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Alex
Pareene is doing his annual hack list at
Salon, and the conceit this year is that he writes each
entry in the hack’s own voice. This means, among other things,
that he has posted a Thomas
Friedman parody.

This raises the issue: Does the world need another Thomas
Friedman parody? At this point literally every single Thomas
Friedman column is itself a self-parody, and if that doesn’t
exhaust your appetite there’s a website that generates still more
parodies automatically.
It is possible that Friedman himself uses that site to create a
column when he’s feeling rushed, which would explain how
this managed to make it into the paper.

But Pareene took an extra step by asking: You know how
people love to complain about how awful Thomas Friedman is? What
would their complaints sound like if they were written by Thomas
Friedman? Here is what he came up with:

When I was in Singapore, I talked to hundreds of Asian
college students, business people and diplomats, and while none of
them said this to me, exactly, it’s basically my thesis and

so I’m going to put it in quotation marks as a sort of
“distillation” of things I probably was told by people: “Is
everything going all right over there in America? How could the
people who gave us Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, H.P. and Google
also have so many people, many of them in positions of authority,
who take a clown like Thomas Friedman seriously? Most of his
columns are just
nonsensical buzzwords he’s been repeating for literally 10
years and his foreign policy analysis is usually either
incredibly facile or actively offensive to Arabs and Muslims. It’s
actually terrifying how influential he is. Like it legitimately
makes me despair of anything improving anywhere in the world for
anyone but the super-rich. Also there is probably some Times rule
about not putting ‘distilled’ quotes in quotation marks,
right?”

When I heard that—or rather when I didn’t hear it but when I wrote
it, just now—I thought “we’re
gonna need a bigger boat.” And that boat better have
Wi-Fi.

Friedman-bashing aficionados can read the rest here.

Central American countries have
been badly misruled by oligarchs for most of their
post-independence histories. The result is that Nicaragua,
Guatemala, and Honduras are the 2nd, 3rd, and 6th
poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. The one exception
in the region has been Costa Rica where democracy and the rule of
law have generally prevailed. The country famously abolished its
military back in the 1940s.

Unfortunately, in recent years, corrupt politicians have
undermined the trust of Ticos* in their government. This has
provided an opportunity for a rising libertarian political movement
and, less fortunately, an opportunity for politicians advocating
socialism.

The
Tico Times is reporting that a group of prominent
economists have broken from the country’s conservative party to
endorse the Libertarian Movement’s presidential candidate Otto
Guevara in the current election:

A former president of Costa Rica’s Central Bank and previous
PUSC supporter, Jorge Guardia, attacked one of the rising
opposition candidates.

“The country faces an urgent political dilemma,” Guardia said at
a Tuesday press conference. “There exists the risk that José María
Villalta, of the socialist Broad Front Party, could win the
February presidential elections.”

Guardia praised the Libertarian Movement presidential nominee as
having the only economic plan to solve Costa Rica’s woes, such as
its
8.9 percent unemployment rate.

The Tico Times further reported:

Guevara thanked his new-found supporters and used the
opportunity to slam his top opponents.

“The choice is between three,” Guevara said. “Socialism on one
side, a continuation of impoverishment, or a change to strengthen
the economy.”

In 2010, Guevara received
21 percent of the vote and his party gained 10 of the 57 seats
in the Chamber of Deputies. Here’s hoping that Ticos make the right
choice on February 2.

*Costa Ricans are called Ticos because they tend to
pronounce dimunitives like momentito as momentico. I had the
pleasure of working as reporter for the Tico Times back in the
1990s.

H/T Kevin Fleming.

U.K.-based
Sky News has released a video of a brigade of British jihadists
fighting in Syria. According to the interviewed jihadists, private
funds from the U.K. are the largest source of funding for jihadist
fighters, and hundreds of fighters from Britain have traveled to
Syria to fight against Assad.

In the video, the British jihadists claim that they only intend
to fight Assad and have no plans of returning to the U.K. to wage
jihad. They also reject being labeled as terrorists.

Earlier this month, European security officials said that the

number of Europeans fighting in Syria against Assad was
increasing.

That the British jihadists in the video claim that they have no
interest in waging jihad in the U.K. is unlikely to reassure
British authorities, who have already
arrested
men who have returned to the U.K. from Syria.

It shouldn’t be surprising if there is increased coverage of the
number of foreigners fighting with Islamic groups within Assad’s
opposition if the Western-backed Free Syrian Army continues to

lose ground
to the Islamic Front, a group that welcomes foreign fighters
and despite its unpleasant goal (the establishment of an
Islamic state in Syria) is becoming more important to the

Obama administration’s pursuit of a diplomatic solution to the
Syrian civil war. According to The Daily Beast’s Jamie
Dettmer, the Islamic Front has fought with jihadists
before.  

Although American diplomats were willing to talk to the Islamic
Front, it was reported today that the Islamic Front
refused to talk to U.S. representatives.

To give an idea of the sort of people involved with the Islamic
Front, here are some of the thoughts of the Islamic Front’s
military chief, as reported by
Foreign Policy:

Zahran Alloush, the Islamic Front’s military chief, has
demonized Syria’s Alawite minority and called for them to be
cleansed from Damascus. As he put it in a recent video: “The
jihadists will wash the filth of the rafida [a slur used to
describe Shia] from Greater Syria, they will wash it forever, if
Allah wills it.”

More from Reason.com on Syria here. 

Pretty much everyone concerned
with climate change issues agrees that temperatures are rising and
snow is melting. But what is causing the planet to warm
up? The United Nations’ computer climate models are supposed
to give policy makers reliable data regarding future trends in
man-made global warming. But they’ve failed to predict a flat
15-year period. Ronald Bailey argues that their latest report does
not inspire the kind of confidence that could justify a
trillion-dollar climate policy bet.

View this article.