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Rielle Hunter on Edwards: ‘I Know He Loves Me’: The understatement of the year.  John Edwards wanted Rielle Hunter to get an abortion, because of the timing…

"He … always said that he would support whatever decision I made," Hunter told GQ. "But I believe on some level he was hoping that I would get an abortion. Because he didn’t — he wasn’t happy about the timing. Which is understandable. He was married and running for president."

Yeah, I gotta think that knocking someone up while you’re (1) married, and (2) running for president, might present a small problem in timing.

Consumer Goods Suck Up Surprising Amounts of Water: This is just crazy.

The $1 bag of refined sugar in many American kitchens requires more than 283 gallons of water to produce. The $20 bag of dog food on store shelves takes more than 4,000 gallons.

The Underlying Tragedy: Interesting op-ed trying to explain why pouring money into third-world countries doesn’t seem to lift them out of poverty at all.

There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results.

The truth behind it is not pleasant:

[…] Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.

We’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them.

The blog Kenyan Entrepreneuer agrees:

[…] Africa’s poverty can be attributed to the fact that Africa does not have a culture of production.  If something cannot be extracted from the ground (e.g. oil, gold, etc, etc) – we simply will not create or make it and this culture of non-production is the main cause of Africa’s poverty.  That’s why foreign aid hasn’t worked.  It’s because the do-gooder’s of the world have refused (out of fears of being labeled “racist” – have refused to confront this underlying question of culture).

We’re supposed to respect other cultures, but when can you just call a spade and spade and point out that some things aren’t working and need to change?  Say what you want about imperialism and the evils of the white man, but the base productivity and tendency to innovation and progress of the United States is something to be envied.

We talked about this same thing a year ago: The State of Aid in Africa.

How framing affects our thought processes : Interesting article on how people on the left- or right-wing of politics view financial losses.  It includes this great definition of the psychological concept of “framing”:

A take-away restaurant near my house offers customers free home delivery or a ten per cent discount if you pick up. It sounds much better than saying you get no discount for picking up and suffer a ten per cent fee for delivery – this is the power of ‘framing’.

It was like that for years at gas pumps.  You got a four-cent a gallon “discount” by paying cash.  This was really a slick way to pass through the credit card processing costs directly to the consumer by tacking a four-cent a gallon fee onto credit card purchases.  But people would complain about a “fee,” so the station owner reverses it and calls it a “discount.”

You also see this in political surveys.  I remember some site opposing same sex marriage.  The site was warning visitors not to use the question “Do you want to ban same sex marriage?” because “we lose 10 points in the polls with that question.”  There was some other question that, while it meant the same thing, it was just framed differently, and this framing had a huge impact on responses.

electoral college reform : This is pretty interesting.  Click through for a much larger map.

By no means do I think this should happen, but I think it’s interesting that South Dakota falls into the new state of “High Plains,” which is the biggest, geography wise.  Logic tells me that this region is the most sparsely populated in the country.

The organization of the states should be altered. This Electoral Reform Map redivides the territory of the United States into 50 bodies of equal size. The 2000 Census records a population of 281,421,906 for the United States. The states ranged in population from 493,782 to 33,871,648.  In this map, new states have formed, all with equal populations of roughly 5,617,000.

I love the names he picked too.  Where does he get “St. Croix” for Minnesota?

What happens when population shifts?  Do we re-draw again?

Not a huge fan of Jay Z in general, but this song is inspired.  Wonderfully done.  Annie and I were in New York last summer.  The video brought back memories.

I love this.  I’m not 100% sure how they did this, but it’s a musical collaboration via YouTube.  A half-dozen musicians around the world, collaborating on the same song, and all glued together on YouTube.   On top of the cool factor, the song is really good.

U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret ‘Jesus’ Bible Codes : Wonderful.  We’re coming up with all sorts of reasons for Muslims to hate us.

Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.

[…] One of the citations on the gun sights, 2COR4:6, is an apparent reference to Second Corinthians 4:6 of the New Testament, which reads: "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

 "Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen" Sound for Film Profile on Vimeo: I really enjoyed this video about the sound engineering on Transformers 2.  Never saw the movie, but the sound is apparently amazing.

 A divided island: the forces working against Haiti: I’m more than a little amazed that I stumbled on this article.  For years, I have wondered about this very question: why has the Dominican Republic done fairly well, while Haiti is a trainwreck, given that they share the same island?

Last year I listened to “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond, which is about why and how civilizations developed.  I enjoyed it, and I was thinking to myself, “Man, I wish Jared Diamond would answer my questions about Haiti…”

And here is an article with this subtitle:

Why does Haiti have it so tough compared with its neighbour, the Dominican Republic? Jared Diamond explains

That’s crazy awesome.

(The article is actually extracted from his current book, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” which I now have to read, I supposed.)

The gist of it comes down to these precipitating factors:

• The Haitian side of the island doesn’t get much rain – not nearly as much as the Dominican side. So the Dominican side of the island is vastly superior to plant life and agriculture.
• Back in the Colonial Period, Haiti was a French colony, and France developed it with slave labor.  The Dominican Republic was a Spanish colony, and Spain was having economic problems, so couldn’t develop their side of the island.  This caused Haiti to have a much greater population density than their neighbor, along with the accompanying societal problems of slavery.
• France deforested a lot of the country in the 19th century and brought the timber back to Europe.

So, Haiti by the start of the 20th century was (1) relatively arid, (2) packed with former slaves, and (3) largely stripped of its forests.  Not a good way to head into the Industrial Revolution.

The Dominican Republic, on the other hand, was still fairly fresh.  It peaked later, essentially.  In the 20th century, it was much more attractive to Europeans who brought business, investment, and help it develop an export economy.

The rest is history, really.

The question becomes, what do you do now?  How do you turn a country around?  I wish I knew.