Cheap shots and chasers 6/22

Look out, Tom! It's another one! From the Portland Mercury.

Eat your heart out, Friedman—those benighted North Africans who will never amount to anything because of their uncreative classrooms and rote learning, unlike the Singaporeans and South Koreans with their uncreative classrooms and rote learning, are going to save the world from global warming.

The Tunisian company Saphon Energy is selling a new approach to wind power using an ancient technology, with a four-foot circular sail on the top of a pole where it captures the kinetic energy of the wind that sways it back and forth. It's noiseless, and harmless to birds. Read the whole story at TPM and check out the company's website.





Now that retired pitcher Roger Clemens has been found not guilty of lying to Congress about his alleged use of steroids and HGH in his second trial (the first trial fell apart when prosecutors showed the jury inadmissible evidence), I wanted to take another look at this map, unearthed by bmaz at emptywheel a little while back, illustrating the bases covered in the FBI/Department of Justice investigation of Clemens in the four years they worked on the case, giving you a powerful sense of what an enormous elephant they constructed to pick up this little pea. "Any more questions," bmaz asked plaintively at the time, "why DOJ cannot get around to prosecuting banksters?" And that was when it still seemed likely they might get a conviction!

Still and all, it goes to show you: The arcs of the Department of Justice bend toward the moral universe, but they're too damn long.

What a difference a day makes! Before the elections, Antonis Samaras of Greece's New Democracy Party was such a Gloomy Gus, and now?

“Samaras today is completely different than what he was two weeks ago,” [hard-right politician George] Kirtsos said. “Two weeks ago, he was very negative about cooperating with Pasok.”

You have to read the Times story pretty carefully to find out why, but it's there all the same:

Critics say that Mr. Samaras destabilized Greece with his insistence on calling elections to replace the government led by Lucas Papademos, the technocratic prime minister whose mandate was to sign Greece’s second loan agreement.

“He just wanted to be prime minister,” said Thanos Veremis, a political historian who said he voted for New Democracy as a last resort. “It was pure ambition, pure and simple. Even in this state of collapse, he wanted to be Nero, playing his harp.”

Yes: after the May elections nobody wanted to ask Samaras to be prime minister and he had a great big sad. So they had to have another election—that's €47.9 million, cheaper than the €70.4 million they spent in May, but still a good bit for a bankrupt treasury to shell out. But hey, Antonis feels better now, so it's worth it, right? Thugs.

Airborne elephant watch

Google fetched this from someplace unsafe-looking called wn.com. Apologies for not crediting anybody. Forellenhof is the name of any number of hotels where Deutsch wird gesprochen and I suppose you can order trout—Forelle—from the Gasthof menu.

Yes, it's time to think once again about one of those news stories Thomas Friedman would not be able to imagine even in his most fevered vegetably-induced trance state: another prankish pachyderm sighted among the clouds, this time back in Tunisia, where they say elephant-gliding first got its start.

You can ignore the Times's Friedmanesque headline—"Tunisia Faces a Balancing Act of Democracy and Religion", like Religion, weighing in at 500 pounds, in this corner, and in the other, fresh from a championship bout in little Myanmar, you get the picture—and go straight to the story.

It turns out that the democracy and the religion are mostly struggling "ach! in einer Brust", in the same breast, and not really struggling, either, because they're actually fairly comfortable with it, that is a majority of Tunisians so far think of themselves as both little-d democrats and big-M Muslims at the same time and fail (of course they're not smoking whatever Tom is) to see any contradiction. Almost like Baptists, or somebody.

Not that everybody is entirely on board. There are your liberals, as usual, the ones who won the revolution but lost the election; and there are your Salafis, the ones who think that elections are not from God; and they tease each other a lot. The liberals are not listening to me, which is not that much of a surprise, and they're more worried about movie censorship than about breakfast for people who don't know where they're finding lunch, and if they want to start winning elections, they need to think about those priorities; and the Salafis are in my humble etc. kind of creepy. And somebody is really going to get hurt, I'm afraid. But most people won't, and things in general are going to keep chugging along. Try to enjoy it!