Daniel Aaron Lazar

Fareed Zakaria, once again, hits the nail on the head.

Here is his essay on the 2008-09 crash.

The first 2/3 of the essay is a clear and concise explanation of the economic and political decisions that got us to where we are. Then he adds a much-overlooked dimension to the discussion when he asserts:

“Throughout this essay, I have avoided treating this economic crisis as a grand morality play—a war between good and evil in which demon bankers destroyed all that is good and true about our societies. Complex historical events can rarely be reduced to something so simple. But we are suffering from a moral crisis, too, one that may lie at the heart of our problems.

Most of what happened over the past decade across the world was legal. Bankers did what they were allowed to do under the law. Politicians did what they thought the system asked of them. Bureaucrats were not exchanging cash for favors. But very few people acted responsibly, honorably or nobly (the very word sounds odd today). This might sound like a small point, but it is not. No system—capitalism, socialism, whatever—can work without a sense of ethics and values at its core. No matter what reforms we put in place, without common sense, judgment and an ethical standard, they will prove inadequate. We will never know where the next bubble will form, what the next innovations will look like and where excesses will build up. But we can ask that people steer themselves and their institutions with a greater reliance on a moral compass.”

“I am the absolute winner of the election by a very large margin,” Mousavi  in Tehran.

From the BBC

Wikipedia

Who Cares Who is the President of Iran? from Slate

BBC Video on Election Protests

On the Iranian Baby Book (and Youth Voters)

Newsweek predicts the fall of Islamic theocracy—though not necessarily the current regime—in Iran. The regime, based on the “divine” appointment of a supreme leader, now faces more dissent than ever: Top clerics are divided, and there are millions of Iranians who no longer believe in the government’s ideology. It will now be able to maintain power only by military intimidation. When it comes, the end of a 30-year experiment in political Islam will make waves across the Muslim world

A profile of Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei describes how the idealistic Shia cleric who loved poetry about oppression has become “that cold, hard weight of authority” he once chafed under. His complicated relationships with other members of the government go back decades, and his “indulgent” support for President Ahmadinejad suggests power has given him “tunnel vision.”

The Weekly Standard argues that whatever happens in Iran, the Islamic Republic as we know it is over. The government’s decision to announce the election result so quickly—without even making reasonable efforts to have it appear genuine—”shows how insular and insecure Khamenei, a politicized cleric of some intellectual sensitivity, has become.” Questions about the future of a “supreme leader” in Iran were being discussed before this month’s election, and Khamenei’s handling of the situation has all but ensured he’ll be the end of the line.

The Chatham House and the Institute of Iranian Studies at St. Andrews University offer this analysis of the numbers.

From Vladivostok to St Petersburg, Russians are taking to the streets in anger over job losses, unpaid wages and controls on imported cars…

Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, is facing the most sustained and serious grassroots protests against his leadership for almost a decade, with demonstrations that began in the far east now spreading rapidly across provincial Russia.

More from The Guardian

I am a teenager and often feel powerless when I see problems in the world. My monetary resources are limited, and I already volunteer one day a week at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. My social circle is broad but not numerous. I am schooled at home, so I can’t even talk to my classmates. Can you think of anything I can do to make a bigger difference?

Read responses

Everything you know about Iran is wrong, or at least more complicated than you think. Take the bomb. The regime wants to be a nuclear power but could well be happy with a peaceful civilian program (which could make the challenge it poses more complex). What’s the evidence? Well, over the last five years, senior Iranian officials at every level have repeatedly asserted that they do not intend to build nuclear weapons. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has quoted the regime’s founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who asserted that such weapons were “un-Islamic.” The country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa in 2004 describing the use of nuclear weapons as immoral. In a subsequent sermon, he declared that “developing, producing or stockpiling nuclear weapons is forbidden under Islam.” Last year Khamenei reiterated all these points after meeting with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. Now, of course, they could all be lying. But it seems odd for a regime that derives its legitimacy from its fidelity to Islam to declare constantly that these weapons are un-Islamic if it intends to develop them. It would be far shrewder to stop reminding people of Khomeini’s statements and stop issuing new fatwas against nukes.

Read on From Zakaria in Newsweek

‘Slumming’ was the name given to the thousands of white middle class voyeurs crossing boundaries of race, class and sexual orientation to trip into the worlds of the poor on their dorstep. There they learnt to drop the restraints of respectability and savoured an often salatious sense of sex and discovery in the period of prohibition. The jazz raged, the ‘pansies’ preened, but after the party what was the effect on the communities they visitied? Laurie talks to the author of Slumming, Chad Heap, and the writer Bonnie Greer about the impact that the wild white adventuring in urban areas had on sexual and racial politics in America.

Listen to this 30 minute piece from BBC4’s Thinking Allowed

A non-stop full-court press gives weak basketball teams a chance against far stronger teams. Why have so few adopted it?

Gladwell from the New Yorker

Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.

Read this brilliant piece from the Atlantic

In April of 2004, the world first learned that American soldiers in Iraq had abused detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison. Images first revealed on CBS and in The New Yorker showed prisoners standing hooded on a box with wires attached to their hands and genitals; piles of naked prisoners stacked into a pyramid; and detainees forced to simulate sexual acts upon one another, often with grinning GIs on hand to point and offer a jaunty thumbs up.

The reaction to the Abu Ghraib scandal was swift and bipartisan. Within days, President George W. Bush had offered a public apology for “the terrible and horrible acts,” and his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, took “full responsibility” for the scandal, promising that the offenders would be brought to justice, because the victims “are human beings. They were in U.S. custody. Our country had an obligation to treat them right. We didn’t do that.” With the exception of a handful of outliers—Rush Limbaugh said the abuse was “no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation,” and Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., claimed to be “more outraged by the outrage than … by the treatment”—Americans reacted with almost universal surprise and revulsion.

Read On

Between 2002 and 2008, sub-Saharan Africa started growing again, buoyed like much of the rest of the world by the global commodity boom and Chinese investment. Thus ended one of the most dismaying periods in the continent’s recent history, a generationlong stretch during which most countries in the region saw per capita incomes fall, sometimes to levels not experienced since the end of colonialism.

read on from Francis Fukayama’s contribution to Slate