David Corn and Bloggingheads.tv

David Corn has (again, finally) featured in half of a recent episode of bloggingheads.tv, with a fellow by the name of James Pinkerton. If nothing else, it’s a reminder of how debate, dialogue and discourse are supposed to work. Also David Corn is freaking awesome.

Episodes highlights/contents:

Who does Christendom exclude? (05:37)

Is Turkey starting the next Middle Eastern war? (07:25)

Will one of these Republican losers win in ‘08? (09:46)

God doesn’t play dice. She plays baseball (12:50)

Spitzer’s immigration problem (13:17)

Does Christendom need defending against Islam? (16:21)

Saudi king tries to grow modern ideas in desert

Bloody interesting.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is staking $12.5 billion on a gargantuan bid to catch up with the West in science and technology.

Between an oil refinery and the sea, the monarch is building from scratch a graduate research institution that will have one of the 10 largest endowments in the world, worth more than $10 billion.

Its planners say men and women will study side by side in an enclave walled off from the rest of Saudi society, the country’s notorious religious police will be barred and all religious and ethnic groups will be welcome in a push for academic freedom and international collaboration sure to test the kingdom’s cultural and religious limits.

…

For the new institution, the king has cut his own education ministry out the loop, hiring the state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco to build the campus, create its curriculum and attract foreigners.

It all sounds vaguely Syriana-ish – not to mention wonderful! I’d work there. If only they had some medieaval art for my (Jewish) wife to study. So…

Upon completion, the energy-efficient campus will house 20,000 faculty and staff members, students and their families. Social rules will be more relaxed, as they are in the compounds where foreign oil workers live; women will be allowed to drive, for example. But the kingdom’s laws will still apply: Israelis, barred by law from visiting Saudi Arabia, will not be able to collaborate with the university. And one staple of campus life worldwide will be missing: alcohol.

The university president will be a foreigner, and the faculty members and graduate students at first will be overwhelmingly foreign as well. Generous scholarships will finance the 2,000 graduate students; planners expect the Saudi share of the student body to increase over the years as scholarships aimed at promising current undergraduates help groom them for graduate studies at the new university.

The university’s entire model is built around partnerships with other international universities, and faculty members are expected to have permanent bases at other research institutions abroad.

The university will also rely on a new free-market model. The faculty members will not have tenure, and almost all of them will have joint appointments. While the university will initially be awash in money, its faculty and graduate students will still have to compete with top international institutions for the limited pool of private money that underwrites most graduate research.

Very impressive.

“Perhaps the new Copernican revolution is the discovery that the world economy does not orbit the US.”

Nice line.

Which leads to the challenge of picking the odd one out: Warren Buffett, Hu Jintao, Don Argus, Peter Costello.

According to Buffett, the subprime wash-up will hurt for up to two years, but the US economy overall will move forward. (The Sage of Omaha is in South Korea inspecting the local subsidiary of the Israeli industrial tools company he bought last year – just another little bit of globalisation.)

According to Argus, commodity demand and prices are staying high despite US weakness. The chairman told the BHP AGM in London overnight that Chinese growth is continuing and India is following it, 10 or 15 years behind.

According to Hu, well, according to the Chinese government, September quarter growth printed at an annualised rate of 11.5 per cent, down a fraction from the June quarter, but the same as the annualised rate for the first nine months of the year. China’s about to overtake Germany as the world’s third biggest economy.

And Prophet Pete Costello is predicting extreme difficulty ahead which will turn into Armageddon if Labor wins the election and he’s not given the chance to be prime minister.

The line of the day goes to Macquarie Bank international economist Mark Tierney: “Perhaps the new Copernican revolution is the discovery that the world economy does not orbit the US.”

Lovely.

Malthusian crop yields

The forecast size of the NSW grain crop has been cut by a further 40 per cent due to dry, hot and windy weather this month and last month.

The NSW Grain Report, published yesterday by the Department of Primary Industries, is predicting a harvest in coming months of just 2.8 million tonnes, compared with a mid-September estimate of 4.67 million tonnes.

It means the 2007-08 harvest is likely to be even smaller than the disastrous drought-ravaged 2006-07 harvest and the worst in more than a decade.

… yesterday’s NSW report said: “Yield prospects for all crops have continued to deteriorate, with virtually no effective rainfall recorded during September and October. Estimated winter crop area to be harvested is 2.68 million hectares. About 3.12 million tonnes was harvested from 2.62 million hectares in 2006.”

One hesitates to say they told an entire country so. Mostly because, for me at least, my whole family is there, and could really use food, water and electricity for, I’m guessing, the rest of their lives.

In the past year the price of wheat has more than doubled, to reach new highs, and this week the UN published a report that said the planet’s water, land, air, plants, animals and fish stocks were all in “inexorable decline”.

It warned that the world’s population of 6.75 billion “has reached a stage where the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available” and climate change “may threaten humanity’s very survival”.