Uyghur riots in Urumqi

There's been unrest among the Uyghurs in Urumqi, China over the weekend. Urumqi is the capital of the Xinjiang, a massive province in the west of China, and home to the Uyghur people, a non-Han minority which has accused China of trying to Hanify its homeland:

Uighurs are the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang but are a minority in Urumqi, where Han Chinese make up more than 70 percent of the population of two million or so. The Chinese government has encouraged Han migration to the city and other parts of Xinjiang, fueling resentment among the Uighurs. Urumqi is a deeply segregated city, with Han Chinese there rarely venturing into the Uighur quarter.

Xinjiang is an absolutely enormous province – it takes up one-sixth the size of China and is larger than the entire nation of Mongolia – and the Chinese government is scrambling to turn it majority Han, so that if one day they lose their iron grip on the country, they'll have one more excuse not to let the Uyghurs, who are more closely related to the Turkic Central Asian peoples than to the Han Chinese who rule the prosperous coastal regions in the east, secede.

Update: I wouldn't take this at face value, but Reuters is reporting that the Chinese state news agency is reporting some deaths caused by Uyghur rioters. First they claimed "three ordinary people of the Han ethnic group" were killed, but later amended that to one police oficer and "a number of innocent members of the public." I suspect what probably happened is that the Chinese propagandists realized that they'd gone too far in stoking ethnic tension by accusing the Uyghur rioters of killing Han, so they backtracked. I'd be surprised if any police officers or innocent Han civilians were killed.

50 reasons why Waxman-Markey is a bad, bad, bad idea

I can't recommend this article enough for those looking for all the arguments against the Waxman-Markey climate change bill.

Bottom line: the law may very well do nothing to reduce carbon emissions, and even make the problem worse, all while adding tons of cruft and handouts to an already-byzantine system of energy/agriculture regulation.

There are literally 50 reasons on that list why Waxman-Markey is a bad idea, and it's really hard to pick just a few to excerpt, but seeing as how I've been working at a lobbying firm this summer and so that's what's on my mind, let's do this one:

3. With its rich menu of corporate subsidies and special set-asides for politically connected industries, Waxman-Markey has inspired a new corporate interest group, USCAP, the United States Climate Action Partnership — the group largely responsible for the fact that carbon permits are being given away like candy at Christmas rather than auctioned. And who is lined up to receive a piece of the massive wealth transfer that Waxman-Markey will mandate? Canada Free Press lists:

Alcoa, American International Group (AIG) which withdrew after accepting government bailout money, Boston Scientific Corporation, BP America Inc., Caterpillar Inc., Chrysler LLC (which continues to lobby with taxpayer dollars), ConocoPhillips, Deere & Company, The Dow Chemical Company, Duke Energy, DuPont, Environmental Defense, Exelon Corporation, Ford Motor Company, FPL Group, Inc., General Electric, General Motors Corp. (now owned by the Obama administration), Johnson & Johnson, Marsh, Inc., National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy, NRG Energy, Inc., Pepsico, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, PG&E Corporation, PNM Resources, Rio Tinto, Shell, Siemens Corporation, World Resources Institute, Xerox Corporation.

Pew, NRDC, and the Environmental Defense Fund are what stood out to me. I guess you can cross those off your list of organizations you can trust on environmental and energy issues.

One thing that I would like to have seen in that article, though, are some more links. For example, can anyone at the National Review explain to me the lack of citation here (number 11 on the list)?

Two peer-reviewed scientific papers suggest that no-till either does nothing to decrease carbon dioxide or actually increases the level of greenhouse-gas emissions by upping emissions of nitrous oxide — a much more powerful greenhouse gas.

Unlicensed and unregulated private schools in the Third World

In the City Journal (one of today's most underappreciated publications, in my opinion), Liam Julian has a quick book review of The Beautiful Tree, a book by James Tooley (published by Cato) about unlicensed, unrecognized, and unregulated private schooling among the world's poorest children. Here's an excerpt from the book that stood out to the reviewer, where the book's authors did a study to determine how well these private schools actually taught:

The results from Delhi were typical. In mathematics, mean scores of children in government schools were 24.5 percent, whereas they were 42.1 percent in private unrecognized schools and 43.9 percent in private recognized. That is, children in unrecognized private schools scored nearly 18 percentage points more in math than children in government schools (a 72 percent advantage!), while children in recognized private schools scored over 19 percentage points more than children in government schools (a 79 percent advantage).

And it's not just those without access to free public schooling who are taking advantage of the private schools – even many of those entitled to free public schools don't trust them. It sure makes you wonder about the UN (and pretty much everyone else in the development community) putting so much emphasis on free, universal primary and secondary schooling.

