Recommended Reading

For the third time in less than twenty years, Germany is trying to force down the throat of Europe a federal “political union” which, in the eyes of too many European observers, eerily resembles a gentler, kinder Anschluss.  While Europeans were able to push back against the first two attempts, the two-year long financial crisis has created within Europe a “German unipolar moment” and provided the kind of leverage that had eluded Germany earlier. With the German Chancellor as a de facto “EU Chancellor,” German elites are leveraging the crisis by playing a game of chicken in order to make their federal vision prevail.

Maggie’s Farm – Jews confront the Gentlemen’s agreement on campuses  (Bruce Kesler)

Kesler looks at the de facto alliance between tenured leftists and pro-Palestinian student extremists on university campuses to promote antisemitic activities and even violence and the response of Jewish student organizations:

….In March 2011, the US Office of Civil Rights finally opened an investigation into Rossman-Benjamin’s Title VI complaint. There’s also a pending legal complaint against UC Berkeley for allowing harassment of Jewish students, and a weak court sentence, later further reduced, was levied against UC Irvine and UC Riverside students who illegally disrupted Israel Ambassador Oren’s speech at UC Irvine. Other legal challenges to colleges in other states allowing across-the-line infringements on laws and academic freedom are in process or development. Fear of threats and violent or illegal actions by pro-Palestinian activists on campuses continue to silence many pro-Israel speakers from being allowed a peaceful campus stage. Freedom of speech is being violated, in contradiction to tenets of academic freedom. 

SLATE – “Narco Economics” (Ray Fisman) 

“It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.” Al Pacino’s classic line from The Godfathernicely sums up the economics profession’s basic view of human enterprise, criminal and otherwise: Human beings make decisions based on rational cost-benefit calculations, not passion or emotion. And it captures the approach employed by MIT Ph.D. student Melissa Dell in her recent work, which strips the seemingly senseless violence of the Mexican Drug War to its cold, rational essentials. Viewing Mexico’s drug cartels as calculating, profit-maximizing business operations, Dell’s model provides a framework for understanding how traffickers have adjusted their operations in response to President Felipe Calderón’s war on the drug trade. According to Dell, the cartels have behaved like textbook economic actors, shifting their trafficking routes in predictable ways to circumvent towns where the government has cracked down and raiding towns where competing cartels have been weakened by government efforts. By providing a basis for analyzing how traffickers react to government efforts, Dell’s work might help Calderón’s administration design a better strategy for defeating Mexico’s drug lords.

Hat tip to Feral Jundi

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