I should have posted about this earlier, but I went into seclusion earlier this week to finish a review of John Talbott's "Obamanomics," which will be appearing in Salon next Monday or Tuesday.

Furthermore, I will be taking Thursday and Friday as vacation days, so the drought will continue all the way until next Monday. My apologies.

From BicycleRetailer.com:

When Steve Flagg reviewed his inventory reports recently, one item jumped off the page -- 27-inch tires. "We were totally unprepared for the demand in 27-inch tires," said Flagg, president of Quality Bicycle Products.

Wayne D. Gray, vice-president of KHS/FreeAgent Bicycles, noticed the same trend. "We're seeing a lot of demand for them. It's people taking their old Schwinn Varsity out of the garage and to a shop for new tires and a tuneup," said Gray from his Southern California office.

No currently manufactured bicycles -- road, mountain or hybrid -- are designed to be used with 27-inch diameter tires, but if you've got a 10-speed bike bought back in the 1980s moldering away in the basement or garage, chances are, it will need some new tall, skinny tires before it's ready to take back out on the road.

Why the sudden urge to recycle the old bicycle? The price of gas is one factor, along with the more generalized happy confluence of two mutually reinforcing motivators -- the desire to go green and the desire to get fitter. And who knows, maybe one day those tires will be made from Russian dandelions.

After some initial hesitancy on the part of aggrieved nationalists, Chinese audiences have welcomed "Kung Fu Panda" with enthusiasm. This pleases How the World Works, since our own reaction to the Dreamworks movie was that it was a mash note to Chinese culture, rather than a rip-off.

But for a truly virtuoso deconstruction of the film in the context of the larger universe of kung fu movie tradition, readers must hie themselves immediately to Haiyan Lee's "Kung Fu Panda: Go Home!," published today at the excellent China Beat blog.

An assistant professor at the University of Colorado who specializes in modern Chinese literature, Lee demonstrates an impressive level of kung-fu-osity, along with setting forth a compelling argument as to how "Kung Fu Panda" radically threatens some ancient themes of the kung fu flick genre.

Any essay that namechecks "The Hulk," "The Lord of the Rings," YouTube, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and casually drops the word "panda-monium" is obviously worth reading, but Lee's thesis isn't easily summarized. So I'll just give you the last line:

In this sense, Kung Fu Panda is a disarmingly cute and merry face of the global modernity that has made it impossible for anyone to lay claim to beloved cultural symbols as inviolable national patrimony.

I continue to be fascinated by the evolution of Kiva, the online microfinance lending site that allows you to pick and choose exactly who gets your loan.

My first loan, made back in December 2006, was paid back in full, and I promptly rolled it over to a new recipient. But the friend of mine who had originally alerted me to Kiva's existence, reported a month ago that his first loan had defaulted.

The problem, it turns out, was not so much with the loan recipient, but with Women's Economic Empowerment Consort, one of the on-the-ground field agencies Kiva was working with in Kenya. The founder of the organization died suddenly in 2007, and the group appeared to lose its way afterwards.

Matt Flannery, the founder and CEO of Kiva, posted in his own blog yesterday about some of the troubles Kiva has encountered in Africa. Kiva has been forced to shut down operations with five different local field agencies, three in Kenya, one in Cote d'Ivoire, and one in Uganda. The reasons have ranged from mismanagement and misrepresentation to outright fraud, but Flannery writes that there is something of a common theme:

Behind each of these break-ups, there is a story. Usually, there lies a patriarchal figure who viewed his organization as an extension of himself and a Kiva which was way too naive.

Kiva's experience neatly encapsulates the larger narrative in which Western development agencies have encountered so much difficulty in ensuring that aid to Africa is effectively distributed and efficiently deployed. The difference with Kiva, is, again, the incredible transparency of each step in the process. Ironically, I feel more confident about making future loans through Kiva after reading about the organization's missteps and naivete in Flannery's blog.

Schadenfreude alert:

In 2002, Texas sweepingly deregulated its electricity market. Today, a page one story in the Wall Street Journal by Rebecca Smith informs us that citizens of Texas are paying some of the highest electricity rates in the United States.

Power costs are rising in the rest of the U.S., but everything is bigger in Texas: On a hot day in May, wholesale prices rose briefly to more than $4 a kilowatt hour -- about 40 times the national average.

But that's OK. Because:

"The system is working the way it is supposed to work," says state Rep. Phil King, the Republican from Weatherford who is chairman of the House Regulated Industries Committee.

Such honesty from an elected official is to be applauded. Of course, what King really means is that high prices are supposed to provide incentives for utilities to build new power plants and improve the transmission grid, but the WSJ's Smith doesn't tell us anything about whether new supply is coming online.

A couple of weeks ago, the Nation featured an exuberant look at the prospects of Democrats wresting Texas from Republican hands. My initial opinion was that the article was more an exercise in wishful thinking than sober political analysis. But who knows? Republicans own the state, lock, stock and barrel, and Republicans have delivered to their constituents some of the highest electricity prices in the country. Well done!

