a few things. in no particular order:
- lest we forget, the vicky mendoza diagonal.
- new photos coming to liminal (flatiron district and fort greene).
- this is good, i’ve been listening to this. or a better-known, old (august) flame.
- in re the never-ending, agonizing, and at times hilarious / frightening republican primary: NPR and everyone else, in the course of considering this “divisive” primary’s effects on the eventual GOP candidate’s performance in the general election, please refrain at all times from comparing this race to the democratic primary of 2008. that was competitive because two segments of the liberal electorate were excited by two different (but strong) candidates. this one is competitive because no one can get excited at all by the only candidate granted the benediction of sufficient malleability by the united corporations of america.
requiescat in pace, chica. you were good and you will be missed.
now i’m not normally one for getting too involved in discussing political matters (at least not in the view of all the world), but my curiosity was piqued by a few statistics and attitudes i’ve seen bandied about in the past few months. one thing that made me think was the BBC world service poll (essentially a who-said-what-about-whom popularity contest at the international scale). you can see some interesting trends, like “everybody hates north korea”, “everybody loves canada”, “kenyans love everybody!”, and “turkey hates everyone!” i was extremely curious to see how some of these views matched up against foreign aid donations as a percentage of GDP. surprisingly, after a cursory search i couldn’t turn up any extant research to this effect. so, for your viewing enjoyment, here’s my own somewhat secondary- (and sometimes tertiary-) source compilation of those statistics! mostly i looked at globalhumanitarianassistance.org, but i also consulted the CIA world factbook, wikipedia, and specific government’s accounts of foreign aid (when available).
- sweden, 2009 (5,100,000,000 USD) – 1.26% of GDP [!]
- denmark, 2009 (2,900,000,000 USD) – .94% of GDP
- norway, 2005 (2,000,000,000 USD) – .92% of GDP
- netherlands, 2009 (6,600,000,000 USD) – .83% of GDP
- saudi arabia, 2009 (3,100,000,000 USD) – .82% of GDP [surprised?]
- united kingdom, 2009 (13,000,000,000 USD) – .48% of GDP
- spain, 2009 (6,700,000,000 USD) – .46% of GDP
- switzerland, 2009 (2,100,000,000 USD) – .43% of GDP
- france, 2010 (10,600,000,000 USD) – .40% of GDP
- austria, 2010 (1.500,000,000 USD) – .39% of GDP
- united arab emirates, 2009 (859,000,000) – .37% of GDP
- germany, 2009 (12,300,000,000 USD) – .37% of GDP
- canada, 2009 (3,400,000,000 USD) – .32% of GDP
- australia, 2010 (2,700,000,000 USD) – .29% of GDP
- usa, 2009 (28,300,000,000 USD) – .20% of GDP
- japan, 2009 (8,500,000,000 USD) – .17% of GDP
- italy, 2010 (3,641,000,000 USD) – .17% of GDP
- turkey, 2009 (785,000,000 USD) – .13% of GDP
- poland, 2009 (461,000,000 USD) – .11% of GDP
- iceland, 2010 (13,000,000 USD) – .11% of GDP
- south korea, 2009 (921,000,000 USD) – .11% of GDP
- russia, 2010 (752,000,000 USD) – .06% of GDP [oog.]
- china, 2010 (3,100,000,000 USD) – .06% of GDP [eek.]
interesting, huh?