Diplomats destroy Egypt whale fossil

From Yahoo News

"""Sun Aug 26, 1:57 PM ET

CAIRO (AFP) - European diplomats in four-wheel drive cars have caused millions of dollars worth of damage to a fossilised whale lying for millions of years in the Egyptian desert, a security source said on Sunday.

"Whale Valley officials have informed the authorities that people from two diplomatic corps vehicles destroyed the fossil," the source told AFP after the destruction was discovered around 150 kilometres (95 miles) south of Cairo.

Two cars drove into the protected area on Friday and then refused to stop when asked to do so by wardens who nevertheless got the vehicles' registration numbers which the source said were from "a European country."

"The damage is more than 10 million dollars," the source said.

The site, known as Wadi Hitan (Whale Valley), was home to whales around 40 million years ago when the area was ocean. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and home to hundreds of of whale fossils.""

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This is the kind of stuff that really infuriates me.
I want to sue those bastards!!! And charge them gazillions of dollars in damages... Well first they ought to be identified and yestmese7 bekaramet ahl baladhom el ard.

While the guards of the location failed to prevent a car from entering - which they should justly be blamed for - it is the fault of those irresponsible f*cks who knowingly took a protected area for an off-road track - or for their kiddie sandpit.

We really let anyone in Egypt these days..

HIJOS DE PUTA!!! ENCULES DE VOS MERES!!!

(pouf, that felt good :)

(thanks for Irene for bringing this to my knowledge...)

"Homes Away from Homes"

In this month's Harvard Magazine (the alumni magazine).

Read. Then go over the paragraphs that made you smile, or bite your lip, again.

http://www.harvardmagazine.com/2007/09/homes-away-from-homes.html

It's about a student forging her new 'home' in her new college house, and building a 'home away from home away from home'... I like.

Ok, I'm super nostalgic right now... especially that the immediate future plans - moving back to France in two weeks -have taken a serious hit. Damn the french government, I so passionately hate this administration!

Anyways. When you're done reading the article, tell me: when things go dark and you 'want to go home', if only in your thoughts.. where is that home exactly?

And did you hesitate, and think a bit before coming up with this answer, or was it immediate, spontaneous?

Footballs in Afghanistan: The best laid plans...

... of mice and men often go awry.

This is one of my favourite sayings -- and the first thing that crossed my mind when I read this. (that is, after falling under my desk with laughter.)

People demonstrated against the US troops who air-dropped footballs with flags on them - and among those the Saudi flag. Hmmm. Those familiar with the Saudi flag know why that is a problem: above a stylised sword is written 'La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammad rasool Allah' (There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his messenger).

So now the americans are accused of insulting Islam, and/or cultural insensitivity. And people have been demonstrating (like, REALLY demonstrating!)

Oh come on, people, cut them some slack! The US Army surely doesn't recruit the brightest, but many could have made this mistake. Hell, I could have. And I think that the US army distributing footballs is cute. (although I still think that US troops should all be court-martialled and sent to rot in a jail in the Hague for crimes against humanity, but that was a cute gesture).

Funnily enough, I used to have the exact same football! Well, almost. On the one my mom bought me (I think around the 1994 World Cup), someone had the presence of mind to change the religious sentence on the flag into a simple 'Saudi Arabia'. Maybe someone in the football factory in China was a muslim..

I broke my parents' bedroom mirror.

What Economists (and Epidemiologists) can learn from an Online Game Epidemic

I find this absolutely fascinating.

Epidemiologists used a virtual epidemic in the World of Warcraft online game to study the behaviour of people in cases of epidemics. They say that the behaviour of the 'virtual' people is quite close to the real behaviour: from the altruistic, trying to help others while exposing themselves, to the jerk who tries to contaminate as many people before he dies.

One reason why the epidemiologist interviewed in the article was excited, is because people studying disease dynamics are limited to 'observational and retrospective studies' - because you can't launch an epidemic in a human population just to study people's reaction. (yes, you can't, really.)

Hmmm. Don't we have the same problem in economics?
The joke 'an economist is someone who will be able to tell you tomorrow why what he predicted yesterday did not occur today' exists for a reason: we, too, function on mathematical models for predictions, and retrospective studies for explanation (and further predictions).

