Sinatra Song Often Strikes Deadly Chord – NYTimes.com. if you find yourself doing karaoke in manila, make sure you don’t sing “My Way”.

Bill Moyers Journal . Greg Mortenson. great interview with the author of Three Cups of Tea about what should be done in Afghanistan.

Norman Borlaug, dead at 95

Norman Borlaug, who is regarded as having saved more lives than any other human in history, died yesterday at the age of 95. The New York Times has a great obituary which I’d highly recommend reading.

Though not a household name, Borlaug is widely credited for the creation of “semi-dwarf high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varietals” which, between 1965 and 1970, doubled wheat yields in Pakistan and India and saved upwards of 1 billion people from starvation. For this, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

Charlie Rose – A conversation with author Joshua Cooper Ramo. talking about his book, The Age of the Unthinkable. Second interview I’ve seen with him and he’s got a lot of interesting stuff to say about politics, china, and complex systemic problems.

Financial Rescue Approaches GDP as U.S. Pledges $12.8 Trillion – Bloomberg.com “The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year”. You might also remember that household debt is also 100% of GDP. via amr.

Scenes from the recession – The Big Picture. lots of crazy photos.

Globe and Mail interview with Niall Ferguson. long and interesting interview about the fate of the global economy.

TheStar.com | GTA | Tamils protest genocide. this was quite large.

NPR: TED Spread Party!. The TED spread, the difference between the interest rates on interbank loans and US T-bills, has finally returned below 1. This is a big deal. Time to get back in the market!

FT.com – Letter from Iceland. that’s some depressing shit. via ram.

buying airline routes and putting money under the mattress

I have to point out this morning’s NPR Planet Money podcast. It was just too good. There’s three segments and the last two are awesome.

The second piece has some guy trying to explain why we can’t just take all the crappy mortgages out of these big CDOs and call it a day. Well, it turns out that a lot of these CDOs have a collection of utterly disconnected things such as “income from a specific Friday night flight on Korean Airlines between Tokyo and Seoul” and “royalties from David Bowie’s songs” but more importantly things like “the mortgage for your office building” and “the mortgage for the cell phone tower your phone used this morning”. That’s one of the reasons why this toxic subprime debt is effecting things completely unrelated, like friday night flights out of Tokyo.

The last piece is talking with some bond and paper traders. The guy mentions how he has a client who had to buy treasury notes that day and ended up only getting 1 basis point for his trouble. That’s 1/100th of 1%. That’s a 1 cent return for $100. He also mentioned that some notes cleared this week for 0, the equivalent of hiding it under your mattress.

Earth From Above comes to NYC – The Big Picture – Boston.com. this photoset absolutely blew my mind.

The Double Life of an Infamous Serbian Fugitive – NYTimes.com. from genocide to an alternative medicine santa claus. crazy.

Excerpt: Zakaria’s ‘The Post-American World’. didn’t even know he had a new book out. that’s a definite next-day 1-click on amazon.

100,000 could be dead in Burma, diplomat says | guardian.co.uk. dear lord.

Global Housing Bust. so when’s the other shoe gonna drop in canada?

IMF says US crisis is ‘largest financial shock since Great Depression’ | guardian.co.uk. some serious doom and gloom.

Colbert: First Vid of Dean Kamen’s Miracle Water Distiller. for real? via josh.

Earth Hour crashes to Earth | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog “But here’s the awareness it should raise: how difficult it is to get even a tiny cut in just electricity use for one lousy hour, in a country responsible for just 1.5 per cent of the world’s emissions.”

$1 now equals 25,000,000 Zimbabwe dollars – CNN.com. $100USD equals 40 pounds of zimbabwe dollars. and since this article is a month old, it’s probably worse since inflation is currently 165,000%