Philanthropy

I'd had a note to look up Pakistani charitable giving, and that led to World Giving Report, where the map claims that China is in the top 20%! That seemed less than believable, but apparently there've been some changes made recently. Charities Aid Foundation put them at 95'th out of 142, up from about the bottom. "corporate philanthropy, which makes up the bulk of Chinese charitable giving, in contrast with Europe and North America where individual giving dominates." The WGR report has numbers that don't quite match the CAF numbers, albeit for different years, and since I gather that the statistics are compiled by the government and given largely to government-approved projects, I'm guessing that the China numbers may be inflated and that since even they say 76% of the donations are corporate, that these are often a kind of informal tax.

But it is very interesting that a) the Chinese see benefits in charity which they didn't a few years ago or b) the Chinese government sees benefits in appearing to be charitable. Or perhaps both.

Hmm. I'm not fond of jello numbers. Alliance says 73% of Pakistanis donate money and 16% volunteer while 42% say "they are unable to donate to charitable causes due to financial constraints." Maybe they give to their neighbors (as required by Islam) and don't consider that "charitable cause." The WGR says 51% give directly.

The WGR says 61% of the US population donate and 28% volunteer, and only 28% give directly to people in need. Nigeria has 89% donating, 69% doing so directly, and has 76% volunteering.

The "UK ranked 64th most generous country".

I'm not sure where the data for all this comes from, and what the denominators are (in Nigeria they use "working age people" for the volunteering rate), so I suspect some fuzziness and some apples to pears comparisons. But at some level, in most places, people are helping neighbors and even strangers.

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Why Pakistan? It considers itself the "land of the pure", devoted to Islam; and one of the pillars of Islam is Zakat: alms giving. Apparently they take it fairly seriously: 1.64% of income (.75% directly) vs 0.97% (.26% directly) in the US.

Niagara boat tour thoughts

The world was made for God. We are rich enough to make ourselves comfortable and keep most things human scale and human-controlable, but the world isn't always either one. Things like Niagara drive that home. Farmers probably are forced to know that we don't control everything, and the rest of us should remember it. Maybe that's part of the daredevil urge--they try to extend human control, but do it by frankly facing the non-humanity and wildness of the world.

A little different take on China

David Goldman wrote about China, and his take differs from others I hear.

Western observers often attempt to draw a bright line between the good Chinese people and the nasty Chinese government. That is an unsubtle form of condescension, and wholly misguided. The character of China’s state is shaped by the ambitions of the Chinese people.

...

The emperor is not a revered demigod on the Japanese model, or an anointed sovereign claiming divine right, but simply the emperor whose job it is to prevent all the other emperors from killing each other.

...

At a closed-door conference in Beijing with senior government advisers not long ago, I asked the Chinese group if they felt nostalgic about any of their past rulers. After all, the Jews pray thrice daily for the return of King David’s dynasty. Medieval British romances call Arthur “the once and future king.” Similar tales are told about the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Charlemagne, and others. Folklorists call this motif the “king asleep in the mountain,” and it is encountered from Portugal to Japan—but not in China. None of the Chinese officials in attendance could name a government they would like to see return. On the contrary, the Chinese are happy to see the back of every one of their dynasties. They tolerated them when they were useful and turned on them when they became corrupt or weak, which takes a couple centuries in the best cases, and a couple of decades in the worst.

Interesting. I will probably look for the book.

I'm curious what he thinks of the man surplus there. Will they be spent in war, or colonial projects, or is the enthusiasm for China Uber Alles only skin-deep in the families with only a single child?

The US has a long history of being friendly with China (although not always Chinese immigrants), interrupted by Mao et al. I wonder how well that will survive the expansionism and influence-buying spree they've been on lately.