Like most book reviews, this one is little more than a summary, but here's an interesting bit of criticism from Amazon.com reviewer D. W. MacKenzie:

The one nit I have to pick with the Cato crowd is on vouchers. Entitlements to education, like vouchers, can produce the same results that the author of this book decries- corruption and waste. But this disagreement does not detract from the general value of this book. Read it and learn more about learning.

I'd like to see some figures on the breakdown of where the world's poorest parents choose to send their children to school, and how many of those sending them to private schools have access to public schools.

Joe Biden says the US won't try to stop secession in Iraq?

Quoteth the New York Times:

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. told Iraqi leaders on Friday that he and President Obama were committed to helping them resolve their political differences, but he warned that the United States would be unlikely to remain engaged in Iraq if the country reverted to sectarian violence, American officials said.

First of all, I doubt this is true. Even if the American public would not tolerate another over internvetion in the case of possible secession, I have no doubt that the Obama administration would pick sides and try to throw money and guns at whoever is promising to keep Iraq whole.

But besides that – what kind of message does Joe Biden think he's sending, exactly? I assume he intended it towards Malaki and his parochial interests, but it sounds like something that would please the Sunnis and Kurds (and even Malaki's rivals among the Shiites, like Ayad Alawai).

The reason I think that Joe Biden's promise of nonintervention is hollow is that the secession of the Kurds – who would likely be the first to split if the US declared a hands-off approach – would greatly offend US ally Turkey, which is doing everything it can to keep hold on to its own restive Kurdish region. The US would lose a rare friend in the Middle East, and Europe might lose the opportunity to break Russia's monopoly on transiting natural gas from the Caspian Sea with the Nabucco pipeline (though admittedly the Russians have already all but killed the deal).

I imagine that the inspiration for Joe Biden's remarks are his own personal convictions – back in 2006, when he was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, his play for Iraq was to split it up into three autonomous regions loosely bound into one nation. That was probably the most intelligent thing I'd ever heard Biden say, though I wish he'd gone further and called for three totally independent states, Turkey be damned.

The Seattle PI doesn't seem that dead to me

My work this summer involves an hour or two of scouring the internet for energy-related news articles, and once or twice a week I ask myself the question: was it the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that ceased print publication in March? I had the feeling that it was, but it seemed odd that I was still finding so much news from them – certainly more so than still-printing big city secondary papers papers like the New York Post and the Daily News, and even more than the papers of record in large cities in, say, Texas. I understand that a lot of people lost their jobs and local coverage may have suffered, but at least they cover national news well enough for me to decide that an article or two each week covered whatever energy topic better than any others.

White firefighters case may have implications for college enrollment and affordability

In January, I blogged about a paper that argued that the rise in college graduates was due to a specific Supreme Court case, Griggs v. Duke Power, decided in 1971. The ruling implied that that any test given by employers to prospective employees was liable to be found illegal under anti-discrimination laws, unless the results were proportional to the racial makeup of the candidate pool. Without tests to determine the caliber of applicants, the study's authors suggest that employers began using college degrees to determine whether or not to hire an employee, which caused the the college boom – both in enrollment and cost – in the late '70s, which has continued up until today.

The Supreme Court, however, has just recently overturned Griggs v. Duke Power, in the controversial "white firefighters case," Ricci v. DeStefano. The media has been up in arms about it mostly because Obama's Supreme Court pick, Sonia Sotomayor, was part of the lower court which dismissed the case out of hand, finding for the city and against the white (plus one Hispanic) firefighters. But after the nomination battle is over, I'll be very interested to see if there's an uptick in aptitude testing on the part of employers, and if that results in a decline in college enrollment...and if so, if anybody even realizes why it happened.

Clampdown on cocaine in Mexico yields violence in Canada

The LA Times gets it:

Authorities trace the violence to the recent government crackdown on cocaine traffickers in Mexico, which has squeezed profit margins for cocaine north of the U.S. border.

Canada's outlaw retailers are fighting to the death over market share, police say, a situation exacerbated by personal vendettas and power vacuums left by the arrests of gang leaders.

"The war in Mexico directly impacts on the drug trade in Canada. . . . There's a complete disruption of the flow of cocaine into Canada, and we are seeing the result," said Pat Fogarty, operations officer for the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, British Columbia's main law enforcement agency targeting organized crime.

