The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism

From Hernando de Soto, at the Wall Street Journal, "Military might alone won’t defeat Islamic State and its ilk. The U.S. needs to promote economic empowerment."

An interesting piece, including a powerful argument about economic freedom and personal autonomy. I just don't think de Soto makes the connection to terrorism all that well. Islamists aren't primarily driven by poverty. They're driven by religious ideology. Wealthy or poor, contemporary Islam is about jihad, not greater economic empowerment.

Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier Dead at 63

One of the most revolting dictators of my lifetime.

At the New York Times, "Jean-Claude Duvalier, ‘Baby Doc’ of Haiti, Dies at 63":

Jean-Claude Duvalier, a former president of Haiti known as Baby Doc who ruled the country with a bloody brutality and then shocked the country anew with a sudden return from a 25-year exile in 2011, died on Saturday.

Mr. Duvalier, 63, died of a heart attack at his home, his lawyer told The Associated Press. President Michel J. Martelly announced the death on Twitter.

Mr. Duvalier continued to defend what human rights workers called one of the most oppressive governments in the Western Hemisphere, following in the footsteps of his father, François, known as Papa Doc, who also died suddenly, in 1971. The son was 19 when he assumed the post “president for life,” as he and his father called it, becoming the youngest head of state at the time.

He never apologized for atrocities, including brutal crackdowns on opponents at the hands of the feared Tonton Macoutes, a civilian militia that left a thousand people, if not more, dead, disappeared or illegally detained in harsh prisons.

Indeed, he defended himself as victims of his government pursued cases in Haitian courts on charges of corruption and human rights abuses. Mr. Duvalier had appeared in court and calmly denied any wrongdoing and even asserted the country was better off when he ruled.

“Were there deaths and summary executions under your government?” a judge asked him at a hearing in March 2013.

“Deaths exist in all countries,” Mr. Duvalier replied almost inaudibly. “I didn’t intervene in the activities of the police.”

He regularly dined in restaurants in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, and attended events at the invitation of Mr. Martelly, whose administration has included relatives and allies of people associated with Mr. Duvalier.

This year, his old political party announced that it would field candidates in elections and opened an office, though analysts were not sure if it was a serious move or a thumb in the eye of the rival he loathed and who succeeded him, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, another formerly exiled president who also returned and still is a political force.

Mr. Duvalier fled the country in 1986, as political repression and worsening economic conditions set off violent unrest in what was then and still is the hemisphere’s poorest country. He asked France for asylum and the United States for the plane that would take him there, an American official said at the time.

His departure set the stage for democratic, though tumultuous, elections. Human rights groups have said that he looted Haiti’s treasury of millions of dollars and has largely lived off ill-gotten gains ever since.

His presence in the country, and the fact that he will now escape trial, appalled victims and human rights workers.

“On Duvalier’s death I’m thinking of the look in my mother’s eyes when she talks about her brother Joel who was disappeared by that dictator,” Patrick Gaspard, a Haitian-American who is the American ambassador to South Africa, said on Twitter. “News of the passing of Duvalier makes me honor my father and generations of Haitians who resisted that vicious dictatorship.”

More.

Pro-Democracy Protests Shake Hong Kong

At WSJ, "Roads Were Blocked and Some Schools and Offices Were Closed Monday Morning."

Hong Kong is a bright shining light in Asia and China is on its way to snuffing it out. #OccupyCentral

— Melissa Clouthier (@MelissaTweets) September 28, 2014

Chaos in #Brazil at World Cup Soccer

At U.S. News and World Report, "Brazilian Protesters Draw Harsh Penalties Before World Cup Opener." And Huffington Post UK, "World Cup 2014: Violent Clashes In Sao Paulo Mar Tournament Opening."



More at the Atlantic, "'There Will Be No World Cup': What's at Stake in Brazil."

