What do these 3 countries have in common?

(Spoiler Alert! Answer at bottom)

Step 1: Identify the countries;)  South Korea, Israel, Singapore.

These 3 countries are all:

• first world / developed countries with very high economic growth
• small in area and population
• ranked in the top ten for active military per 1000 people
• have a draft requiring men (south korea and singapore) or men and women (israel) to spend 18+ months in the army full time and then participate in the reserves
• have high ratios of reserve troops to active troops, with large portions of the population participating in the reserve army
• have hostile relations with neighbors or have been invaded by neighbors in the past (singapore by japan)

Further Reading:

• gapminder
• Start Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economics Success
• Wiki Article on Conscription

State of the Internet

Websense is a San Diego based Internet Security Company with roots in web filtering.  A quick google has revealed criticism about Websense falling into two categories:

1. They serve repressive regimes in China and Yemen in their goals to censor the internet.
2. In America, where they are used widely both in Corporate and Government deployments, there are too many false negatives.  This means that sites become censored which should be available.

They have released some interesting findings from 2009 here.  Among the highlights are:

• 71% of Web sites with malicious code are legitimate sites that have been compromised.
• 95% of user-generated posts on Web sites are spam or malicious.
• Phishing lures have doubled since the first half of the year representing approximately 4% of spam email.
• US, Russia, China and Brazil are consistently in the top 5 countries hosting crimeware and receiving stolen data.
• The average time it took for anti-virus vendors to deliver a patch once malware was identified has more than doubled from 22 to 46 hours, comparing the first 6 months of 2009 with the last.

International Unemployment

United States Bureau of Labor Statistics

Skinny Jeans

Times are changing!! Yayee!  Its finally my turn to criticize a younger generation whilst secretly envying their carefree confidence and lack of regard for convention.  The age of grossly oversized clothes as a fashion manifestation of non-conformity and youthful rebellion seems to finally be passing!  For a couple years now I have been noticing heterosexual young adult men wearing shockingly tight pants walking around in my home town of Red Bank.

Exhibit A: Nick, an 18 year old employee at clothing store Metropark, a Los Angeles based specialty store chain.  Here he is in my local Starbucks (didn’t have to go far for the inspiration for this article) sporting Kill City jeans and a New Era (still oversized) fitted hat which in this context seems to be old-hat;)

Naturally the first couple times I wrote them off as isolated incidents.  However, this trend seems to be gaining speed and attention.  50 cent, naturally bitter about the movement,  stated on his latest freely downloadable mixtape War Angel, “I think these n***as is f***ots.”  Harsh words 50!  (See the full interview here.)  Fashion must be moving fast for 50 cent to come off as the trapped in the last century grandpa on the porch yelling “Kids these days!! Pull up your pants and have some respect!!”  Over at AskMen.com, a harsh review of skinny jeans generates a wave of comments from men, extolling the virtues of their new fashion choice.  Hilarity in the comments section ensues!

Alas, I don’t see myself jumping aboard this skin-boat.  As my babycakes knows, I already have a hard enough time not scaring little kids with my frequent erections.  I am undoubtedly a transparent person, but i am almost positive skinny jeans would take this transparency to a level neither I nor my associates would be comfortable with.  In closing, I hail the new generation of youngsters for their ability to bewilder me!  Rock out with your cock out!

My God is Better Than Yours

Reza Aslan has been making his rounds promoting his latest book:

How to win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror

John Stewart interviewed him on Monday, April 20th (in the last part of the show).  And this afternoon NPR aired a 30 minute interview with him getting into some more details.

First a definition:

“A cosmic war is one where the participants believe that they are acting out on earth a war that’s actually taking place in heaven between the cosmic forces of good and evil.”

Reza’s central point is that when confronted with cosmic warriors it is bad policy to rile up your own cosmic warriors to the call of the good side by invoking the gods and images that are familiar to them.  Examples he gives are George Bush’s “War on Terror”, General William Boykin visiting American churches stating that the enemy is not Al Queda but Satan, and ultimately the soldiers painting Christian symbols on tanks and handing out tracts in the combat zones.  It sounds like common sense that invoking our God only justifies their jihad and is against the law.  He begins to lose me though when describing what will end the war on terror.  He proposes that the answer is Democracy, “political participation has the power to moderate radical tendencies.”  This sounds great and we can all rejoice in the many wonders of democracy, but the obstacles to implementation remain.  From “Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracies at Home and Abroad,” we learned that in the 20th century we went from having no countries with liberal democracies to 62% of the world’s countries partaking.  Countries with natural resources like oil, however, have fought the trend, remained autocratic, unstable, and or with an impoverished population.  In “The Bottom Billion” analysis on economic growth data showed that indeed democracies are at an economic disadvantage when it comes to managing surpluses from natural resources!  In other words there is something about elections that makes it harder to save and or spend wisely all that extra oil money.  Democracy alone as a solution to radical islamic extremism has its obstacles.

Shall we take a closer look at these purported tactics for winning cosmic wars?  Haha unless I hear otherwise i think not.

Happy Together or Just Happy?

If  you’ve read Malcom Gladwell’s Blink, you may recall an interesting divorce study.   Couples were brought in for couples counseling.  They were sat in a room by themselves and given some time to talk while waiting for the proctor.  During this period their facial expressions and body language were recorded.  These expressions were later scrutinized and used to predict divorces in the upcoming years.  The general gist was that a disproportionate number of frowns spell impending doom for a couple.

Well this new study goes even further.  They found a correlation between the expressions of people in their adolescence in pictures and their future chances at divorce.   It turns out that to predict divorce you dont even have to wait until the mate is chosen.  Smile!  You’re happily married!

A related study that had been released based on census data showed that there is a “divorce divide” between educated and the un-educated.  Educated people are marrying later and staying married.  The 50% divorce rate figure that we often hear thrown around is less valuable than the specific rate for your socioeconomic group.  Go here to find out your personal divorce prediction.

So what does it all mean?!  If you want your romantic relationships to work out, go back to school and embrace Will Ferrell (or your favorite brand of comedy)!?!  Sounds like more work and more delayed gratification to me!  Oh how the universe conspires to put us to work!  Nothing comes for free in life!  I thought i would just read Harville Hendrix’s books and everything would be ok;)

(Sidenote: George and Christina, yet another reason your marriage is built to last!)

Office Staff in the Classroom

Many of us are acutely aware of the ever rising cost of colleges.  My own personal experience?  I accumulated more debt in the 2 quarters at Stanford than i did over my 4 year undergraduate stay at Rutgers.  Hooray for State Schools!?  Anyway, here are some articles with some attempts to characterize and explain the outrageous rate of increase of college tuition.  Their findings are right in line with what is happening at NJ High Schools.  The administrative staff had grown over the years and is now among the first cut backs in the face of budget cuts being imposed by the state.