Today’s links to interesting news and analysis, collected from around the Internet. If you find this useful, pass it to a friend or colleague.
- About the new society being shaped by new media: “The Social Media Bubble“, Umair Haque, blog of the Harvard Business Review, 23 March 2010
- “Exporting American Democracy to the World“, Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, 25 March 2010
- Provocative political analysis: “Going to Extreme“, Paul Krugman, op-ed in the New York Times, 25 March 2010
- A great briefing about Yemen: “Unhappy Yemen“, Tariq Ali, London Review of Books, 25 March 2010 — An answer to the seldom-mentioned detail: many al Qaeda are in Yemen?
- Discovery of these new reserves might reshape the world’s energy map: “Shale gas in Europe and China: how promising is it?“, blog of the Financial Times, 25 March 2010
- Poll shows U.S. firms’ security concerns grow in Mexico“, Reuters, 25 March 2010
- A forecast of what lies ahead for Mexico: “The Fall of Mexico“, Philip Caputo, The Atlantic, December 2009
- The Day After Tomorrow postponed indefinitely: “Heat-Toting Ocean Currents Chugging Along“, Andrew C. Revkin, blog of the New York Times, 26 March 2010 — Slowly the climate doomster fairy tales evaporate in the sunlight.
- Excellent analysis of the long-predicted euro-crisis: “From A Greek Debt Crisis To A Eurozone Structural One?“, Edward Hugh (economist, bio), Global Economy Matters, 26 March 2010
- “Deja Vu in Marja – Our guiding illusions in Afghanistan“, Andrew J. Bacevich, America magazine, 29 March 2010
(A) Powerful interactive graphic showing the length and magnitude of this recession
The recession and recovery in perspective, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis — Conservatives show little curiosity about the mild effects of the longest and deepest recession since the 1930’s, while they yell that the stimulus had little or no effect.
(B) Today’s feature story
“David Frum and the Closing of the Conservative Mind“, Bruce Bartlett, Capital Gains and Games, 25 March 2010 — Excerpt (red emphasis added):
As some readers of this blog may know, I was fired by a right wing think tank called the National Center for Policy Analysis in 2005 for writing a book critical of George W. Bush’s policies, especially his support for Medicare Part D. In the years since, I have lost a great many friends and been shunned by conservative society in Washington, DC.
Now the same thing has happened to David Frum, who has been fired by the American Enterprise Institute. I don’t know all the details, but I presume that his Waterloo post on Sunday condemning Republicans for failing to work with Democrats on healthcare reform was the final straw.
Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI “scholars” on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.
It saddened me to hear this. I have always hoped that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first to suffer from a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn’t already.
Updates:
- “On David Frum’s Departure from AEI“, Charles Murray, National Review Online, 26 March 2010
- Explaining that Murry’s objection is absurd: “Murray Hits Frum“, Matthew Yglesias, 26 March 2010