Narendra Modi Victory Heralds New Era in #India

I saw this at Pamela's earlier, "Astounding Victory for Modi in India Election":

The results are in and they are astounding. Magnificent. Narendra Modi did wildly better than even the best projections. The BJP (Modi’s party) won over 50 percent of the seats ALONE, without even their handful of ideologically aligned allies.

Despite what the cretins in the media and the Islamic apologists in the political arena tell you, there is major change afoot. I have been seeing it here in the States, and we see lights of hope and truth beginning to blaze across the world.

And here's WSJ, "Modi Election Win Heralds New Era: Hindu-Nationalist, Pro-Business BJP Candidate Narendra Modi Marks Sweeping Shift."

It's a big deal. The BJP dislodged the Gandhi, Congress Party machine that's ruled india for 60 years.

More at Telegraph UK, "Narendra Modi wins India election with landslide victory."

And video from Euro News, "Dramatic shift in Indian politics with Modi set to win landslide election victory."

Mexican Leftists Irate Over Senate Vote on Opening Oil Industry to Foreign Investors

Anything that pisses off leftists is alright by me.

At LAT, "Mexican Senate OKs bill to open oil industry to foreign investors":

On Wednesday, members of the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, and other leftists closed off the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, in Mexico City, chaining doors and blocking entrances with chairs in an effort to prevent lawmakers from considering the bill.

"They are selling the entire subsoil of the country to interests that are against Mexico," former PRD presidential candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas said in a TV interview. Leftist leaders hope they can stop the legislation by calling a national plebiscite, though it is unclear whether they will be able to pursue that avenue legally.

The poor dears!

India's Child Slavery Scourge

At Der Spiegel, "Daughters for Sale: Aid Organizations Confront Child Slavery in India":

Millions of Indian children work as slaves in factories, brothels or in the homes of families. Out of poverty and desperation, parents sell their daughters, and human traffickers wait at train stations for runaways and scour for orphans in monsoon-ravaged villages.

On the day that Durga Mala was rescued, she lay crying on the stone floor, where she was attempting to cool her back. She was 11 years old and her skin was covered with blisters, from her shoulder blades to her buttocks. A few days earlier, her owners had poured hot oil over her because they thought she was working too slowly.

Suddenly Durga heard screams and huddled on the floor. Acting on a tip, police stormed the apartment in the heart of Bangalore. When they broke the door down, Durga crossed her arms in front of her chest and closed her eyes. She was only wearing a pair of panties -- that's all the clothing that her owners had allowed her to have. Durga says: "I was ashamed."

One of the men wrapped the small girl in a sheet and brought her to a hospital. Doctors treated her for a number of days. In addition to her burns, she was malnourished, infected wounds covered her fingers and her lips were scarred. "I dropped a glass once," says Durga, "and the woman got angry and pulled my fingernails out, one by one." Sometimes they poked her in the mouth with a needle. Durga was supposed to work, not speak.

It's estimated that millions of children in India live as modern-day slaves. They work in the fields, in factories, brothels and private households -- often without pay and usually with no realistic chance of escaping. The majority of them are sold or hired out by their own families.

According to an Indian government census from 2001, this country of over 1 billion people has 12.6 million minors between the ages of 5 and 14 who are working. The real number is undoubtedly significantly higher because many children are not officially registered at birth -- and the owners of course do their best to keep the existence of child slaves a secret. Aid organizations estimate that three-quarters of all domestic servants in India are children, and 90 percent of those are girls. Although both child labor and child trafficking are illegal, police rarely intervene -- and the courts seldom convict child traffickers and slaveholders.

Continue reading.

And what to say?

India's a developing country with a huge population. Tremendous poverty obviously forces many parents to think of children as burdens and sources of financial remuneration. Hence, parents selling off children to human traffickers, which is something that people would find horrifying in the United States.

Contaminated School Lunches Kill at Least 23 Children in India

The costs of "free" food.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Tainted School Lunch Kills at Least 23 Indian Children: Free Food Was Provided Under Government's Midday-Meal Program":

PATNA, India—In a threadbare hospital here, 5-year-old Rashmi Kumari is fighting a powerful poison. "She is a brilliant student," said her uncle as he tried to distract her by asking her to recite poems.

