Somali Pirates

The only effective government Somalia has had since 1991 was the brief tenure of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU, with vague ties to Al-Qaeda). They virtually eradicated piracy (it was punishable by beheading), and imposed Shari'a. But their government was overthrown by American-backed Ethiopian troops. So now the questions arises - do we engage the ICU and try to reposition them in power? Or are piracy and anarchy throughout the country just the price we pay for keeping the ICU out of power? And would people even be mentioning this as a possibility if piracy were not disrupting oil shipping?

Finally Figured it out

Why is privatization of social security always on the Republican agenda? Why, even after several stock market crashes, do "free-marketeers" always insist that Americans should have the freedom to invest their social security savings in the stock market?

The same reason that adjustable-rate mortgages became so damn common - they need ever newer sources of money to put into the market to continue the growth rate of their (not our) portfolios. Michael Lewis recently noted in an article that what made the sub-prime collapse so bad was that investment banks wound up making side bets on their ARMs (kinda like fantasy baseball, except that when the ARMs defaulted the I-banks went belly up). The reason for the side bets was that there just weren't enough people in the market for ARMs to satisfy the I-banks, so they duplicated the ARMs by betting on them with hedge fund managers.

Social security would be a very similar scenario - it's not that investing the money is better for the individual taxpayer (far from it, most likely), but it's better for the Wall Streeters. They don't give a damn whether there's a hiccup in the market that causes people to lose their retirement savings, just like they weren't concerned that the ARMs might eventually forclose on people - the short term benefits to their portfolios (though not necessarily their shareholders' porfolios) would be astronomical.