Ron Paul's economic adviser Peter Schiff probably running for Chris Dodd's Senate seat

Learned this one on the Daily Show last night, confirmed by the Wikipedia article. Peter Schiff, Ron Paul's former economic adviser, is leaning towards running for Chris Dodd's Senate seat.

Schiff is probably best known for his prescience about the state of the American housing sector and economy, and for having enabled a cottage industry of Peter Schiff-was-right best-of YouTube videos of him getting laughed at on cable news shows as far back as 2002 for calling out the housing bubble.

Chris Dodd and his eyebrows, on the other hand, have made every possible mistake regarding the financial crisis. He's got a pretty long rap sheet, being fingered by his copiously cited Wikipedia article in multiple different scandals related to Country Wide, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, AIG, and Bear Sterns. Back in 2003 he was among the Congressional Democrats who blocked Bush's proposed reforms of Freddie and Fannie, and in 2007 he blew off his job as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee to pursue a hopeless presidential campaign.

The attack ads just about write themselves. Dodd's been blathering on camera for decades, and there's no shortage of 5-second pithy clips of Schiff being right. Peter Schiff's probably got deep pockets – he is, after all, the investor who got it right – so I expect a fierce campaign from him. I'm not sure that voters are going to look that deeply, but he'll be in a much stronger position if the dollar drops by November 2010, since he's been predicting it for years.

Unfortunately for Schiff, he's not the only one who wants the Republican nomination. He'll be up against Rob Simmons, member of the US House from Connecticut who narrowly lost his seat in 2006, and Sam Galigiuri, a state senator. But if elected, I'm pretty sure Peter Schiff would be the only believer in Austrian economics in the Senate.

Why Russia supports Iran's nuclear program

This is exactly why Russia is helping Iran develop nuclear weapons - so that Tehran and Washington will never normalize relations, and Russia will maintain its grip on natural gas flows westwards from the Caspian:

Iran can participate in the EU backed gas Nabucco pipeline if Washington normalises relations with Tehran, the US Secretary of State's Special Envoy for Eurasian Energy said today.

Bits on patents

From the Southeast Texas Record the notoriously patent plaintiff-friendly court, venue the US Eastern Texas District of Texas, has long some of its fangs:

The country's most active patent docket, the U.S. Eastern District of Texas, took a swing toward defendants when The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a powerful writ of mandamus against the East Texas court for its lack of consideration for forum convenience.

The ruling, according to legal experts across the country, has already changed the pace of patent case filings in East Texas, a small legal outpost known for its expertise in patent legislation, but also known for its plaintiff-friendly juries and courts.

"The rocket docket engine has either slowed down or shut off completely," Strand said. The East Texas court was a famed "rocket docket" for the rapid pace that it processed cases, most favorably for plaintiffs.

Though patent experts don't think a court as powerful as the Eastern Texas District will reemerge, the author notes that Delaware is pretty friendly towards plaintiffs in patent cases. Interestingly enough, it looks like the Delaware Attorney General's office is a Biden property, and the Bidens sure love cramming intellectual property down people's throats:

Delaware has emerged in recent years as a very popular venue for plaintiffs' attorneys in a variety of civil cases, particularly since Democratic Attorney General Beau Biden took office.

A USA Today story in 2008 noted Biden worked for a large plaintiff firm before becoming attorney general. His father, now Vice President Joe Biden, has a long history of backing plaintiffs' rights to try their case, often working to kill tort reform legislation.

The Bidens' campaign accounts have both benefited from large donations by trial lawyers and their related political action committees. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, employees at three law firms that specialize in asbestos litigation were among Beau Biden's top 10 all-time contributors.

In other not-so-unrelated patent news, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the Bilski case, which would revisit the question of whether software and business methods are patentable. Likely future Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor has a largely pro-intellectual property rights history, and her decisions seem to lean towards favoring IP rights holders. And there's this disturbingly idiotic conclusion that she once reached:

As a federal trial judge in New York in 1997, Judge Sotomayor sided with producers of the "Seinfeld" TV show, ruling that a book of trivia based on the show effectively stole the show's material.

" 'The Seinfeld Aptitude Test' seizes upon the notion which lies at the very heart of 'Seinfeld' that there is humor in the mundane, seemingly trivial aspects of everyday life," Judge Sotomayor wrote. "Simply put, without 'Seinfeld' there can be no 'Seinfeld Aptitude Test.' "

I'm not sure of the source on this, but I remember hearing that the perennial Patent Reform Act of [current year] might be put on the back burner pending a Supreme Court ruling. I'm not sure which would be a more pro-reform venue – the Supreme Court or Congress – though the movement does seem to have a bit more momentum this year than I remember it having, so we'll see.