The ENArchs

Class stratification in France: the ENA-rchs and French unions:

For all what the history books show, the French never actually had a Revolution. It is possible to go to Russia, and live there for years, and never see a trace of the old aristocracy in the state institutions or companies. There is a definite hierarchy in place, but it is not one based on class. In France, by contrast, it doesn’t take one long to figure out that the entire government and major corporations are dominated by an elite consisting of the old French aristocratic families (take a look at the names, and see how many have de in them) and the cream of the crop of the French grandes écoles:

and

And as with the government and the electorate, stuffing the upper echelons full of well-connected elites results in a huge disconnect between the management and the workers. For it is largely true that, no matter how hard one works and how brilliant one is, you will never surpass the chosen few from the grandes écoles in terms of promotion and prestige. For sure, many try, and considerable efforts are made by the company management to convince the ordinary folk that if they show sufficient compliance, obedience, and work themselves to death they will be admitted to the hallowed ranks of the chosen few. But in reality, they are being sold an absolute lie.

Anybody with experience in France care to comment?

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Found via White Sun of the Desert

Catacombs

Going to Italy is not in our budget anytime soon. But Google Maps has gotten there already, and no stress on my knee!

Absent Dictators

I didn’t learn much about the history or composition of Libya until fairly recently. But its current anarchic state seems almost inevitable in retrospect. Fiercely tribal and inheriting a giant arsenal, with a central state damaged by civil war and the purges:

Mutinying security men have taken over oil ports on the Mediterranean and are seeking to sell crude oil on the black market. Ali Zeidan, Libya’s Prime Minister, has threatened to “bomb from the air and the sea” any oil tanker trying to pick up the illicit oil from the oil terminal guards, who are mostly former rebels who overthrew Muammar Gaddafi and have been on strike over low pay and alleged government corruption since July.

Remember the standard accusation that the US always sided with dictators? Proof positive that the US didn’t care about anything but its own interests, or so it was always taken. And I’ll grant that the powers-that-be don’t care about anything but their own short-term interests, but it seems ironic that supporting dictators might sometimes be humane. A cowed Gaddafi was fairly harmless—he didn’t go in for quite as many foreign adventures after Bush put the fear of the US into him, and seemed (wonder of wonders) willing to cooperate on some things. And life is certainly worse for Libyans with multiple tyrants quarreling instead of one.

Who knows about the long term--maybe the fighters will converge on a new system that everybody gets used to and keeps the place running smoothly with a little liberty and pursuit of happiness. Or maybe it will break up into groups that fight each other for centuries.

As I've said before, I hold no love for Gaddafi--I knew people who'd be alive today if not for his meddling. But the "progressive march of democracy" through the world so in vogue in my earlier years seems to over-reach a little now and then.

"You may not make an end of them at once, lest the wild beasts grow too numerous for you."

Russian style protests

Apparently the "Pussy Riot" protest has aspects that aren't obvious to the non-Russian Orthodox. Their positioning in front of the royal gates facing the congregation was taken to be, and presumably intended to be, somewhat sacrilegious. They could have been a lot more provocative just by walking through the "royal gates" but they must not have wanted to go that far.

They complained about Orthodox leaders being joined at the hip with the government. That's a long-standing problem with Eastern Orthodoxy; a side-effect of their doctrine of the nature of the state.

Something else that's of long standing is the tradition of the holy fool. From the article cited:

Indeed, the patron saint of holy fools is St. Simeon Salos of Emress. He retreated to the Syrian desert in the 6th century to devote his life to prayer, living on nothing but lentils. A few decades later, Simeon returned to town a completely different man. He tied a dead dog to his waist and entered town dragging the carcass. Simeon would throw nuts at the priests during worship services and publicly ate sausage on Good Friday. The seemingly nutty monk also helped people in the town, though never when someone else might notice and never taking credit. Simeon’s saintly deeds were done in secret. And no one could dispute that Simeon was very holy person, even the priests he pelted with nuts on Sunday. Simeon just poked fun at every attempt people made to feel themselves "holier than thou."

