Weekend links

• NYT—a profile of the eccentric British hedge fund manager who is trying to corner the world cocoa market. British tabloid nickname: Chocolate Finger.
• AOL Finance–NYT quarterly revenue goes up, fueled by a 21% increase in digital ad revenues. With the Times of London recently disclosing just how hard (think: 90% of online readership) their traffic has been hit by their online paywall, maybe the the online ad uptick will convince the NYT to scuttle their announced paywall project. That would make The Country Estate a very happy blog.
• The Independent—Some African churches in Britain are lodging charges of witchcraft against children and then abusing them with “exorcisms.” One girl has already been murdered. The case of another girl: “Kay claimed that in 2008, when she had turned 18, her pastor said she would need to sleep with him 21 times to rid her family of the witchcraft that caused their problems. Kay said: ‘It felt as if I was being raped.'” Um, yeah…you felt as if you were being raped because you were being raped by a sick, trust-and-power-abusing freak.
• Taki’s Mag—a guy reviewing Noam Chomsky’s newest book makes the case for a conservative streak in Chomsky’s ethos. It’s good stuff–the sort of stuff that “humanitarian interventionists” like Michael Ignatieff, Bernard Kouchner and Bill Clinton should read.
• NYT—DC school chancellor Michelle Rhee lays the hammer down and fires 241 teachers and puts 737 more employees on one-year, improve-or-go notice. If we’re going to have a public school system, it needs to be led by people like Michelle Rhee. We don’t tolerate results-free evaluation of performance in almost any other field. Teachers’ unions have gotten away with bloody murder for years, frequently demanding more money for education, just to see it go to compensate teachers whose only virtue is having stuck around the longest. Rhee’s performance in DC so far has been impressive.
• Radio Free Europe (via Andrew Sullivan)–Personal testimony from women across the Muslim world on the topic of why they do or do not wear the hijab. It would have been interesting to hear from some of the Western converts to Islam who have inexplicably chosen to give up their freedom and adopt the hijab. I would love to know their “reasons.” Still an interesting piece, especially in light of the recent anti-burqa wave in Europe.
• Veronique de Rugy at The Corner–the revised, much worse federal deficit projection for FY2011 and what it likely means for tax rates. Spoiler: Americans love government goodies so much that rather than return this bloated carcass of a state to its constitutional limits, they will probably elect to soak the wealth-creating class a bit more.
• Cnews (via David Kramer at LewRockwell.com)–Two passengers are pulled off an Air Canada flight for watching footage of 9/11 on an Ipod. Ok, this clearly wasn’t the smartest thing for these two passengers to be doing. But when your justification is, “‘It made everyone nervous,’ the employee said, adding the entire incident may have been a coincidence,” you might need to reconsider your actions. Oh, and people on the plane…do you really think a terrorist would be dumb enough to do something that incriminating?
• NYT—the Han rush into Tibet with lots of money. Beijing invested 31% more in Tibet last year than it did in 2008. How much of it went to these seasonal Han entrepreneurs? How many went to actual Tibetans? How blatant is this Sinify Tibet?
• Bleeding Cool (via Jesse Walker at Reason)–Comic-Con attendees counter-protest Fred Phelps and his “God hates fags” Westboro Baptist halfwits. I particularly like the jaunty Comic Book Guy-lookalike in the “Superman Loves Fags” shirt.

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