We can't decide to create hyperinflation in a country or devaluate its currency, for the sake of experimentation. We can't decide to fully liberalise a country's economy and foreign trade to see the effect on growth - that's why we have CGEs and Gravity Models and stuff.
But that's also why some theories that seem outlandish managed to survive from the 17th century until today.

So what if we could actually model economics - in a virtual world? Imagine a SimCity, 2nd Life or whatever (or World of Warcraft! :) where people actually take economic decisions - production, consumption, trade, and so on. Next, do something - a drought, free trade, an oil shock, whatever your heart fancies. And see people's behaviour.

Sure, it won't be optimal - but i really think the idea deserves some digging. It could totally be a yearlong project in a university.

Anyone out there looking for a dissertation topic? :)

Yikes!

Just read about the virus that hit Monster.com and stole personal data of 'hundreds of thousands' of users, used most probably for phishing. Wow.

To quote the news article:

"Symantec said it had seen reports of phishing e-mails sent out to Monster.com users which were "very realistic, containing personal information of the victims".

The e-mail encouraged users to download a Monster Job Seeker Tool, which was in fact a program that encrypted files in their computer and left a ransom note demanding money for their decryption."

Wow. The phishing is one thing -- but kidnapping people's files for a ransom is just beyond me.
Whatever happened to the time of (almost) harmless viruses that would just flash across your computer screen 'Mubarak is cow'?

(yes, that was a real virus. Back then with Windows 3.14... It would just write 'Mubarak is cow' a bunch of times on your screen.)

Emirates airlines practices citizenship discrimination

From the reservations website of Emirates Airlines
(Not sure if it's very clear - click on the image to get a larger one.)

I'm fine with airlines reserving flights for specific purposes (say, Umrah), first because there's a lot of punctual pressure at particular periods, but also because it makes logistic sense, with them landing in a different terminal in Jeddah, different immigration procedures, etc.

What I cannot stomach however is how Emirates would be rude enough to put 'Umrah passangers and GCC nationals'. This is the quite repulsive, I say. (GCC is Gulf Cooperation Council, btw). So Gulfies have a preference over other nationalities? What the fuck???

Imagine Air France writing 'Flight reserved for Western Europeans' on their website and saying that 'other nationalities will have their booking cancelled with no guarantee of rebooking anywhere else'.
This is how insane this is.

I never liked Emirates. They are overpriced, their food is barely above average, their personnel is rude, (and the flight attendants are not as cute as they advertise:) - and this is one more reason for me to despise them.

Shame! Down with Emirates Airlines!!

Turkey Welcomes Friendly Foreigners

From the visa info page on the turkish ministry of foreign affairs website.
"Visa information for friendly foreigners".

Is there any info for hostile travellers? Pretty please? :)



(I know, that's not it. For some reason the 'visa information for foreigners' and the Printer Friendly' links overlapped. But I seriously thought it was funny.)

Foreign Labour in Dubai - the less glamourous face of globalisation

The NYTimes published an article about foreign labour in Dubai - and, despite some good efforts, it wasn't a great article, but definitely worth a read and not too long, so read it!!!

Foreign labour meant here is the poor, primarily from the Indian subcontinent but also from other poor Arab countries, which works in construction or other handy jobs. No, not the people who sip their chococcinos (that’s hot chocolate and coffee) sitting in their fancy offices in the Emirates Towers, to go ‘home’ to their fancy hotels... (inside joke here, never mind).

It’s the guys who find themselves working outdoors in 50 degrees Celcius, sometimes mistreated, and most often disillusioned. Those who haven’t gone home in 3 years, either because they can’t afford to ‘waste’ the plane ticket money or because they’re illegally here and will be unable to get back in Dubai afterwards.

The article described the bad work conditions, from the day they pay $3000 to an ‘employment office’ in Delhi to get a job in Dubai, to their day to day struggle with difficult jobs, mediocre work conditions, missing their kids back home.