Rashmi is also the only child in her household left alive.

Her cousins, Anshu and Kushboo, died after eating a school lunch now believed to have been contaminated with a pesticide compound, according to a hospital official. The disaster has left at least 23 children dead as of Thursday morning and spotlights the shortcomings in a government school-lunch program intended to feed India's millions of malnourished students.

Initial investigations suggest that organophosphorus, commonly used in farm pesticides, may have been mixed into the rice, beans and potato curry served Tuesday at an elementary school in Gandaman, a village in the impoverished state of Bihar, according to Amarkant Jha Amar, medical superintendent at the hospital.

The students became sick and suffered from vomiting, fainting and foaming at the mouth. More than two dozen victims are still being treated. Mr. Amar said patients are receiving medicine to neutralize the chemical, which is similar to nerve agents such as sarin.

It remains unclear how or where the chemical got into the food. A state-level investigation is under way and the first report is expected Thursday, according to local police and a district magistrate.

Foaming at the mouth? Sarin? What a horrible way to die, and so senselessly tragic.

More, "India’s Problems With Free School Meals."

Why Humans Throw So Well

This is cool.

At the New York Times, "Scientists Unlock Mystery in Evolution of Pitchers":

No one knows whether Homo erectus, the early ancestor of both the Yankees and the Red Sox, threw the split-finger fastball.

But he could have, according to a group of scientists who offer new evidence that the classic overhand throw used by baseball players at all positions, and by snowball, rock and tomato hurlers of all ages, is an evolutionary adaptation dependent on several changes in anatomy. They first appeared, the researchers say, around 1.8 million years ago, when humans were most likely beginning to hunt big game and needed to throw sharp objects hard and fast.

No other primate throws with anything comparable to human force. Chimpanzees, who are much, much stronger, pound for pound, than human beings, can throw, as any zoo visitor knows. But the best an adult male can do is about 20 miles per hour. A 12-year-old human pitcher can easily throw three times that fast.

Clearly, the reason is not muscle strength, according to Neil Roach of George Washington University, first author of a report in the journal Nature released on Wednesday. Dr. Roach, who conducted the research as a graduate student at Harvard, and his colleagues there used motion-capture video to analyze the throwing motion of 20 college athletes, who hurled baseballs at a target about 100 feet away, with and without a brace that restricted shoulder motion.

They analyzed the structure of the shoulder and upper arm, the motion and the forces involved, and concluded, first, that muscles alone cannot account for how hard and fast humans throw. The shoulder and arm and the rest of the body involved in the throwing motion must be storing elastic energy, like the long tendon of a kangaroo when it hops, or the human Achilles’ tendon in running and jumping, they said.

“You’re storing energy in your shoulder,” Dr. Roach said, speaking from Africa, where he was heading to Lake Turkana to look at fossil footprints of human ancestors about a million and a half years old. The storage occurs in the cocking motion, when a thrower brings hand and ball back, preparing to throw. “It works just like a slingshot would. You’re actually stretching the ligaments.”

Several developments in anatomy allowed humans to throw this way, he said, including a waist that allows twisting and a relatively open shoulder, compared with those of other primates like chimpanzees.

Looking at the fossil record, Dr. Roach and colleagues put the moment at which these changes came together in one body at about 1.8 million years ago, when Homo erectus first appeared. “It’s possible that Homo erectus could throw as fast as we do,” Dr. Roach said.

More at that top link.

Africa's Economic Boom

An excellent piece, from Shantayanan Devarajan and Wolfgang Fengler, at Foreign Affairs, "Why the Pessimists and the Optimists Are Both Right":

Talk to experts, academics, or businesspeople about the economies of sub-Saharan Africa and you are likely to hear one of two narratives. The first is optimistic: Africa’s moment is just around the corner, or has already arrived. Reasons for hope abound. Despite the global economic crisis, the region’s GDP has grown rapidly, averaging almost five percent a year since 2000, and is expected to rise even faster in the years ahead. Many countries, not just the resource-rich ones, have participated in the boom: indeed, 20 states in sub-Saharan Africa that do not produce oil managed average GDP growth rates of four percent or higher between 1998 and 2008. Meanwhile, the region has begun attracting serious amounts of private capital; at $50 billion a year, such flows now exceed foreign aid.

