DEVELOPMENT BEFORE SECURITY?: Aidwatch on what happens when you decide to build a long highway as a development project in Afghanistan, before the area is secured.

DANGER ROOM: At the end of this week, I’m with Spencer Ackerman on this.

And while I’m at it, I’m sorry I didn’t go celebrate in front of the White House last Sunday night.  I have zero patience for the “every man’s deathe diminishes me” meme, au courant in some (and some surprising) quarters; it is untrue and a disservice to the concept of justice.  Unjust aggression, unjust war is a form of tyranny, as Michael Walzer wrote in Just and Unjust Wars.

The tyrant does not have to be sitting atop of one as the dictator in power; today the tyrant can be a terrorist who leverages a small bit of actual violence into a massively tyrannical effect, even from a far distance.  And when the tyrant is overthrown, even one at a far distance and in a far country (where he is sheltered and given safe haven by those who are also enemies of ours), we the people rejoice and celebrate in the streets and shout for joy at his downfall and, yes, his death.  Why should we not?

FAILED ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC: Professor Jacobson says, be careful before you go full eliminationist.

LIKE MANY IPHONE APPS, this one lets you cut down on pedestrians. I tend to think the biggest driving problem these days is the driver not actually looking in the direction the car is moving. Also, not to stand in the way of progress and all but … was it worth the $20 million San Francisco spent on it?

EASTERN SIERRA SUMMER SEASON about to get underway.  The town of Bishop, in the Owens Valley, and the surrounding mountains, both the Eastern Sierra on one side and the White-Inyo Mountains on the other side, are God’s own country; other places, not so much. This year, we will manage to get there for a family vacation before Beloved Daughter leaves for freshman year at Rice University.

HEADLINE OF THE DAY: Manless Drone Strikes Brainless Men.

IRWIN STELZER predicts a coming Euro-zone crackup: it’s a fine, short, and brisk analysis of the political economy of the EU.  The cold facts, says Stelzer, are these:

• Greece, Ireland, and Portugal are now frozen out of credit markets. The yield on Greek two-year bonds is 24 percent and on both Irish and Portuguese bonds of similar maturity around 12 percent. No country can afford to borrow at those rates. Of interest to the White House and Congress might be the speed with which the markets move: Interest rates charged on Greek debt increased by 10 percentage points in the past month.
• The debt burden on these countries is in excess of the 90 percent of GDP that scholars now agree stifles growth. Portugal’s debt is at 90 percent of its GDP and rising, Greece’s is approaching 150 percent, and “Ireland’s debt now appears to be bigger, in relation to its economy, than the reparations imposed on Germany after the First World War,” according to economist Anatole Kaletsky.
• These economies cannot grow their way out of the problem. The Greek economy shrank at an annual rate of 4.5 percent last year and is forecast to decline this year at 3.2 percent. Portugal’s will shrink at an annual rate of 1.5 percent, guesses the International Monetary Fund. And Ireland, despite a robust export industry and a corporate tax rate of 12.5 percent that, at half the EU average, remains attractive to foreign investment, might eke out growth of 1 percent. No way these growth rates produce enough tax revenues to meet debt obligations.

One of the many problems of the risk models used in the run-up to the debt crisis was the assumption of smooth, continuous rises and falls in the price of debt.  But institutions, whether firms or sovereigns, tend to grow incrementally, financial instrument by financial instrument – and crash by institution.

WE SPENT MIDDAY AT LONGNECKER GARDEN in the UW Arboretum. There should be lots of flowering trees by now, but everything is late this year. The Mother’s Day revelers had to content themselves with magnolias and daffodils.

I like the name of the place: Longnecker. In these days of “truthers” and “birthers” and “deathers,” I look at “Longnecker” and try to dream up strange ideas about people with long necks.

AT AMAZON, markdowns on DVD and Blu-Ray.

JOURNALIST OF THE YEAR.

JANE EYRE: So, okay, shoot me, I wasn’t looking forward to two hours of Jane Eyre in the movie theater on Mother’s Day, not even with Beloved Wife and Daughter.  Increasing skepticism as the theater filled with nearly all mothers and daughters.  But it was terrific.  I really enjoyed it.

(Even with pretty much the only other guy in the theater seated two seats away – this enormous guy came into the theatre with a cooler, and midway through the movie proceeded to pull out a family size bag of doritos and consume the entire crunchy, crunchy, far more crunchy than popcorn, bag while slurping from a big bucket sized thermos, followed by some kind of cookies. I was distracted from the Divine Waifiness of Mia Wasikowska on-screen because a part of my brain could not help but calculate the calorie intake of the human cookie monster next to me. There is a reason I hardly set foot inside a movie theater.)

SIMON AND PAULA, together again.

RAND SIMBERG tells me not to be sad.

ALTOGETHER NOW, SAY, “GUTSY.”

DALE CARPENTER: Is there a rising tide of GOP opposition to a Minnesota state constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage?  Republicans won last fall “on promises to balance the budget, limit taxes and spending, and make the state more business-friendly. Social issues were almost totally absent from the campaign. Nevertheless, a constitutional amendment excluding gay couples and their families from marriage has been making its way quickly through the Minnesota legislature. If approved, it would go on the ballot in November 2012 in a popular referendum, where it would have to get a majority of all votes cast in a high turnout year. It had seemed the amendment would sail through the state legislature. But now it faces rising Republican opposition.”

FLY THE JITTERY SKIES:

• Chicago Tribune, today: “Passenger tries to open door; plane diverted.”

• CNN: A Delta flight from Detroit headed to San Diego was diverted Sunday to Albuquerque, NM “after a flight attendant found a suspicious note in a lavatory, an official with the Transportation Security Administration told CNN.”

• Yahoo/AP, Friday: “Muslim leaders say they were taken off Tenn flight.”

“DEAR GOV. BROWN: WHAT PART OF ECONOMICS 101 DID YOU FAIL?” —  “For the seventh year running, California has been ranked the WORST state in which to do business according to a survey by Chief Executive Magazine.”

THE HERMETIC AND ARROGANT NEW YORK TIMES:

The NYT employs some of the smartest and ablest users and analysts of social media: it’s probably the most sophisticated newspaper in America on that front. And then it has dinosaurs like Bill Keller and Arthur Brisbane, whose respective columns this weekend betray the fact that the people with the bully pulpits are stuck in a completely different world, seemingly ignorant of some of the biggest stories in social media.

A couple of months ago, Keller described the Huffington Post (which competes daily for the Times’ core Bobo demographic)* as a haven for “celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications.” So it may be asking him far too much to get Twitter, as well.

In other words, once again, Gray Lady Down.

* As does the Daily Show, which had lots of fun with the Gray Lady in general, not to mention Keller himself a couple of years ago:

APROPOS ADMIRAL YAMAMOTO.

SECRETARY CLINTON, CALL YOUR LAWYER: Positions the US government needs to defend in its legal defense of the OBL targeted kill. The questions that AG Holder needed to address, but didn’t, and that State Department spokesman Mark C. Toner thought should be discussed … somewhere other than the Department of State.

DANA LOESCH: “Motherhood Is Political.” But as more and more aspects of life fall under the purview of government, what isn’t, these days?

CHENEY: Waterboarding not torture, reinstate it.

Related: Cheney on photo decision: ‘I can’t quarrel with it.’

REAR WINDOW: The most awkward neighborly conversation ever.

Or, perhaps not, but it’s still pretty awkward.

JIM TREACHER: “It took over 65 years, but as of today, the United States’ total demoralization of Germany is finally complete.”

AT AMAZON, it’s the Computer Outlet Sale.