Some friends and I had an interesting discussion about it actually, which started with Patrick quoting this section of the article in an email:

“Faced with complaints about low wages and difficult work, Mr. Kaabi (Min. Of Labor) repeats a point often made here: Many workers face greater hardships at home for less pay. “We don’t force people to come to this country,” Mr. Kaabi said. “They’re building a whole new life for their families.” Some come from backgrounds so impoverished, he said, “they don’t know how to use the toilet; they will sit and do it on the ground.” But Ms. Whitson of Human Rights Watch said, “That’s what exploitation is — you take advantage of someone’s desperation.”


Patrick described the reply as ‘powerful’. I beg to differ.
First because the lady from HRW (an organisation I’m not very fond of, unlike Amnesty International) is mixing up concepts here.

True, very often the rights of these workers are often flouted. They are forced to work during the summer’s peak sun hours, when most of us dread the thought of waiting outside our air-conditioned buildings for 2 minutes to hail a taxi.

Second, because the Kaabi dude is partly right: for many workers - not those quoted in the NYTimes article, obviously, because if they interviewed them it would be good journalism... :-P being in Dubai is indeed a great opportunity. That’s what international movements of labour are all about: workers out, remittances in. A house, education for the kids, etc. We were living the same in Egypt (still are, to a certain extent, but far less than in the 80s and early 90s).

AND, let’s face it: that’s the way the markets work. Supply, demand, clearing price. True, it is a example where the market clears at an ugly price (low salaries) and this is indeed capitalism in its most extreme form. But that’s how the world works; THIS is not exploitation, sorry HRW. It’s business practices.

Real exploitation, however, comes with forcing workers to work in insane summer temperatures; packing them in lousy unsanitary houses; cheating them of their pay, in cutting corners on safety measures and helmets in work places. Now THAT is exploitation. It is illegal, and if it isn’t, it damn well should be.


So where do we, chococcino sippers in fancy neckties, fit in this picture?
For Taufiq, it starts with pausing ‘to ponder how many workers died to make our ascent possible’ as we ride an elevator in a tall building; to let ‘our minds wander to the
laborers forced to live in makeshift camps in the desert’ when we enjoy an air-conditioned restaurant.

Okay. Then what?
Corporate Social Responsibility, says Patrick - for the government to include safety measures and other such basic things in their standard work practices.
Now that sounds like a logical thing to do, and should actually be obtainable.

Revolting against low salaries and bad big businesses making money off the back of their poor workers is ineffective. Perhaps even counter-effective.

I actually wonder whether mixing up the basic Human Rights issues (mistreatment, safety procedures, etc) with those of extreme capitalism doesn’t weaken the first. Meaning, crusading for better salaries and better sanitation in the housing complexes can lead to a rejection of the complete lot of demands, even though the latter should be completely inarguable. I think we should separate what we argue for - whether we agree with the way markets settle other things or not.

Damn, I’m such a free-marketer. The Kennedy School will disavow me.


(PS: Photos from the NYTimes, same article. you didn't really think I took these, did you??
PPS: If I ever get deported, please dispatch a good lawyer.
PPPS: the previous sentence was a joke. (well, mostly).

Egypt's women footballers

I'm starting to really like the Jazeera English service...
And the clip is good. And in my humble opinion, meaningful - and goes far deeper than just whether it is 'Haraam' for women to be referees in a football game or not!




Oh yeah, and music of the day: Goo Goo Dolls - Slide. Totally, non-stop.

The Namesake: On Identity and Predetermination

Inji sent me Gogol’s ‘the Overcoat’ with the line ‘we all came out of Gogol’s overcoat’.
So I did two things: I read the novel and watched ‘The Namesake’ (which someone was kind enough to split and upload on YouTube; I downloaded it with the new Real Player which can record streaming video. Shhh...).
I wanted to write a post on The Namesake since I saw it in June (on board of a plane)... but never got the chance, so here it goes.

The story in a nutshell: the life of the Ganguli family that left Calcutta to Cambridge, Massachusetts (NYC in the film, I believe), and particularly Gogol (Nikhil) Ganguli, US-born Bengali with multiple identities, homes, allegiances... those who know me well know how important - and complex - this question is to me.