In Russian history the greatest of the "holy fools" was Basil the Blessed, a man so revered that the famous Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square next to the Kremlin was named in his honor. Basil walked through Moscow wearing nothing more than a long beard. He threw rocks at wealthy people’s houses and stole from dishonest traders in Red Square.

Few doubted Basil’s holiness. Tsar Ivan the Terrible feared no one but Basil. Basil was also given to eating meat on Good Friday. Once he went to Ivan’s palace in the Kremlin and forced the tsar to eat raw meat during the fast saying, "Why abstain from eating meat when you murder men?" Countless Russians died for much less but Ivan was afraid to let any harm come to the saintly Basil.

I'm not claiming that Pussy Riot is holy in any way, shape, or form. But I wonder if they think of themselves as working in the holy fool tradition. (If so I think they left out a few bits. Celebrity ≠ holiness)

Chutzpah

I knew already that the Dodd-Frank bill compelled banks to make high risk home loans in the hopes that cause and effect could be magically reversed. I remembered that it had some internationally intrusive features too. The scope is startling broad. Any company that deals in the US at any level is at risk from US regulators at any level.

Not only will they have to comply with the rules of federal bodies such as the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, there are also state bodies, such as The New York State Department of Financial Services, which is the regulator that accused Standard Chartered.

It is 10 months old and supervises some 4,500 institutions with assets of about $6.2 trillion.

Yet many had not even heard of it until this week.

I should probably give people the benefit of the doubt and assume they mean well, though I'm extremely skeptical of that titular pair. Still, it takes a certain deliberate blindness to forget the "sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" rule, especially given how many Americans have wound up in hot water for exercising free speech in lands that don't allow it.

And to be fair, Berlin and Brussels are no slouches at "These are our rules so they're your rules too."

But there's a bit of difference between requiring transparency in accounting and demanding boycotts of Iran. If money is flowing through the US it should flow honestly, and if goods are sold here they shouldn't be unexpectedly poisonous; but dealings outside the US aren't under our authority.

Some things companies/countries do are utterly vile: Chinese organ harvesting, for example. Boycotts there sound like an excellent idea: but not enforced by the state. Others are a lot more ambiguous: child labor, for instance. No question that it can be terribly abusive, but it can also be life-saving. So how do we get the right to regulate them?

But they're our laws (written by staffers) passed by our representatives (who don't pay us any mind, but never mind that--they don't generally read the laws anymore either) and interpreted and enforced by our bureaucrats (who might as well be on the moon for all the input they ask from us): they must be good for us and for all the world as well.

vanGulik didn't mention this

"Replacement convicts" are not new. For centuries, the use of criminal substitutes was among the first things Westerners would mention when discussing China’s legal system. Missionary and traveler Karl Gützlaff in 1834, French legal scholar Édouard Louis Joseph Bonnier in 1862, and American scholar Owen Lattimore in the 1930s wrote about the practice. In 1895, Taiwan missionary George Mackay described witnessing these replacement convicts: "It was an open secret that these men had nothing to do with the case, but were bribed to wear the cangue for six weeks." In 1899, Ernest Alabaster, a scholar of Chinese criminal law, wrote that courts "permitted" the real offenders to hire substitutes, and that such things "frequently happen, have for long happened, and—notwithstanding Imperial decrees to the contrary—will, under the system, always happen." Supposedly, the going rate in 1848 for a replacement convict was 17 pounds, which would come to roughly $2,000 in present-day dollars."

Slate has an article about some Chinese rich and powerful who, in the unlikely event that they wind up being prosecuted, hire stand-ins to appear in court and if necessary serve the sentence. Even at less elevated levels of society, sober passengers may confess to reckless driving to save their drunk relative from severe penalties.

Apparently the practice has a long history, though how long would take a little skilled research to discover (I can't read Chinese). It was condoned because the culprit had to pay (literally) for his crime and the fact of punishing somebody served as a warning to others. (You thought the weregild was bad?)

I've groused before about "Do you know who I am" and our legal system, but I'm aware that other places are much worse, and this is a reminder that things can get worse still.

