Remember this video I posted a few days ago:
Turns out the entire thing was a big hoax. Bullocks.
by John Cole| 50 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Remember this video I posted a few days ago:
Turns out the entire thing was a big hoax. Bullocks.
This post is in: Because of wow., Excellent Links, Open Threads, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
Kudos to President Obama for choosing an ‘unpredicted’ World Bank nominee that’s got all the right people excited:
… In 2003, [Kim] won a MacArthur genius grant. In 2004, he was named director of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department, where he ran the “3×5” campaign, which sought to put three million new HIV/AIDS patients in developing countries on antiretroviral drugs by 2005 (it ended up taking till 2007). In 2006, he was on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2009, he became president of Dartmouth College.
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“At some point, you have to decide whether you’re going to keep throwing your body at a problem, which is what I’ve always done,” he told the New York Times. “You realize that one person can’t do that much. So what I want to do is train an army of leaders to engage with the problems of the world, who will believe the possibilities are limitless, that there’s nothing they can’t do.” …
Now there’s a quote for our times. (Also too, thanks Kay for keeping us updated on this.)
And while everyone’s taking a moment from discussing Hunger Games to look beyond our borders, in celebration of the wonderous interconnectedness that is the Internets, I’m going to lift Felix Salmon’s excerpted story from Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s TED talk:
From 1967 to ’70, Nigeria fought a war: the Nigeria-Biafra war. And in the middle of that war, I was 14 years old… We were on the Biafran side. And we were down to eating one meal a day, running from place to place, but wherever we could help we did. At a certain point in time, in 1969, things were really bad. We were down to almost nothing in terms of a meal a day. People, children were dying of kwashiorkor. I’m sure some of you who are not so young will remember those pictures. Well, I was in the middle of it. In the midst of all this, my mother fell ill with a stomach ailment for two or three days. We thought she was going to die. My father was not there. He was in the army. So I was the oldest person in the house. My sister fell very ill with malaria. She was three years old and I was 15. And she had such a high fever. We tried everything. It didn’t look like it was going to work.
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Until we heard that 10 kilometers away there was a doctor, who was able … who was giving … looking at people and giving them meds. Now I put my sister on my back, burning, and I walked 10 kilometers with her strapped on my back. It was really hot. I was very hungry. I was scared because I knew her life depended on my getting to this woman. We heard there was a woman doctor who was treating people. I walked 10 kilometers, putting one foot in front of the other. I got there and I saw huge crowds. Almost a thousand people were there, trying to break down the door. She was doing this in a church. How was I going to get in? I had to crawl in between the legs of these people with my sister strapped on my back, find a way to a window. And while they were trying to break down the door, I climbed in through the window, and jumped in. This woman told me it was in the nick of time. By the time we jumped into that hall, she was barely moving. She gave a shot of her chloroquine, what I learned was the chloroquine, then gave her some, it must have been a re-hydration, and some other therapies, and put us in a corner. In about two to three hours, she started to move. And then, they toweled her down because she started sweating, which was a good sign. And then my sister woke up. And about five or six hours later, she said we could go home. I strapped her on my back. I walked the 10 kilometers back and it was the shortest walk I ever had. I was so happy that my sister was alive. Today, she’s 41 years old, a mother of three, and she’s a physician saving other lives.
Yeah, there’s worse predicaments than “I wept because I had no iPad, until I met a man who had no wireless access.”
So, now that I’ve spoiled everyone’s good mood… what’s on the agenda for the weekend?
Open Thread: “It Was the Shortest Walk I Ever Had”Post + Comments (47)
by John Cole| 75 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, DC Press Corpse, Our Failed Media Experiment, Sociopaths
Had to do some shopping, so I found myself driving through the country, and snapped this beautiful pic. Wish you could see how yellow they were in real life, because this picture does not do it justice.
At any rate, after spending some time at the garden center, picking up some supplies and some pansies, I was driving home and caught the weekly EJ Dionne/David Brooks wankfest on NPR. During the discussion, the Ryan plan came up, and Brooks repeatedly called it a serious plan and that it took us off the path to fiscal calamity, and then basically lied about it not ending government as we know it. After the second or third utterance of “serious,” I briefly considered plowing my car into the cement base of a highway underpass to make the pain stop once and for all.
