Egyptians against harassment; brainless capacity building; peak oil is wrong; states with adjectives; half a billion insured?; America’s dark heart: links I liked

Egyptian women and men stand in the streets of Cairo to protest against sexual harassment – photo gallery (this one reads ‘“The street is not yours, my freedom is not yours”)

Enjoyable tirade by Makarand against brainless ‘capacity building’ by NGOs. Anything that quotes ‘Yes Minister’ is usually good.

George Monbiot says forget about peak oil. ‘The automatic correction – resource depletion destroying the machine that was driving it – that many environmentalists foresaw is not going to happen. The problem we face is not that there is too little oil, but that there is too much.’ And a lot of it is very dirty (eg shale oil). 

States with Adjectives: Seth Kaplan (who has set up a fragile states website) argues that fragile states are characterized by multiple competing legal systems (colonial v precolonial) and the answer is to amalgamate them into single integrated ‘hybrids’. Only thing missing is a power analysis on why existing elites would want to do it. Cue rant on ‘why is political economy always missing?…….

Everyone (including Bill Easterly) hates Foreign Policy magazine’s new Failed States Index. ODI’s Claire Leigh contrasts it with the G7+ initiative led by some of those very same ‘failed states’.

The Guardian reckons 500m poor people worldwide (mainly in China and India) are now insured. My gut feeling is scepticism, but what do I know?

‘The opposite of poverty is justice, not wealth’. Bryan Stevenson, a human rights lawyer, looks into America’s dark heart, including mass incarceration, the selective killing of black men through the justice system and the extraordinary disenfranchisement that is taking away black votes. And somehow manages to be positive, polite and moving. Watch it and remind yourself what it’s all about. [h/t Tom Murphy]