Hat tip to Maggie's Farm

International Law

There seems to be one fundamental principle in international law: encapsulation. You limit the number and complexity of interactions with other groups by channeling them through a recognized interface--the sovereign government of the region where those people live.

If a foreign ne'er do well steals from you, you don't ask the Berwyn police to find him, you hand over that exercise to the police there, and ask the judge there for compensation. It simplifies life considerably, and avoids a lot of rough edges and anger at interfering strangers.

Of course it doesn't always work right. Sometimes you find egregious evils that you can't do much about without violating encapsulation. And sometimes one or more countries (it only takes one) figure a war is worth the risk. That also is supposed to be channeled through recognized interfaces, where the armies do the fighting until some recognized authority gives up or arranges a treaty.

All bets are off if a country loses a war and those "interfering strangers" get to do what they like, including adjust the loser's laws. Sometimes this makes the losers slaves, sometimes it (e.g. Japan after WWII) makes them a better country.

The encapsulation (sovereignty) model doesn't seem to work very well with groupings like Pakistan or Somalia. If they were peaceful nobody would worry; and if they were wholly occupied in molesting themselves and didn't bother outsiders we could look the other way and pretend it wasn't happening. But they often do attack outsiders, and are effectively sanctuaries for "international criminals."

That leads to several questions.

How do you identify such a situation in a non-arbitrary way? How do you select the representatives of the group that is causing mischief? And what restrictions are you under when you intervene?

Somalia doesn't have a government; it has a low-level civil war with some outside powers taking a hand here and there. It is a collection of closely related peoples who don't like each other: a "nation" in the old sense of a tribe and a language, but not in a sense useful to themselves or others.

One warlord can decide that he's going to attack Americans. We can complain to the paper central government all we please; nothing will happen. We can collect forces to go do battle--but who do we fight? We've no beef with the rest of the Somalis, just the one warlord and his minions. We can, thanks to superior technology, send a drone in to blow him up--or blow up somebody, anyway. Our humint is often very bad in rotten corners of the world where we don't speak the language and everybody lies to outsiders.

Where are you able to make the distinction between that and an Iranian government, weary of dealing with the futile atheists in British government, sending a drone to kill Salmon Rushdie?

The distinction seems obvious, but I'm not at all sure how one can make the distinction precise--as precise as "work through government channels." If there were an international way to decide that nobody recognizes the existence of a government in area Z, that might be a method, but all we have is the UN. Big joke. (To play devil's advocate: Iran could point out that Britain fails to punish criminals but afflicts citizens who try to defend themselves, is failing to teach its youth knowledge manners or morals, and fails completely to enforce laws found around the world against blasphemy. It sounds like a failed state when you put it that way, doesn't it?)

Who regulates contracts in the tribal areas of Pakistan? The local jirga or Islamabad?

In a region of mixed tribes it isn't clear who to deal with or how. The local warlords threaten families because it works. Ought we, in wild areas of the world, pay assassins and threaten families the same way, to focus the retaliation on the enemy and not the other bystander tribes in the area? The traditional alternative is sending in troops that shoot up the area and make the bystanders mad too--especially if we need troops to hang around to keep tribe Y under control. Afghanistan comes to mind.

Take Mexico as a nearby case. Sections of it are allegedly no longer under the control of the central state, or even of the local government, but instead under the sway (but not detailed control--they don't run schools or courts: see Britain above :-) ) of what are universally recognized as criminal groups. If US citizen are regularly attacked, when does the US have the right to send in forces? (When in hot pursuit?) Maybe peel off a section of the country and administer it ourselves to put things right?

This seems a can of worms. I can see why people keep trying to shoehorn every grouping of other people into something resembling a government.

I started this as a comment, but moved it higher to expand it.

Are sports fans always sports fans?

I'm not particularly interested in sports. I didn't grow up with them, was never very good at them, and never acquired the taste. I've said before that they can be a very good thing--cheering is one of the few major activities shared between generations.

