Monday, September 6, 2010 - LABOR DAY

WEB BOHEMIAN (Monday, September 6, 2010)
(1)- THE COMING FRUGAL SUPERPOWER - From his new book, Michael Mandelbaum lays out the challenge of the U.S.’s activist foreign policy, including an expensive war on terror, in an age of economic retraction and pending entitlements.

(2)- INDIA AND CHINA -- These two Asian giants, which until 1800 used to make up half the world economy, are not, like Japan and Germany, mere nation states. In terms of size and population, each is a continent, a poor one.

(3)- WHY SCHOOL? -- In 1900, 6.4 percent of American 17-year-olds graduated from high school, and perhaps another 10 or 15 percent would have graduated if they could have afforded it.

(4)- GRUMBLING -- The local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas. Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as gospel.

(5)- MIXED PROGRESS -- Despite a general consensus that women should have the same rights as men, people in many countries around the world say gender inequalities persist in their countries; especially in some of the wealthier nations.

(6)- NEW WORLD RECORD -- A British man has set a new world record after he spent 114 days in a tiny room with 40 dangerous snakes; two black mambas, two green mambas, three snouted cobras, seven bloomsangs and 27 puff adders.

(7)- BAIJIU -- The Chinese love their homegrown liquor – a fiery grain spirit called baijiu (which literally translates 'white spirit’) – a great deal more than fancy foreign brands like Black Label or Smirnoff.

(8)- DISCOVERED - Astronomers have discovered a planetary system containing at least five planets that orbit a star called HD 10180, which is much like our own Sun. The star is 127 light years away, in the southern constellation of Hydrus.

(9)- WHAT'S LEFT? -- If the 20th century was an expansive era seemingly without boundaries—a time of jet planes, space travel and the Internet—the early years of the 21st have showed us the limits of our small world.

POLITICAL COMMENTARY

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