Tunisia: the first Wikileaks revolution?

Foreign Policy asked yesterday: Is Tunisia The First Wikileaks Revolution? Events of today might answer that question. President Ben Ali has disappeared (update: found!), and the Prime Minister has temporarily taken charge.

Meanwhile, Business Insider wonders if Tunisia is the first food price revolution, given that we are moving ever closer to a worldwide food price shock.

NYT: For the Arab World, a Potent Lesson. See also NYT's [live?] blog: Arab Bloggers Cheer on Tunisia’s Revolution, with several notable links and tweets.

Evgeny Morozov: First thoughts on Tunisia and the role of the Internet

HuffPo is providing live updates.

Twitter updates via hashtag #sidibouzid

Fitch may cut debt rating based on political turmoil.

AP provides background: Ben Ali: a cult of personality ends

Tim Carothers, Carnegie Endowment for Peace: Tunisia: Lessons of Authoritarian Collapse

Wired: U.S. Had Helo Deal With Ousted Tunisian Dictator

Gideon Rachman @ Financial Times is one of many drawing comparisons with Egypt.

FP provides historical context, noting Ben Ali's 1979 playbook.

Where in the world is Ben Ali? Probably not France, who refused to give Ben Ali permission to enter. Or is he headed for Montreal?

Reuters has some credible speculation on potential Tunisian leaders.

CNN and Al-Arabiya TV report Ben Ali landed in Saudi Arabia.

Reuters reports caretaker president Ghannouchi will form a government on Saturday.

The Guardian, one of the recipients of the full Wikileaks archive: Tunisia: The WikiLeaks connection. "Mohamed Ghannouchi, former PM now acting as president, described in WikiLeaks cables as well-liked and respected"

L. A. Times: Tunisia protesters use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to help organize and report. While not the focus of the story, here is a notable pull quote,

Laila Lalami, a Los Angeles-based writer from Morocco, wrote on Twitter, "Please stop trying to give credit to WikiLeaks, or Twitter, or YouTube for the toppling of Ben Ali. The Tunisian people did it." Later, she tweeted, "The Internet facilitates communication, but it alone doesn't keep people in the streets for four weeks."

HuffPo Paris: How Tunisian Facebookers Will Change Newsrooms. Describes how Al Jazeera's and France24's footage came exclusively from social media users for the first 2 weeks, and how journalists attempted to uphold standards in their reporting.

Council on Foreign Relations: After Ben Ali

Saudi Arabia officially welcomes Ben Ali into their country.

WSJ: As Tunisia Events Play Out Live, The Middle East Watches Warily

The Economist summarizes the events of Friday in Tunisia, concluding

Today's events mark the first time in recent memory that popular protests have felled a leader in the Arab world. But the celebration in Tunisia has been muted. It is unclear whether Tunisians will accept the leadership of Mr Ghannouchi — nicknamed "Mr Oui-Oui" for his subservience to Mr Ben Ali — or whether the protests will continue. The revolution that toppled Mr Ben Ali may not be over yet.

Marginal Revolution: The paradox of Tunisian water policy: Tunisia takes first place in water quality in the Arab world, and was, under Ben Ali, the least corrupt country in the Maghreb.

Rhetoric, and the desire for a meme

Quoting Jacobson,

The meme that opponents of Obama are crazy and dangerous has been an explicit Democratic Party campaign strategy for over two years.

Here is just a partial list of events in which the left-wing and Democratic Party media operation has immediately blamed right-wing rhetoric, only to be proven wrong when the facts finally came out: Bill Sparkman, Amy Bishop, The Fort Hood Shooter, The IRS Plane Crasher, The Cabbie Stabbing, and The Pentagon Shooter.

The facts will come out about the shooting and murder by Loughner. Until then, we’ll be subjected to the sickness of people who seek to use the crime to their political advantage and who will worry about the facts later on, if ever.

Update: Friends, teachers tell of Loughner's descent into world of fantasy

Is A.I. already here?