When a debate between two authors of new books about the future of food is labeled "A Food Fight," one can be excused for expecting some fireworks. But the exchange hosted in late June at the Oxford University Press blog between Robert Paarlberg, author of "Starved for Science" and Pamela Ronald, author of "Tomorrow's Table," on the topic of "how to best ensure a safe food supply with the least amount of damage to the environment," was anything but adversarial.

It might have helped if the two authors has more sharply opposed stances. But Paarlberg, who believes Africa is shooting itself in the foot by resisting genetically engineered crops, and Ronald, who believes organic farmers should take advantage of GMOs, appeared to agree more than disagree.

The discussion is not without nuance, however, and Ronald was even brassy enough to cite "Silent Spring's" Rachel Carson as a potential muse for those who aim to merge the latest biotechnology with sustainable agriculture.

After all, in 1962 she said:

"A truly extraordinary variety of alternatives to the chemical control of insects is available. Some are already in use and have achieved brilliant success. Others are in the stage of laboratory testing. Still others are little more than ideas in the minds of imaginative scientists, waiting for the opportunity to put them to the test. All have this in common: they are biological solutions, based on understanding of the living organisms they seek to control, and of the whole fabric of life to which these organisms belong. Specialists representing various areas of the vast field of biology are contributing -- entomologists, pathologists, geneticists, physiologists, biochemists, ecologists -- all pouring their knowledge and their creative inspirations into the formation of a new science of biotic controls."

Personally, it seems like a bit of a stretch to jump from that quote to an endorsement of Monsanto's RoundupReady cotton or soy, but, as noted here many times before, How the World Works has no fundamental objection to integrating all kinds of exotic biotechnology into our food production system, as long as we aren't depending on the companies who are aiming to profit off the new products for the final word on health or safety risks. But the quote that really seemed to sum up an approach to farming (and just about everything else) that this blog can get behind also came from Ronald, quoting a farmer friend of hers:

As Mike Madison, a fellow farmer, neighbor and writer says, "In dealing with nature, to be authoritarian is almost always a mistake. In the long run, things work out better if the farmer learns to tolerate complexity and ambiguity... Having the right tools helps."

Part two of the exchange is here. Part three is here. And both books have joined my endless queue.

"On one side of the river the slogan was 'Kill the Gringos'; on the other it was 'Kill the Greasers.'"

It is often useful, when contemplating contemporary snake pits -- such as the problem of "border security" between the U.S. and Mexico -- to recall that not so long ago, life was much, much messier. In "A Troubled Past: The Army and Security on the Mexican Border: 1915-1917," published in the July-August issue of Military Review, military historian Thomas A. Bruscino takes us back a century to a time far more chaotic and violent than today.

The U.S. Army not only had to deal with constant deadly border raids, including some led by the notorious Pancho Villa, but was also plagued by local vigilante and law enforcement groups motivated by racial antagonism. Today's Minutemen have nothing on the Texas Rangers.

The Texas Rangers had the ostensible responsibility for keeping order in the state, but a corrupt and inefficient governor had hobbled the organization. Just as the situation on the border grew worse, the force became inexperienced and inept, and Rangers participated and even led attacks against Mexican Americans. In August, civilians in Texas organized the Law and Order League, one of several vigilante groups. These groups confiscated weapons and property, threatened Mexican Americans, and beat, shot, and lynched suspected bandits. In September, one of the groups shot and killed 14 Mexican Americans near Donna, Texas, and left the bodies in a row as a warning to the bandits.

Further complicating the Army's situation were orders from Washington prohibiting U.S. soldiers from crossing the border while in pursuit of bandits. Negotiating the "mishmash of border security, local violence, guerrilla warfare, racial politics, and state diplomacy" was not easy. Ultimately, writes Bruscino, border disputes ended up solved via treaty rather than armed force, but for "for that time in the 1910s when the Army played the key role in trying to provide stability and security along the border, the situation became very messy and nearly degenerated into war."

In June 2006, U.S. military forces were assigned to the border to assist the Border Patrol in dealing with illegal immigration and drug smuggling. What lessons can be learned from the experience a century earlier?

Where then in this situation is the major area of concern for the military? The same place as it was in the 1910s: escalation. The border region is peopled with individuals of varying nationalities and national allegiances, and those allegiances can fuel intense emotions. Local authorities have their own agendas, which can be at cross purposes with the concerns of the national government, and volunteer law enforcement or vigilante groups might choose to act outside of local official policies. The presence of international boundaries means that local authorities must work with national-level diplomats to find solutions to disputes. The danger only grows when the military moves into the area...

When the military is involved, there is a great temptation to use force, as everyone discovered in the 1910s. But as everyone also discovered in that tumultuous decade, the use of force along the border can have dramatic and very negative effects.

Jim O'Neill, chief economist for Goldman Sachs, tells those of us "in the west" not to fret about economic gloom and doom. Globally speaking, he says, the outlook is rosy.

