Russian 'democracy'

Is catching up with Gary Kasparov.

A few good links, vol. MXVII

Couple oddities in today's New York Times.

First up is this article, by liberal columnist Maureen Dowd, about the recent spats between Democratic Presidential nomination front-runners Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton over their respective foreign policy experience. The title of the piece — "She's No Morgenthau" — looks to be an on-topic reference to Hans J. Morgenthau, an international relations theorist and University of Chicago professor who immigrated to the U.S. from Poland after living through World War II.

But there are no further references to Morgenthau in the story proper, nor would a candidate's possession of foreign policy experience necessarily make he or she "Morgenthauian."

(Morgenthau's main claim to fame is setting out the fundamental precepts of classical realism in his influential 1948 tome, Politics Among Nations, a school of International Relations theory that identifies the consolidation of power, maximization of security, and the protection of core national interests as the predominant responses of nation-states to what the theory argues is a fundamentally anarchical international order. So, basically, realpolitik, but dressed of for academes.)

Pardon my ignorance on the details of the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination campaign, but the realpolitik doctrine doesn't seem all that applicable to the foreign policies of either Obama or Clinton. And with no mention of Morgenthau after the first reference, Dowd leaves us guessing as to why she had his name put up in the hed.

(In the public policy sense of the word, Morgenthau was not a foreign policy practitioner, either. Although influential, he was, by trade, an academic — a little far off from what usually makes for a President of the United States.)

So what is Dowd trying to do? Compare Clinton to realism? Attract some IR theorists to her column? Was this a desk editor trying to be clever?

Second up isn't so much an oddity as an interesting piece on Hollywood producer Brian Grazer. As the article points out, Grazer isn't well-known — he certainly isn't a household name — and for someone who has been behind such major projects as Eight Mile, Inside Man, A Beautiful Mind, The Da Vinci Code, and American Gangster, his Wikipedia entry contains scant information. I found this bit of the NYT story most fascinating, though:

For the last 20 years, Mr. Grazer has met each week with a person who is an expert in science, medicine, politics, fashion, religion — anything other than entertainment. He is so serious about the meetings that he has a staff member whose job it is to find interesting people.

The weekly get-togethers have led to some of Mr. Grazer’s most successful ideas. After meeting with five of the top trial lawyers in the country, Mr. Grazer came up with the idea for “Liar Liar.” “Eight Mile” came about because he had met Chuck D, the lead singer for Public Enemy, and Slick Rick, a rapper from the 1980s. A meeting with a former F.B.I. agent, Christopher Whitcomb, led to “The F.B.I.,” a new show for Fox.

“I like learning stuff. The more information you can get about a person or a subject, the more you can pour into a potential project,” Mr. Grazer said. “I made a decision to do different things. I want to do things that have a better chance of being thought of as original. I do everything I can to disrupt my comfort zone.”

Read away.

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Domo Arigato, Michelin-San

Revealing something I've always had a sneaking suspicion was true (or, in the least, truthy), Michelin Guide today declared Tokyo the world's top city for cuisine.

Ze quote:

Eight of Tokyo's restaurants won the maximum three stars — only two fewer than Paris itself. Another 25 got two stars and 117 one star.

To add to Paris's embarrassment, three of the top eight restaurants in Tokyo serve French food. Three more offer traditional Japanese fine dining, and the other two are sushi houses.

"Tokyo is becoming the global city with the finest cuisine, the city in the world with the most stars," said Michelin guide director Jean-Luc Naret.

In other news, it turns out it is possible to clean blood off a knife with soap and water (or, preferably, bleach).

Canada is now China's 3rd largest export market, reports the China Daily:

Canada's exports to China nearly doubled to 8 billion Canadian dollars (US$8.8 billion) in 2006 from 4 billion Canadian dollars (US$4.4 billion) in 2002. In the first seven months of 2007, they soared 43 percent over the same period one year ago, the largest gain by any of the G-7 countries, the report said.

Although Canada still imports far more from China than it exports, 21.7 billion Canadian dollars (US$23.9 billion) as of July, 2007 compared to 5.5 billion Canadian dollars (US$6.1 billion), export growth has outpaced imports by a wide margin this year, said the report.

This is good news for our export portfolio. Sadly, according to 2006 figures from Industry Canada, 82% of our exports still go to the U.S. — a whopping $360 billion, versus East Asia's total $23b.

Net worth(s)

In yet another sign of the global power shift away from the Atlantic and toward the Pacific, China's flagship sovereign wealth fund, PetroChina, has become the world's largest company by market value.^*

The oil giant closed out its first day of trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange at 44 yuan per share, putting the company's total market value at just under $1 trillion USD — a tad below Canada's annual GDP and roughly equivalent to India's. Taking up the second violin chair on the world's-most-valuable list is ExxonMobil, worth about $480 billion USD, or $90 a share (NYSE). And of the five most valuable firms on earth, three are Chinese — PetroChina at No. 1, China Mobile at No. 4, and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China at No. 5. (General Electric rounds out the top five at No. 3.)

Even if ExxonMobil is "more profitable, better managed, and richer in assets," as The Economist reports, and PetroChina's IPO is inflated and unreflective of its actual market value, the $500-billion gap is still a major indicator of the shifting global winds.

(Hint: the weather vane points east.)

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^* Market value does not reflect a firm's total assets, market capitalization, or "size." Measured in terms of assets, western banking giant Citigroup dominates, though the recently-privatized Japan Post savings system is probably worth more. In terms of market capitalization — or "physical stuff," as it were — GE is king.

Yes, I know it's a famous and acclaimed novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez...

...but "Love in the Time of Cholera" has got to be one of the worst movie titles ever. And the badness is made worse by New Line's marketing campaign, which features romantic, rose-adorned posters, a melodramatic trailer complete with lush, soaring music, and the word "Cholera," printed in large, white text and announced by a male narrator so delicately it's as if he's saying "silk lingerie" or making a pass at a moonlit-damsel in Seville. The effect borders so closely on camp that I've yet to sit in a theatre showing the trailer where moviegoers didn't break down and giggle when the title appears near the end...

(The giggling is followed by the trailer's quick, almost off-hand proclamation that the film features original songs by Shakira. You can take a guess at where this leads.)


It's all a tad shameful because, well, who knows, Cholera could be really good.

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Feels good

To be 25