Durban deciphered; China’s bubble will burst; African democracy v growth; weird eurocrats; Martin Luther v Facebook; human rights v religion; celebrating failure: links I liked (and see you in 2012)

Harvard’s Robert Stavins provides a nice post mortem of the Durban climate summit. George Monbiot fumes  – if you’ve come across any really good ones, please send me the links. [h/t John Magrath]

Something inevitable about this – Paul Krugman thinks the Chinese bubble is about to burst

Evan Liebermann’s excellent new blog on African governance finds no links between recent booms and the level of democracy

Some vaguely Christmas-related stuff:
‘In order to release this positive energy, people need oxygen. Society can offer this oxygen. Positive education, positive parenting, positive journalism and positive politics play a crucial role here. This oxygen we can also create ourselves by a balanced existence or a religious or philosophical rooting.’ Europe’s leaders are even weirder than we thought - from Herman van Rompuy’s Christmas letter to Barack Obama

‘How Martin Luther went viral’, Economist Christmas essay argues that five centuries before Twitter and Facebook, networks of pamphleteers – the social media of their day -helped bring about the Reformation

Thoughtful post from Wronging Rights on human rights versus (or as) religion

And finally, Engineers Without Borders is continuing to cause a buzz of excitement among development wonks by talking about failure (and encouraging others to do the same), as in this TedX talk by David Damberger, from its Canadian chapter

And with that I shrug the blogmonkey from my back and take a seasonal break. See you in 2012.