Specifically, the "global middle class" is growing at a rapid rate. Citing data from a recently published Goldman Sachs paper, "The Expanding Middle: The Exploding World Middle Class and Falling Global Inequality," O'Neill says about 70 million people a year are joining the middle class, "as defined by those on incomes of between $6,000 and $30,000."

The phenomenon may continue for the next 20 years, with this global middle accelerating to 90m a year by 2030. If this happens, an astonishing 2bn people will have joined the ranks of the middle class. This demonstrates that, contrary to widespread opinion, global inequality is declining significantly, not increasing.

I do not doubt that this is true -- China and India alone are pumping up the global middle class volume to an extraordinary extent. This is a good thing, and it augurs well for the future, if we can figure out how to ensure that the earth can sustainably support these upwardly mobile millions. The problem, however, is that ordinary people do not seem to be comforted by global economic progress or globally declining inequality. Localism always prevails. Working class voters in Ohio, for example, are unlikely to care that the world is getting richer, when in their own country, the concentration of wealth is progressively skewed towards the top end of the spectrum. For global inequality trends to make any kind of psychological difference to the psyche of those "in the west" a sense of a shared global identity is required. But we don't have that. We are riven by nationalist, cultural, and racial identity politics. We do not see ourselves as one world.

O'Neill lectures:

It is important for everyone in the so-called developed world to be constantly aware that these powerful shifts in global wealth are good not only for the developing world, but for them too. If you take a look at a chart of recent US export growth, you may well think you are looking at the wrong data series. But you are not. US exports are indeed growing at close to 20 per cent and it is this that is stopping the housing and credit crunch from driving the US into a deep recession. Aspects of the same phenomenon can be seen in Japan, Germany and even the UK.

Again, this is undoubtedly true, and again, it is unlikely to convince skeptics of "free trade" so long as the benefits of that increased trade are inequally distributed among the population. It is entirely possible for trade to boom and global income inequality to be fall, while within individual nations, inequality rises. And as long as that latter fact holds, O'Neill's remonstrations will fall on deaf ears.

Indeed, I would argue that it is important for everyone in the so-called developed world whose own income places them in the top one percent of the population -- a niche that I suspect Jim O'Neill belongs to -- to be constantly aware that while the burgeoning global middle class may be great for them, they may ultimately have to accept a little redistribution of their own income if they want other residents of "the west" to further support expanded trade and economic opportunity in the developing world.

How about it Jim? Why not, just for fun, a hike in the capital gains tax, the proceeds from which would be used to fund an expanded safety net for the Americans competing directly with the newly emergent middle classes of the world? Goldman-Sachs is going to do very, very well in a world that gets richer and richer. But if the company wants to inspire a sense of shared global solidarity, it may have to accept the responsibility to share some of the wealth.

Phil Gramm says whiny Americans are suffering through a "mental recession."

How about some data, Phil?

The U.S. Labor Department reported on Wednesday that consumer prices jumped by 1.1 percent in June, compared to May. That's the biggest one month rise in inflation since 1982. Gasoline prices, alone, rose by 10 percent.

In a separate report, the Labor Department also noted that average weekly earnings of U.S. workers, adjusted for inflation, fell 0.9 percent in June. Forbes notes that this marks "the third straight month when wages have not kept up with rising prices and the sharpest drop in real earnings since August 1984."

But it's all in our mind, says Phil Gramm. It's all just an illusion.

No U.S. journalist I'm aware of has been covering the solar power beat as well as Fortune's Todd Woody, and his latest offering, "The Southwest Desert's Real Estate Boom," shouldn't be missed. (Disclaimer: My son and Woody's son were, until a month ago, students at the same elementary school. They also share a deep affection for Japanese anime.)

One major theme of the piece is the emerging conflict between solar energy developers and environmentalists who want to ensure that the solar land rush in the Mojave Desert doesn't end up wreaking its own variety of environmental havoc. Will the desert tortoise become the new spotted owl?

My own feeling is that it's essential to hold renewable energy developers to the strictest environmental standards, or what's the point? But I was also fascinated by Woody's account of Goldman Sachs' solar "prospecting."

...No one has been as quick to move into the Mojave -- or as tightlipped about it -- as Solar Investments.

That entity, it turns out, is Goldman Sachs' solar subsidiary. The investment bank's designs on the desert are a topic of intense interest and speculation. Goldman declined to comment. But here's what we know:

Solar Investments filed its first land claim in December 2006 and within a month had applied for more than 125,000 acres for power plants that would produce ten gigawatts of electricity. Many of the sites lie close to the transmission lines that connect the desert to coastal cities. (Goldman has also staked claims on 40,000 acres of the Nevada desert.)

Nobody expects Goldman to begin operating solar plants. It will probably either partner with another developer or sell its limited-liability company (and its leases) outright. The firm has been making the rounds of solar developers....

"I view Goldman as a very interesting indicator of things to come," says Brian McDonald, PG&E's director of renewable-resource development.

There's money to be made in them there desert! The desert tortoise has a right to be alarmed, but for those humans biting their lips in impatience as they wait for solar power to hit the prime time, Goldman Sachs' solar power play is an encouraging sign.