But Egyptian sports fans seem to be having a riotous time. I don't think this is entirely about the game and lousy crowd management and general bad tempers. The Blues and the Greens in Constantinople were fans of their respective chariot race teams, but their battles weren't just about which racer was going to win. It wasn't safe to complain openly about politics, so if Justinian was a Blue, you could be a Green to show opposition.

I don't think that politics explains the violence of British soccer fans, though.

Listening to NPR

Earlier than usual this morning I tuned in the news, and caught a couple of stories that didn't quite say everything.

The first was an NPR piece on a public teaching hospital in Haiti, touted as a model for aid programs. My ears perked up and I listened carefully as they described the low cost ($16M+$4M+ in kind) and the facilities (fiber optic, 6 surgery theaters, etc) and how they hoped this would help keep Haitian doctors and nurses from decamping to the US. I'm still missing something here... Did they use local labor? The reporter compared other "less successful" projects (cholera treatment is still in tents, government palace is still waiting demolition, etc), and ended with a devastating stinger as a throw-away line: The Haitian government doesn't have a budget item for operating expenses.

So no, it is not a model for aid programs. We've seen this many times before, and it does not end well.

The next story was on student protests in Morocco. College graduates have organized daily demonstrations demanding government jobs. Morocco has the usual bloated and useless government bureaucracy, but faced with the protests officials often give in and create a few new positions. The leaders keep lists of who shows up to protest every day, and only the devoted regulars are on the list submitted to the government. Did I mention that nobody really wants to work in the private sector when government jobs are lifetime and perk-filled?

It sounds like a kind of extortion that rewards noisy jerks, but one thing the government gets out of it is a list of people who know how to show up for work every day...

The astute reader will notice that I have to rely on a modicum of integrity in reporting. Prior knowledge told me what to look for in the report on aid projects and left me with red flags when information was missing. Anyone with any experience with planning (even us peons) knows how to interpret the confession at the end. But suppose that last vital comment about the budget had been left off? This little story would have been added to my mosaic picture of the world with the little tag "not enough information". But that little tag isn't isn't easy to remember a year later, and I'd be left with a prettier image of Haiti than I ought to have. And news reports regularly lack those critical little details.

How to be a dictator

The Economist interviewed Alastair Smith about the book he co-authored The Dictator's Handbook: How Bad Behaviour is Almost Always Good Politics. What's the secret for staying in power?

Do they actually have to support me, or can I just terrify them into supporting me by threatening them with death?

No, they absolutely have to support you on some level. You can’t personally go around and terrorise everyone. Our poor old struggling Syrian president is not personally killing people on the streets. He needs the support of his family, senior generals who are willing to go out and kill people on his behalf. The common misconception is that you need support from the vast majority of the population, but that’s typically not true. There is all this protest on Wall Street, but CEOs are keeping the people they need to keep happy happy—the members of the board, senior management and a few key investors—because they are the people who can replace them. Protesters on Wall Street have no ability to remove the CEOs. So in a lot of countries the masses are terrified but the supporters are not.

or this

tax very highly. It’s much better to decide who gets to eat than to let the people feed themselves. If you lower taxes people will do more work, but then people will get rewards that aren’t coming through you. Everything good must come through you. Look at African farm subsidies. The government buys crops at below market price by force. This is a tax on farmers who then can’t make a profit. So, how do you reward people? The government subsidises fertilisers and hands it back that way. In Tanzania vouchers for fertilisers are handed out not to the most productive areas but to the party loyalist areas.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people happily call for more "public" control of our economies and lives without the faintest clue of what it really means behind the scenes; as though Lord Acton's Law is somehow abolished when you have elections. You'd think that the counterexamples like Chicago would be adequate refutation of that belief. And it never ceases to amaze me how many other people, reacting against the terrifying insanity of the first group, are persuaded that holy greed will always work for the public good.