At the same time, poverty is declining. Since 1996, the average poverty rate in sub-Saharan African countries has fallen by about one percentage point a year, and between 2005 and 2008, the portion of Africans in the region living on less than $1.25 a day fell for the first time, from 52 percent to 48 percent. If the region’s stable countries continue growing at the average rates they have enjoyed for the last decade, most of them will reach a per capita gross national income of $1,000 by 2025, which the World Bank classifies as “middle income.” The region has also made great strides in education and health care. Between 2000 and 2008, secondary school enrollment increased by nearly 50 percent, and over the past decade, life expectancy has increased by about ten percent.

The second narrative is more pessimistic. It casts doubt on the durability of Africa’s growth and notes the depressing persistence of its economic troubles. Like the first view, this one is also justified by compelling evidence. For one thing, Africa’s recent growth has largely followed rising commodity prices, and commodities make up the overwhelming share of its exports -- never a stable prospect. Indeed, the pessimists argue that Africa is simply riding a commodities wave that is bound to crest and fall and that the region has not yet made the kind of fundamental economic changes that would protect it when the downturn arrives. The manufacturing sector in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, currently accounts for the same small share of overall GDP that it did in the 1970s. What’s more, despite the overall decline in poverty, some rapidly growing countries, such as Burkina Faso, Mozambique, and Tanzania, have barely managed to reduce their poverty rates. And although most of Africa’s civil wars have ended, political instability remains widespread: in the past year alone, Guinea-Bissau and Mali suffered coups d’état, renewed violence rocked the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, and fighting flared on the border between South Sudan and Sudan. At present, about a third of sub-Saharan African countries are in the throes of violent conflict.

More mundane problems also take a heavy toll. Much of Africa suffers from rampant corruption, and most of its infrastructure is in poor condition. Many governments struggle to provide basic services: teachers in Tanzania’s public primary schools are absent 23 percent of the time, and government-employed doctors in Senegal spend an average of only 39 minutes a day seeing patients. Such deficiencies will become only more pronounced as Africa’s population booms.

And then there’s the fact that African countries, especially those that are rich in resources, often fall prey to what the economist Daron Acemoglu and the political scientist James Robinson have termed “extractive institutions”: policies and practices that are designed to capture the wealth and resources of a society for the benefit of a small but politically powerful elite. One result is staggering inequality, the effects of which are often masked by positive growth statistics.

What should one make of all the contradictory evidence? At first glance, these two narratives seem irreconcilable. It turns out, however, that both are right, or at least reflect aspects of a more complex reality, which neither fully captures. The skeptics focus so much on the region’s commodity exports that they fail to grasp the extent to which its recent growth is a result of economic reforms (many of which were necessitated by the misguided policies of the past). The optimists, meanwhile, underestimate the degree to which the region’s remaining problems -- such as sclerotic institutions, low levels of education, and substandard health care -- reflect government failures that will be very difficult to overcome because they are deeply rooted in political conflict.

However, even if both narratives are reductive, the optimists’ view of Africa’s future is ultimately closer to the mark and more likely to be borne out by developments in the coming decades. Africa will continue to face daunting obstacles on its ongoing path to prosperity, especially when it comes to improving its human capital: the education, skills, and health of its population. But the success of recent reforms and the increased openness of its societies, fueled in part by new information and communications technologies, give Africa a good chance of enjoying sustained growth and poverty reduction in the decades to come.

Continue reading.

The authors argue that the continent is leapfrogging some stages of technological progress, going right to the cellular era --- "the so-called mobile revolution" --- bypassing a long, plodding period of telecommunications development.