancy.

Until eight weeks old, every fetal brain looks female - female is nature's default gender setting. If you were to watch a female and a male brain developing via time-lapse photography, you would see their circuit diagrams being laid down according to the blueprint drafted by both genes and sex hormones. A huge testosterone surge beginning in the eighth week will turn this unisex brain male by killing off some cells in the communication centers and growing more cells in the sex and aggression centers. If the testosterone surge doesn't happen, the female brain continues to grow unperturbed. The fetal girl's brain cells sprout more connections in the communication centers and areas that process emotion. How does this fetal fork in the road affect us? For one thing, because of her larger communication center, this girl will grow up to be more talkative than her brother. Men use about seven thousand words per day. Women use about twenty thousand. For another, it defines our innate biological destiny, coloring the lens through which each of us views and engages the world.

Related;

Scientists have known for a long time that females react to infections differently than males, especially mood-wise. Researchers have been trying to figure out why. Now a new study shows that female mammals - rodents that is - react to the effects of an infection by producing more of a substance, called cytokines, in the brain yielding a “bad mood”–or a depressive-like behavior in a rat. The males did not suffer this effect.

-The Brain Blog

Intranasal immune challenge induces sex-dependent depressive-like behavior and cytokine expression in the brain.

Assorted

The cost of the prevailing policy framework in finance

A graphical playground

Feldstein's Heresy on Fiscal Policy?

Summers on economic dog days

Hummel on Central Banking

On time management

The crisis: a tale of two monetary policies

Measuring the value of NBA players

How To Talk to a Search Engine

The Street Porter and the Philosopher

Feldstein on Fiscal Policy

Economists predict whether the host country will rule the Beijing Olympics.

10 reasons why mind mapping software should be the foundation of your personal productivity system

Six Rules Doctors Need to Know

The former Fed chairman calls for a new way to deal with a crisis;

Mr Greenspan says a high-level panel of American financial officials should be given broad power to seize any financial institution whose failure threatens the entire economy, bail out its creditors and close it down. “We need laws that specify and limit the conditions for bail-outs” and do so transparently with taxpayers’ money, “rather than circuitously through the central bank, as was done during the blow-up of Bear Stearns,” he writes in “The Age of Turbulence”. (Penguin is to release the paperback on September 9th.)

If that means the government has to wade in, so be it. “Our country has long since abandoned the notion that we should leave crises to be resolved solely by the marketplace,” he says. “The critical need…is to formalise…the procedures improvised in the case of Bear Stearns. This should ensure that in the future, government financial assistance to lending institutions does not impact the Federal Reserve’s balance-sheet and monetary policy.”

Accounting rules for public duty and private failure

Confessions of a risk manager

A housing slump helped cause the credit crisis. But its effect on spending may have been exaggerated

An OECD study in 2004 put the marginal propensity to spend out of financial wealth at between 0.01 and 0.07 for rich countries: that is, if wealth rises by $1, spending rises by between one and seven cents. The Federal Reserve’s model puts the wealth effect in America at 0.0375.

The Fed’s model assumes the same wealth effect for housing as for financial assets. From the perspective of lifetime income, a dollar of housing wealth is the same as a dollar of stockmarket wealth. But some argue that the negative wealth effect from falling home values may be larger than for other assets. One reason is that housing wealth is spread more evenly than financial wealth, which is concentrated among rich households whose spending is less sensitive to the changing tides. Another is that housing slumps are rarer than stockmarket downturns. Consumers are likely to consider a fall in house values as a durable change in wealth and may cut spending more sharply in response.

Which CEO Characteristics and Abilities Matter?

Photo of the Day

Thousands of volunteers took part in the Olympic torch ceremony on a section of the Great Wall of China

Mugabe wins a Gold Medal

Lewis Black gives away Evil Dictator Awards- Mugabe wins Gold Medal for changing Zimbabweans into a nation of starving Rockefellers.