Wired's Stephen Levy on "The A.I. Revolution Is On":

The Kiva bots may not seem very smart. They don’t possess anything like human intelligence and certainly couldn’t pass a Turing test. But they represent a new forefront in the field of artificial intelligence. Today’s AI doesn’t try to re-create the brain. Instead, it uses machine learning, massive data sets, sophisticated sensors, and clever algorithms to master discrete tasks.

Interesting thesis: AI is all around us, in the form of probability and statistics engines, simple 'bot' algorithms, and other data mining software machines. Is our world now driven by a global, decentralized cabal of... algorithms?

LWN on the cost of "free"

Quoting LWN.net...

"Free" is awfully nice, but, as people far wiser than your editor have observed, if you are not paying for a service, you are not the provider's customer - you are their product.

Technorati token 39JQ4Q9T8N3T (ignore this)

On the evility of payday loans

The CARD Act (bill; NYT summary) is a failure, argues John Stossel in "Please Stop Helping Us". Quote,

Since the Card Act passed, mortgage and Treasury bill rates have dropped a little, but credit card interest went up -- from 13 percent to nearly 15 percent. Some banks also stopped offering credit to some people. JPMorgan Chase cut off 15 percent of its customers.

So the real result of this "consumer" regulation? "Hundreds of thousands of people can't get cards who used to be able to have cards, and all the rest of us now have to pay more," [GMU law prof] Zywicki said.

Stossel's screed continues his familiar anti-regulation stumping, but it's worth reading.
Stossel illustrates how the CARD Act made credit cards more expensive, or simply inaccessible.

When messing around with Prosper.com, I saw the truly devastating effects of payday loans on the poor. Talk about evil. 400% interest or worse. You think credit card collections agencies are rough? They pale in comparison to your local, legalized loan shark, who probably lives in or near your own neighborhood.

The CARD Act wound up pushing many "marginal" borrowers into the arms of payday loan sellers, and probably an illegal loan shark or two. Was the CARD Act worth that, on top of the US-wide credit card interest rate increase?

Reminds me of cash-for-clunkers (C4C), which, perversely, disproportionately hurt the poor. Junking all those old cars made environmentalists happy, while failing to make a measureable impact on emissions. C4C transferred a lot of your tax dollars to the local car dealership barons and the Big Six automakers. But it also removed cars from the used-car market that lower-income folks were more likely to buy — thus making lower end used cars on average more expensive.

P.S. Is "evility" a word? If not, it should be.

America is a land of immigrants

America is a land of immigrants. The American Dream is about an idea: create a land where immigrants are welcome; a land where everyone is considered equal under the law, and naturalized citizens may start businesses or find jobs according to their knowledge and skillset, just as natural-born citizens do; a land where those on the bottom have a realistic chance of success, rising to the top.

More importantly, at the present time, America needs immigrants. Here's why:

• America's population is aging; retirees are less productive and require more frequent, more expensive health care (with apologies to all retirees I know and love). Although pensions and retirement savings address much of this burden, present day workers pick up the slack.
• America's birthrate is declining. Fewer new natural-born citizens are being created, leading to fewer workers over the long term, needing to support a larger population of seniors.
• Medicare and Social Security both have huge predicted shortfalls as a result, and along with pensions, threaten to swamp all other expenditures at the federal and state levels.

If America is going to keep its promises to the current and near-future crop of retirees, we need a lot more workers. That means more babies, and/or more immigration. Productivity gains with existing worker levels are possible, but such exponential productivity gains are extremely unlikely.

So you can imagine my reaction when I was reading this Politico piece analyzing Republican immigration policy, and stumbled across this passage:

He won’t say when his committee plans to tackle birthright citizenship, the policy of granting citizenship to every child born in the country. He doesn’t want to talk about whether he will pursue reducing the level of legal immigration, family migration or work visas — all at the top of the wish list for anti-illegal-immigration advocates.

Anti-illegal-immigration advocates want to reduce legal immigration? Really? That is disappointing.

America needs more legal immigration. Above simple raw number increase, our immigration policies should also be adjusted to incentivize education level over family ties: college graduates before cousins.

Obama and the center

Politico: Barack Obama makes the sale

Is Obama masterfully riding the center, clipping away the angered liberals and conservatives, as convention wisdom currently suggests? Or was this the only option given political realities?