Grrrrrrreat film, btw, though I hear it’s not as good as Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel. (note to self: buy the book!) (an excellent interview with Lahiri is here)

The multiplicity of Gogol’s identity - reflected in his name which really doesn’t fit in either of his cultures - is really the centre of the story. At first Gogol is content with one identity - the without the other, then takes his Indian identity in rather violently, with the death of his father and the ensuing ceremonies. Gogol shaves his head in mourning, as his father did when his own father died. He shuts away his nice but clueless WASP girlfriend who wants to go with him to scatter the ashes in the Ganges, declaring that 'it’s a family thing'.


This line I took in full strength I think. As TCKs (‘third culture kids’) as we believe or pretend to be, is it predetermined? Does our genetic material decide which side we’re on and, more importantly, who can be our side, whether we like it or not? Who is family, who is not, against our own wishes?

Will I not have a choice?
Is it predetermined?
Am I not able to leave behind someone else’s past - if I wanted to?

Will I shave my head when my father dies? Will I, too, ‘marry a Bengali’ (as Gogol was so often advised) because it’s somewhat inevitable? (well, an Egyptian in my case :)

Is my name, my colour, my father’s homeland stronger than my birth, my own identity, my free will?

As his mother leaves - and after his separates from his cheating wife - Gogol tells his mother that ‘Everybody’s leaving, I should be devastated (…) but for the first time in my life, I actually feel free’... Why? Is he free from his origins’ obligation?

Is he free to choose ‘home’, at last?

The film ends as Gogol goes on, as his father advised him to, to ‘see the world - you will never regret it’, reading Nikolai Gogol on a train to somewhere.

To find himself a new home, perhaps.

(is this like an immigrant required photo? To pose with the newborn in a very silly & very urban setting? I have a photo just like this...)

Is it just me...

Or does Samantha Power actually look like Juanes?

(Ok, yes, I’m a little mean. It’s my petty revenge against Professor Power for that B+..) But seriously! don't you see the resemblance?? Hmmm, an undercover career for Samantha?)

She remains nevertheless my number One academic crush =). She is a fantastic author and a great teacher. You MUST read A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide if you haven’t. If you have, read it again.

And as for Juanes: just listen to ‘A Dios Le Pido’, that is bound to get your feet moving! Or if you’re in the mood, to ‘Para tu Amor’. Juanes, btw, is from Medellín, Colombia, a place that was once the 'world capital of crime' but has since improved drastically.. Roshan 'the Organised Nomad' Paul has an excellent post on the development of Medellín, whose mayor, Sergio Fajardo, spoke at the Kennedy School last spring.

I am so glad I am now able to listen to Colombian music again...

The Missing Women Tragedy

On a less violent - though also very tragic - issue:
Missing women.

(I know, it's random, but I was going to name the previous post 'missing weapons' as a pun on 'missing women' then I realised it was not funny. So i decided to write a real post instead.

So how many missing women are we talking about?
100 million women. That's a lot. Only they're not kidnapped or anything of the sort: they are just not there. They may have died in their early years, or never been born, but they 'should have' been there.

Ok, this doesn't make much sense. Go back to December 1990. Amartya Sen (Nobel laureate in Economics, professor at Cambridge U) coins the expression "missing women" to designate the gender imbalance in developing countries, which have a lower female:male ratio that the world average (and the developed country average).
He posits that 'bias in relative care' is the problem: families take better care, in education, medicine, and even food of their male kids - so the females are more likely to die in childhood. Sen calculated that 44 million women were 'missing' in China, 37 million in India, and so on.
This article creeped me out. Are we, humans, parents, so BAD? Do we discriminate THAT MUCH between our own children??

The theory still stands, to a large extent for lack of counterarguments.
But a Harvard PhD student (then) - now a U Chicago professor, named Emily Oster, came up with a different theory: she said that women with Hepatitis B were more likely to give birth to baby boys than girls. She ran experiments, gathered data to prove her idea. Got her Harvard PhD for it. Nice, huh? Her publication on the topic - for the Journal of Political Economy - is here.
(She now works on HIV Aids in Africa - brilliant work but i kinda disagree. another post, perhaps).
But in any event, I totally see a John Bates Clark medal coming up for this one very, very soon. Inevitable. (remember, you read it here first).

