News Nuggets 790

A kingfisher out in the cold.  From the Daily Mail of the UK.

UP-FRONT MEDIA NARRATIVE ALERT!!
Just within the last 48 hours there has been a slew of stories like the following.  

Fights erupt among Occupy Wall Street protesters from USA Today

Occupation Wall Street Sanctioned for Public Masturbation from Powerline

Occupy Wall St. Gets Dangerous; NYPD Threatens to Sue Rowdy Demonstrators Who Initiate Violence from the New York Daily News

Woman Charged with Pimping Teen Recruited at Occupy NH Rally from the Manchester Union Leader

Occupy Madison Loses Permit Because Protesters were "Publicly Masturbating" from the Pundit Press

While I have no direct evidence concerning these specific cases, I recommend to people that, in the main, view them with deep skepticism.  Having failed to dismiss the Occupy movement through endlessly derisive commentary, I feel strongly that what we're seeing here are conservative-led efforts (often with the active assistance of local authorities and police) to find evidence that confirms the GOP's hippie/deviant narrative of OWS. Beginning under Nixon and carrying through the Bush/Gore recount of 2000 and up to the present, such coordinated staging has been STANDARD Republican procedure when the chips are down.  The GOP is desperate to discredit this movement -- so look for more and more of these types of stories to emerge!  What they are really afraid of are stories like this one from yesterday that clearly makes the case for who the protesters really are: just average desperate people.

NEW SUNDAY FEATURE: 

BEST STORIES OF THE WEEK!!

What follows are the top must-read "in-case-you-missed-them-the-first-time" stories for this last week's news nuggets:

1.  Libya’s Sexual Revolution (Ellen Knickmeyer) from Foreign Policy Magazine
"How the uprising turned young Libyan men from hopeless layabouts into marriageable heroes."
A VERY interesting story that explains a lot about what has been driving the 'Arab Spring.'

2.  Oil’s New World Order (Daniel Yergin) from the Washington Post
"For more than five decades, the world’s oil map has centered on the Middle East. ... But today, what appeared irreversible is being reversed. The outline of a new world oil map is emerging, and it is centered not on the Middle East but on the Western Hemisphere. "

3.  Scandal in the Age of Obama (Jonathan Alter) from the Washington Monthly
"In all that time—a record span, according to scholars—there has been no major Obama scandal to speak of. ... Other stories that might have paralyzed earlier administrations just fizzled. The question is why."

4.  The Romney Economy (Benjamin Wallace-Wells) from New York Magazine
"At Bain Capital, Romney remade one American business after another, overhauling management and directing vast sums of money to the top of the labor pyramid. The results made him a fortune. They also changed the world we live in."

5.  Islamism Fills the Vacuum Left by Socialism (David Warren) from the Ottawa Citizen [of Canada]
A very clear-eyed assessment of what we might expect from the anticipated elections that are coming with the 'Arab Spring'.
"At the crudest level, this reflects the situation throughout the Arab world. Islamism presents itself as the only possible future, given political cultures in which secular parties only point toward the "Nasserite" and economically disastrous past. Opposition to Islamism comes from the ideological leavings of past dictatorships, and there has never been an opportunity for secular parties to develop except under this unfruitful shade. Islamism now fills the ideological vacuum left by socialist failures."

6.  Magical Mystery Treasure from National Geographic Magazine
"Buried in the English countryside. Anglo-Saxon in origin. Who hid it and why?"
CHECK OUT what this guy found in his lawn!

7.  Occupy Wall Street: It’s Not a Hippie Thing (Roger Lowenstein) from Bloomberg Businessweek
"Don’t be fooled by the drum circles. Today’s protests have more in common with the anti-Hoover 1930s than the antiwar ’60s and ’70s."

8.  Why Many in China Sympathize with Occupy Wall Street (Damien Ma) from the Atlantic
"Income inequality, a feeling of disenfranchisement, and a sense of injustice are fueling popular curiosity about the movement, in which a number of Chinese see parallels with their own complaints against their government."
A very BLEAK portrait of the achievers and strivers who are "making it" in a super-modernizing China.

9.  Sex and the Somme: The Officially Sanctioned Brothels on the Front Line Laid Bare for the First Time from the Daily Mail [of the UK]
"This establishment — marked by its red lamp — was one of the legendary maisons tolérées, or legalised brothels that dotted the towns of northern France. They housed professional prostitutes who worked under the discipline of a madame and were subject to regular medical inspections. By 1917, there were at least 137 such establishments spread across 35 towns."
A surprisingly rich long-form story from the Daily Mail!

Some new nuggets just for today!!

Europe's Last Two Options (David Frum) from the National Post [of Canada]
"What if they had a revolution, and called it a debt crisis? This is the real story of what is going on in Europe right now. It's not about Greece. It's not about budget deficits."

The Pope's Failing Health (Barbie Latza Nadeau) from the Daily Beast
"Pope Benedict is now 84, the same age his predecessor was at the time of his death, and he’s clearly starting to slow down. But he might not have to die to relinquish the papacy—he could retire."
One person's opinion: The man should have resigned in the face of the global sex abuse scandals that have emerged.

Democratic Women Vow a Comeback (Eleanor Clift) from the Daily Beast
"For liberals, 2010 was an unfriendly year. Hoping to put those historic losses behind them, several are trying to surge back in 2012, Eleanor Clift reports."

ECONOMICS BOOK REVIEW NUGGET!!
The Tale of the Dueling Economists: A Review of Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott from the New York Times
"This lively book explores one of the most pressing economic questions of our time: To what extent should government intervene in markets? And in that search, it traces the interaction of the two men most responsible for the way we approach this question: the British economist Keynes and the Austrian economist Hayek."

DOG EVOLUTION NUGGET!!
From the Cave to the Kennel from the Wall Street Journal
"What the evolutionary history of the dog tells us about another animal: ourselves. From a cave in France, a new picture has emerged of canines as our prehistoric soulmates."