I'll have to keep an eye out for the book.

Iranian Schindler

If the news and pop "news" the past week has left a bad taste, refresh yourself with the BBC's story about Abdol-Hossein Sardari. A sample:

The story he spinned to the Nazis, in a series of letters and reports, was that the Persian Emperor Cyrus had freed Jewish exiles in Babylon in 538 BC and they had returned to their homes.

However, he told the Nazis, at some later point a small number of Iranians began to find the teachings of the Prophet Moses attractive - and these Mousaique, or Iranian Followers of Moses, which he dubbed "Djuguten," were not part of the Jewish race.

Using all of his lawyer's skill, he exploited the internal contradictions and idiocies of the Nazis' ideology to gain special treatment for the "Djuguten", as the archive material published in Mr Mokhtari's new book shows.

High-level investigations were launched in Berlin, with "experts" on racial purity drafted in to give an opinion on whether this Iranian sect - which the book suggests may well have been Sardari's own invention - were Jewish or not.

The experts were non-committal and suggested that more funding was needed for research.

I love that last sentence, btw.

If the European doomsayers are right

High officials have said that peace is not a foregone conclusion. I wonder what Europe will be doing 5 years from now. With armies drawn down so far, I don't see war--at least not right away. Certainly not full scale wars of the type we're used to seeing over there.

Assume the gloomy outlook is correct, and that sometime in the not-too-distant future there will be riots killing foreign nationals, and counter riots, and demands for revenge against the thieves and killers. (From over here I don't see that degree of demonization yet. But I have to rely on reporters who speak the local languages--I've no clue what the man in the coffee-shop thinks.)

Neighbors might go to war in the classical way again. But non-neighboring countries might go with different models--attacks in third countries or on the sea, rocket attacks from throw-aways, or borrow from the midEast model and use terror bombings.

What would we expect to see on the road to classical war, given that the armies aren't that large yet?

They'd be expanding the forces under cover, or arranging so they can expand quickly. Rifles and uniforms are cheap, experienced drill sergeants a little less so, trucks and depots and artillery and aircraft still less--is anybody trying to buy back stuff they sold to third world countries? They'd start collecting dual use vehicles, and rehabbing boats as mine sweepers, and hiring vets from other countries.

Governments might start trying to be best pals with Turkey and Russia. Greece vs Germany wouldn't be much of a contest unless Greece had a powerful ally. (Hmm. Probably wouldn't be Turkey...)

The shape of trade wars will depend on how things settle out from the breakdown, and I can't make a decent stab at guessing that, and suspect that very few could.

I'll keep my eyes peeled. We have enough of our own troubles here. Mexico is coming apart at the seams already. The breakdown will be demagogue fertilizer all over; I could easily foresee states offering to secede. Texas isn't Germany, nor California Greece, but there are enough parallels to shape the same kind of conflict.

Trying to figure out events

Recently I haven't had much to say that I thought the world was entitled to know, and less that seemed to merit a full posting.

But from the swirl of events:

I was not a Jobs devotee. His devotion to his aesthetic and view of how things should work (inconsistent though it might be: think of the NeXT!) certainly changed the world. But one size doesn't fit all and "God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." Those who knew him better should write the eulogies.

I still do not understand exactly what we were doing in Libya. Tiny hints poped up along the way suggesting that something was afoot in the nuclear supplies line, but nothing solid enough to conclude that the powers that be had serious issues on their minds. The official line was nonsense; and were they kidding themselves about what the likely heirs of Gadhafi would be like? Not that Gadhafi didn't richly deserve toppling--the world would be a happier place if he'd gone years ago. I'm surprised he didn't flee. I guess he had succeeded in fooling himself too about how much his subjects loved him.

I confess that sending troops to help find/destroy the LRA puzzled me: why? Obvious after someone pointed it out: it's a quid pro quo for permission to establish bases in Uganda. I suspect the troops won't do much good, though. If Ugandan troops and government officials are like those elsewhere on the continent, their main objectives have little to do with engaging the enemy.

