Ethnocide in Tibet?

A Times story today reports that China plans to phase out the Tibetan language from Tibetan schools, which has led to major student protests. I would really hope that the Obama administration in the U.S. and other members of the U.N. would condemn and actually attempt to stop this practice because, based on some really quick research, it completely violates the United Nations Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by the U.N. in 2007. That being said, I doubt they will do a thing.

Are we a nation of political comparison Shoppers?

"In this way, of course, money only mirrors other aspects of our political moment, where the prevailing mood generally seems to swing from one kind of antiestablishment ethos to another. In the age of eBay and Priceline, we are now a nation of comparison shoppers, inclined to trade one governing approach for another with a frequency that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. While one party holds power, the other is always busy learning the tactical lesson of its most recent defeat and counting the months until it can strike back."

Do people agree with this assessment of Americans as political comparison shoppers? Is it true that the majority just hates whoever is in power or is it just the vocal minority? It seems as if this is more tied to the economy, which is ever more frequently undergoing crises, than to some new techno-psychological behavior on the part of the masses.

From: Campaign Money Tends to Flow to the Opposition - October 20, 2010

Rationale for Increasing Capital Reserves of Big Banks

This was just a good blog post in general, but I thought this was a highlight:

The rationale for the capital increase is that in recent years the financial sector imposed massive losses on the rest of society by the mismanagement of credit. If the big banks have a machine that provides supernormal returns to employees and creditors while causing frequent losses to taxpayers (through the fiscal costs, measured in terms of the increase in net government debt as a result of the recession), savers (because interest rates are cut to zero by the Federal Reserve’s policy response), and their own shareholders in many instances, then reducing the voracity of this machine is for the general good.

From: NYTimes Economix blog