So Oster claims that her theory explains, say, half the 'missing women' of Sen.

Another different theory, by Avraham Ebenstein (of Berkeley, I believe), whose finds that unnaturally high male-to-female ratios occur only for children born after the first-born. Not sure what that means -- perhaps that the ratio is actually skewed with fertility rate increases? Still have to read his paper. You should, though.

In any event, 2 conclusions:

a) even if we have alternative theories to gender discrimination, that doesn't make the problem any less serious. Add to it that we are now seeing an increase in selective abortions when pre-natal reports show the gender of the child -- so much that India BANNED the disclosure of the fetus' gender. Chilling, if you ask me.
There is a very, very severe problem of discrimination against women and girls that must be addressed.

b) I'm a new fan of Oster :-D People like her remind me why I did econ - and why I must keep on working in economics.

Outing Fake Steve Jobs

This is a very, very entertaining blog - someone pretending to be Steve Jobs (if you don't know him, please format your computer NOW and go play paper Soduko. If you know that he's the big boss of Apple, please read on) and was blogging what would be what Steve would honestly think - cursing at Bill Gates, at Linux and the open-software community, etc.
No impersonating at all: the blog's title ('Fake Steve Jobs'! hereafter referred to as FSJ) and the writing show that it's totally a joke.
Still, it was fun to read - and the mystery was nice. You could still wonder if it wasn't really Steve Jobs pretending not to be himself to write what he really thinks. (am I making any sense?)

Then came along a journalist of the NYTimes, a Brad Stone (mind the initials...) with too much free time on his hands who decided to spoil the fun for everyone and announce who was FSJ.
Boooooooooooooo. Jerk.

The People of the Blogosphere were kinda mad. The 500+ angry messages on the FSJ blog here are proof enough.
And if not proof enough, you also have these angry posts on Brad Stone's blog on the NYT.
Mike Cane awareded B.S. the title of Bastard of the Year. And someone started a "Fake Brad Stone" blog.
I feel almost sorry for the bastard. Well, not really. Though I fail to see why he'd want to do that. I personally don't care who is behind FSJ. But still, I mean, BS, baby, what were thinking???

It's been a long week in Iraq

My subconscious has been avoiding writing posts about Iraq. It's such a crazy mess... damn occupation! Damn terrorists! damn stupid jerks planting bombs! Damn US! Damn UK! Damn Kurds! Damn Shias! Damn Sunnis! Damn civilians! What the fuck is wrong with this place?

But hey, Iraq won the Asia Football Cup 10 days ago, so that's worth celebrating. Always nice when you see mass demonstrations of HAPPY people... And although we've been dealing with the same level of casualties since - the average 10, 15 dead a day - we've managed to do what we've been doing for Palestine forever: relegate these unhappy bits of news to page 6, bottom.
Unless there are US soldiers who also blew up, at which point it becomes worthy of a front page mention, because we know of course that all lives aren't worth the same.

Oh, and earlier today 5 ministers resigned from Al-Maliki's cabinet. Add those to last week's 6 who withdrew, and you have a cabinet with no Sunnis. Nice. Do I see a Lebanon on the way? However, in Beirut, although the Shiite ministers have left the cabinet several months ago, there has been no major outbreak of violence (a few skirmishes here and there...)
but in Iraq, those guys are hot-headed - and armed.

And apparently they've been getting their arms from the most unexpected supplier:
the US Army.

BBC titled "US 'loses track' of Iraq weapons" - which could very well have been written: "US says 'Oh shit'."
Because it's not a gun they lost -- it's a bloody arsenal:

110,000 AK-47 rifles
(yes, one-hundred-and-ten-ay-kay-fourty-seven-rayfels, you read correctly!)
80,000 pistols
135,000 body armour pieces
110,000 helmets.

NICE. Someone's having a good day. Several thousand people are having their last ones.

And the very cool headed Pentagon decided that... it was going to ask for $2 billion to buy more weapons to distribute.
Did i hear someone say 'irresponsible'????

ROFL.