But I just read his new article "Who's afraid of Tariq Ramadan?" and it is a blockbuster IMO. Magisterial. One surprise and twist after another. What an absolute pleasure. [Unfortunately it is New Republic June 4 issue, you won't find it free on-line.] Here is a very small taste:

"If there is an intellectual establishment, and I suppose there is, the attacks on Hirsi Ali radiate from its center. ....--this does represent something new. Here is the new development among journalists and intellectuals, the development that Ramadan's career has served to illuminate. Something like a campaign against Hirsi Ali could never have taken place a few years ago. A sustained attack on an authentic liberal dissident crying out against injustices in remote parts of the world and even in the back streets of Western Europe, a sustained attack that appears nearly to have erased the very mention of women's oppression and the struggle for women's rights from discussion--no, this could not have happened yesterday, except on the extreme right. This is a new event. This is a reactionary turn in the intellectual world."

Here is the figure caption from the article in Science (vol. 315, p. 1501, 16 March 2007) titled "Return of the Population Growth Factor":

The crisis in Niger. "Niger's population is set to increase from 14 million to 80 million in 2050 if current fertility remains the same--an unimaginable scenario in a country already unable to feed itself, facing widespread destruction of local ecosystems through over-grazing, continued mass poverty, underemployment and massive dependence on international aid.…so, without massive investment in family planning programmes, the outlook is bleak."

Oh, and yesterday's "Daily Howler" on Chris Matthews was even better.

Well yes she IS a politician. But is she really more phony than George Bush or McCain or Al Gore or, for that matter, Barak Obama or Bill Clinton? I think not. Numerous figures say that the more they know her, the more they like her. Just ask us in upstate New York.

So how did she get that "reputation" ? Bob Somerby has the answer, just check out his blog today http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh012407.shtml and the past few days as well. Please read this, it's not really about Clinton, it's about why McCain (or other GOP) will win the next election.

I just finished reading the fascinating article by George Packer in the 11/10 New Yorker about the city of Lagos, Nigeria. The article give a feeling of hopelessness -- the situation is horrid there and steadily getting worse. Yet Lagos is comparatively a bright spot in Africa -- people continue to move there, want to live there, see it as their hope for the future.

I was born in Philadelphia. When I was born Lagos had a population of 200,000. That was about 10% of the population of Philadelphia, a manageable small-city size. At my projected death Lagos will have a projected population of 30,000,000 people. That will be 20 times the population of Philadelphia.

Surely this astonishing population growth has something to do with the problems of Lagos. Lagos is extreme, but population growth far above world standards characterize Nigeria and indeed Africa as a whole.

But Packer does not mention population growth as the cause of the misery. His focus is on corruption, pollution, slums, lack of municipal services, privatization, etc. He sees the new larger populations as a multiplier of the misery, rather than as a cause of the misery. I have gotten used to seeing "population" ignored -- not even mentioned -- in discussions of world problems. This is such an egregious example, I had to write this blog entry!

The one change that could offer real hope for the future of Africa would be the dramatic drop in birth rates. Resources channel into improving the lives of the people, rather than into making more people. This has been tried only once in the world, on a large scale. It worked. When I was little, in Philadelphia, my mother told me to eat up and think of all the starving people in China. Today, US farmers worry about food imports from China.