Dionne did a good job swatting down Bobo’s nonsense, and Brooks then dutifully ignored him and called it a serious plan again.
by Tim F| 79 Comments
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Open Threads
Almost here. Go enjoy the disturbingly good weather, drink a beer or just lie on a grassy southwest-facing hillside and feel the sunset on your face.
Open thread.
by JPK| 33 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Mighty Diamonds, “Go Seek Your Rights” (1976)
This came up a few times this week and sounded so good. Talk about your own songs of the week, or treat as an open thread.
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, Foreign Affairs, Open Threads
Well, here’s a new extremely political campaign for the horse-race addicts to worrit. The World Bank, “an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programs”, will be choosing a new president in June. All former WB presidents have been Americans, because of the Golden Rule: Those that have the gold, make the rules. Felix Salmon, Reuter‘s finance blogger, reports that this year’s race is different:
Lesley Wroughton has the wonderful news: two very highly qualified non-American candidates — Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Jose Antonio Ocampo — are going to be nominated to be president of the World Bank. This really puts the pressure on the White House to knock it out of the park with their nomination, because Ngozi, in particular, is broadly regarded both within and outside the Bank as being pretty much perfect for the job. She’s a whip-smart economist, she’s honest, she’s imaginative, she’s dedicated, she’s expert at navigating the Bank’s labyrinthine bureaucracy and politics, and she’s passionate about the way that the Bank can really make the world a better place…
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Now that Ngozi’s in the running, the US is going to find it incredibly difficult to nominate a relatively low-profile person like Susan Rice, because it’s almost impossible to make a credible case that Rice is a superior candidate to Ngozi on the merits. And other big names seem to be falling away:U.S. Senator John Kerry and PepsiCo’s Indian-born CEO Indra Nooyi also made an Obama administration shortlist, according to a source, although Kerry has publicly ruled out the job and Nooyi is no longer in contention, according to another source.
This is really bad news, because by a process of elimination it more or less forces Obama to go with Larry Summers. Larry would be a dreadful nominee, and a worse president, in a job whose primary prerequisite is diplomacy. And before he’s even nominated, there’s already a website up, ForgetLarry.org, devoted to campaigning against him for the job. It covers pretty much all the bases, although it weirdly misses the Russia/Shleifer scandal: for that, check out Cathy O’Neil’s post from a couple of weeks ago.
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I’ve talked to a fair number of people about this position, including a few who are quite sympathetic to Larry, and not one of them thinks that he would be good in the post. If the US forced the world to choose between Larry and Ngozi, it would have to expend an astonishing amount of diplomatic capital to twist the requisite number of arms to get him the job, just because no one would actually want to vote for him. Their hearts would be with Ngozi…
I certainly don’t know enough about international economics to judge anybody’s fitness, but I do know enough recent history to agree that Larry Summers should not be considered for any position other than ‘premiere test subject in the Soylent Green factory’. (I can’t be the only person planning never to forgive Summers for his ‘thought experiment’ suggesting that toxic industries should be shipped to “less developed countries”, where life and the environment were cheap.) Felix Salmon’s suggestion for the ideal candidate, on the other hand, is going to enrage a certain portion of the Obama Administration’s self-described base. Anybody with a better grasp of the topic want to help the rest of us understand?
And what else is on the agenda for the end of another workweek?
Early Morning Open Thread: Global FinanceeringPost + Comments (70)
by John Cole| 40 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links
Heard this two days ago in the grocery. It was faint at first, while I was checking out the avocados, then when I walked down the spice aisle, I knew what I was hearing:
It’s been banging around my over-sized cranium for two days, and after thirty minutes of fruitless attempts to sleep tonight with this song playing over and over again, I thought I needed to share. There’s just something haunting about the female vocalist singing “All I know—we’ve got to change what’s happening, Something good could happen.” Unlike most ear worms I want to get rid of, I just love this song for some reason, but I felt I needed to share so I could sleep.
I’m a giver like that, you know.
Also, too:
Ahh, Athens, GA. One of the best 5 days of my life. Up there with Madison, WI, and Austin, TX.
Your Late Night Ear Worm- Where’s My Umbrella EditionPost + Comments (40)