I gather today is UN Day. It has some notable victories to its credit: standardizing air traffic control, control of some diseases, and so on. And it has some truly foul corruption and offenses to its discredit, which I won't darken the day with. And it is a wonderful place to find sinecures for cousins. And from time to time the peacekeeping troops do something useful--such as in Liberia. In Lebanon they were merely targets who had to pretend Hezbullah wasn't installing missile launchers; worse than useless. "Shake Hands with the Devil" anyone?

Is the UW discriminating on the basis of race? I don't know. Probably, but from looking at the student body it would be hard to tell: Wisconsin is very much a white state (Milwaukee excepted), and the University, as a state school, has an obligation to provide for the residents of the state. I wish the various parties would use the word "diversity" honestly and consistently. Sometimes it means something the dictionary would recognize: a mix of students from different backgrounds and with different perspectives (such as from China, India, Korea, Japan, Canada, Germany, etc); and sometimes it means with a proportionate mix of students from disadvantaged groups. (Bureaucrats like things they can count, never mind whether the program targets the right subgroup or not.)

Prayers for Norway

Horrible crimes. Pray for comfort for the wounded and the families of the dead, and for God's mercy on the dead.

When I heard of this, the first thing I wondered was "Why the youth camp?" If he's bombing government offices, wouldn't the more logical targets be racing out of the buildings nearby? A second bomb, or a rooftop sniper post would seem more in line with an anti-government attack. What sort of twisted man goes over an hour out of his way out to shoot kids afterward?

Later reports seem to explain it. The youth camp was an organ of the Labor party--sort of as though the Democrats ran a Boy Scouts. Government ministers spoke at the camp, and I gather some of the youth were interns. So he must have thought of it as a target composed of the political elite, not a "terrorize the people" target.

I suppose I could check this by reading his manifesto, but I don't want to give him that much honor. He showed himself vile; I don't want to hear his excuses.

Update: People who were nearby helped the swimmers despite the gunman.

Careless Translation and Biased Reporting

There are half a million Japanese in shelters, said one source. That's a lot--nearly 1/2%. This fellow has an interesting take on the situation. Not an especially gentle one, and quite angry at foreign media.

Tsunami

I watched one video, of the water overwhelming the farms beside the canal, taken from a helicopter.

From so high the crawling chaos seemed almost slow as it slid from side to side swallowing neat farms and gardens and stacked hay into a black stew littered with shattered buildings. But it wasn't slow, as you can see from the cars speeding away on roads that (God help them) did not lead straight away from death.

You see all human order lost in nightmare, with nothing you can do to turn it aside.

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And to add to the mess of shattered buildings and drowned land, a little blast at a power plant. They had previously detected cesium and iodine, so the core had been breached somewhere. Hot uranium plus water = uranium oxide plus hydrogen, leading to a little boom? That'll be messy to deal with. And one report said they were only now getting the last reactors back online after Kobe.

Update They use uranium oxide, so it was likely steam interacting with other structural elements.

Baby Doc

Color me puzzled. (Not for the first time...)

Why would Baby Doc return to Haiti? I can only think of three reasons: he thought he had a base of support that would let him take a role again, even if only a token role as "big man bringing some aid"; he is dying and wanted to die there; or he was delusional about what the reaction would be. It didn't sound like the French were pushing him to leave, and I gather he still had a few francs in his pocket (Wikipedia says he had fallen on hard times, but I'd bet he's still richer than me.)

I wonder if he had voodoo advice before coming.

UPDATE: It was suggested that he might have hoped for enough disarray to be able to come in and leave unmolested after a few days. It seems the Swiss have a new law to prevent the release of disputed maybe-national funds to fugitive leaders. If Baby could persuade the Swiss that Haitian inaction meant they weren't serious about arresting him, then he wouldn't be a fugitive and he could lay hands on the money. Not a risk I'd care to take...