Halfway down the Danube

South Sudan again

By an odd coincidence, this popped up in the news last week:

An international tribunal redefined the borders of a disputed oil-rich region between north and south Sudan on Wednesday. The ruling seeks to defuse a thorny issue in the 2005 peace agreement ending one of Africa’s longest civil wars by splitting the contested zone between the two sides.

In its ruling the tribunal, seated at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, overruled a decision by an international commission that Sudan’s government rejected four years ago.

The new ruling includes important concessions for both sides, giving the government in the north control of the region’s richest oil fields, but consolidating control of the remaining region under the Ngok Dinka, an ethnic group loyal to southern Sudan and likely to vote to join it in a coming referendum.

Both sides in the conflict...  said Wednesday that they would accept the ruling.

Okay, so.  Previously, a conflict in South Sudan was very, very likely in 2011.  That's because the folks who negotiated a peace settlement foolishly agreed to hold a separate vote for Abiye Province, which is mostly inhabited by the pro-Southern Ngok Dinka but which includes the region's richest oil fields.  The North was not going to let this go without a fight.

The new settlement divides the province so that most of the oil is on one side, and most of the Ngok Dinka are on the other.  It's an imperfect division, but it might be enough to prevent a war.

Nobody has been paying much attention to South Sudan.  Hell, I had only the vaguest idea of the place before I went next door to Uganda.  So it seemed all too plausible that it might be allowed to drift into another war.  Now, maybe not -- 2011 will still be very tricky, but it's no longer a certain date with violence and chaos.  The dog might not bark.  That's encouraging.

Really Weird Stuff in the Washington Post

OK, there's a lot of very weird stuff in the Washington Post.  It's not a very good newspaper, and it's getting worse.  (Not all of it, of course; and some of its reporters are the best in the biz ... even if they seem to save their best stuff for their independent books and not their articles in the paper.)  One of the problems is the editorial page, which publishes increasingly strange things, like the following from Robert Maranto of Villanova University.  Starting in the second paragraph of his piece, right after a brief quote from Larry Summers, Maranto writes:

I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I've been on the "far right" as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights. All these views -- commonplace in American society and among the political class -- are practically verboten in much of academia.

Whaaaa?  I supported and continue to support the replacement of AFDC with TANF ("welfare reform") on the grounds that the evidence shows that it has helped the poor.  I certainly believe that resisting Soviet aggression was a good thing.  And I happen to approve of applying cost-benefit analysis to environmental regulations.

Absolutely none of these positions has ever caused me political problems in the university.  Obviously not in economic or political science departments, but not even in history departments. 

In fact, I have a good friend in a major political science department who is advising Rudy Giuliani and a excellent colleague in a similarly major history department who is doing the same.  We won't mention my opinion of their presidential choice, but I can't possibly think more highly of their academic work, and their careers are doing more than fine. 

In short, I just don't know what to make of an editorial that starts by telling me that my own experience of reality is wrong, and then proceeds to make its argument via series of anecdotes reported in ambiguous ways.  For example, is it the following really true?

Despite New York City's 15-year-long decline in crime, most criminologists still struggle to attribute the increased safety to demographic shifts or even random statistical variations (which apparently skipped other cities) rather than more effective policing.

Actually, considering how the above is phrased, how would you know it weren't true?  It implies that any attempt to test the causes of the crime decline is "anti-conservative." 

The whole thing is just a little ... bizarre.

My thoughts on the great Internet race and IQ debate

Kneel before Zod, whitey.

Day 18: It can't be for the content.

Hypothesis: television news programming is mainly a way for advertisers to aggregate viewers by gullibility. Discuss.

Transnistria, Burma

    Most of you have probably seen these already, but here are two recent posts of mine over at the Fistful: one and two.  As time allows, I'll add some more.

Meanwhile, Burma.  Here's my $0.02: not much will change.  That's a really ugly government, it has pretty much all the guns, and it has shown no shyness about using them.  I'd be happy to be wrong.  On the other hand, any plausible successor government is unlikely to be much better, and could be worse. 

(Why, yes, I do live in the former Soviet Union.  Funny you should ask.)

#3872

Via icasualties.org:

U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Scott A.M. Oswell

Age:	33
From:	Not reported yet, Washington
Assigned To:	4th Squadron, 6th U.S. Air Cavalry
Based In:	Fort Lewis, WA
Fatality Date:	Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Fatality Cause:	Non-hostile - helicopter crash
Fatality Location:	Mosul, Iraq

Doug's little cousin.  He leaves his wife Sheri, two little girls, a little boy, parents, brother, cousins, friends... he will be missed. 

We are sad, and discouraged.  Stength and courage to his family in these dark days.

(Picture: Scott and his little girl Caitlyn serve food to homeless people in Hawaii.)

 

Via icasualties.org:

U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Scott A.M. Oswell

Age:	33
From:	Not reported yet, Washington
Assigned To:	4th Squadron, 6th U.S. Air Cavalry
Based In:	Fort Lewis, WA
Fatality Date:	Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Fatality Cause:	Non-hostile - helicopter crash
Fatality Location:	Mosul, Iraq

Doug's little cousin.  He leaves his wife Sheri, two little girls, a little boy, parents, brother, cousins, friends... he will be missed. 

We are sad, and discouraged.  Stength and courage to his family in these dark days.

(Picture: Scott and his little girl Caitlyn serve food to homeless people in Hawaii.)