Already, four shopping malls in China are larger than the Mall of America. Two, including the South China Mall, are bigger than the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, which just surrendered its status as the world's largest to an enormous retail center in Beijing. And by 2010, China is expected to be home to at least 7 of the world's 10 largest malls.

Make sure you watch the multi-media presentation...

China, New Land of Shoppers, Builds Malls on Gigantic Scale

I am not worried about the rise of the cultural conservatives. I am worried about the disappearance of an internationalist, pro-American business elite.

C.E.O.'s, M.I.A.

In this dawning era of genomic medicine, the concept of private health insurance, which is based on actuarially pooling risk within specified, fragmented groups, will become obsolete.

This is an interesting article, but I think its idealistic. In the United States we have a bunch of people who beleive that a massive cost sharing system that most (but not all) people are allowed to participate in coupled with a 10 year government vetting process for any new innovation is a "free market capitalist" solution to the problem of healthcare but any effort to extend the system to the small group who are currently shut out is "dirty communism." "Better that people die then we sacrifice our ideals about communism! Here's my $10 copay!"

Changes to the U.S. healthcare system will be driven by what suits the vested interests most. While I commend Bush for working to enable employees of small businesses to obtain health insurance the fact is that the Republican party has been calling health insurance for employees of small businesses "communist" for 10 years. Now that they are also calling small businesses the growth engine for the economy they were sitting on a rhetorical contradiction so big the democrats could have driven a truck through it. Of course they are doing something about it.

It is inevitable that genetic profiling will be used to cull people out of the healthcare system. Most people will not be culled out. Just the really expensive ones. Reasonable objections will be cast as "communist." Most people will not be affected. There will be talk of reducing the rising costs of health insurance but, of course, prices will not actually be reduced.

I think prices will continue to rise until the industry restructures. You'll go to walk in clinics and pay for it. Cost sharing will be limited to catastrophic diseases. Most people won't have access to state of the art treatments.

More people with treatable illnesses will die, but warbling about that is a bunch of liberal bullshit. Its possible that one might argue that as technology advances it no longer makes sense for everyone to have access to top notch care, and that the level of care that people receive will not regress. I have some sympathy for that perspective, but I don't beleive it. I think the level of care will regress. Anyone who gets an expensive and suitably rare condition will be shuffled out of the system by any means available because our society really does not care. The system will move from treating sick people via insurance to providing maintainance to people who aren't sick. There is simply a lot more money in it.

Decoding Health Insurance

] Maybe it won't be so bad being cut off from the
] blogosphere. I look around the Web these days and find
] that Newsweek's retracted atrocity story has sent
] everybody into cloud-cuckoo-land. Every faction up and
] down the political spectrum has used the magazine's
] blunder as a chance to open fire on its favorite targets,
] turning this into a fevered hunting season for the straw
] men.

AKA the Bird Seller's Lament.

The blogosphere is talking about newsweek's irrelevancy. I'm sure they'll take this column from Brooks as defensive main stream media blog bashing. Its not. There won't be any great controversy when people stop reading political blogs. The numbers will just quietly go down. The authors will be howling all the way...

The Lament of David Brooks

The Muslim world's silence about the real desecration of Iraqis, coupled with its outrage over the alleged desecration of a Koran, highlights what we are up against in trying to stabilize Iraq -- as well as the only workable strategy going forward.

Get your Tom Friedman while it lasts.

Outrage and Silence

The FCC under Martin is likely to be more active on indecency than under Powell.

It was inevitable that the matter would wind up in court.

FCC's New Standards-Bearer

David "Netwar" Ronfeldt has written a new essay for First Monday.

Al Qaeda and its affiliates are operating much like a global tribe waging segmental warfare. This paper describes the dynamics of classic tribes: what drives them, how they organize, how they fight. Al Qaeda fits the tribal paradigm quite well. Thus, continuing to view Al Qaeda mainly as a cutting–edge, post–modern phenomenon of the information age misses a crucial point: Al Qaeda and affiliates are using the information age to reiterate ancient patterns of tribalism on a global scale. The war they are waging is more about virulent tribalism than religion. The tribal paradigm should be added to the network and other prevailing paradigms to help figure out the best policies and strategies for countering these violent actors.

Al Qaeda and its affiliates: A global tribe waging segmental warfare?

] I never thought about the political side of this when
] making the film," Mr. Eastwood says. He is both bemused
] and concerned that a movie with no political agenda
] should be construed by some as a polemic and arouse such
] partisan rage. "Maybe I'm getting to the age when I'm
] starting to be senile or nostalgic or both, but people
] are so angry now," he adds. "You used to be able to
] disagree with people and still be friends. Now you hear
] these talk shows, and everyone who believes differently
] from you is a moron and an idiot - both on the right and
] the left."

How Dirty Harry Turned Commie

This is an ad for the Macintosh around 1989.

k wrote:
] Kind of a neat blast from the past.
] Sometimes we forget that there was a time when "Copy" and "Paste"
] were brand new concepts.

Matt Groening Apple Ad

But few politicians are consistently sly in reading accurately the crowd's daily and hourly shifts in passion, and those who are -- because of the fact of their slyness -- usually find it wiser to cave in to these shifts than to lead the crowd down the hard road elsewhere. Because even our best politicians are cowed by the electoral herd, we must look to another group for the true source of power in our age.

Robert D. Kaplan rocks. In this piece, he channels the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, with McLuhanesque results.

The Media and Medievalism