Who Hates Herman Cain?

Herman Cain is blaming liberals for the recent sexual harrassment allegations against him. I guess that's the thing to say if you're running for the GOP nomination, but obviously it would be dumb timing for any actual liberal to hand a bad story on Cain to the media right now. If you're a liberal, you'd sit tight and wait until Cain is the nominee to start dumping stuff on him. (I think Cain is extremely unlikely to be the nominee.)

This looks like the work of one of his GOP competitors. My top suspect would be the Perry campaign, just because it makes sense for them to do it -- they certainly don't want this Cain surge lasting any longer.

Quidditch Isn't A Well-Designed Game

Caperton at Crooked Timber reveals that people have started a Muggle Quidditch league. (Since it's Muggle Quidditch, you don't have to fly.) But this doesn't solve the major problem with Quidditch, which is that the scoring system makes it a boring one-on-one game for Seekers.

In most matches we see in the books, 6 of the players are barely relevant to the outcome. Since getting the Golden Snitch scores 150 points and ends the game, and the only other way to score is in 10-point increments, having a good Seeker is basically all that matters. I recall only one game described in the books -- the one where Victor Krum loses the game on his own terms -- where the decisive points are scored by non-Seekers. I guess the Beaters kind of matter, insofar as they can create obstacles for an opposing Seeker, but the other 4 players hardly make a difference. They do nifty-looking stuff, but it's usually just a sideshow.

Of course, this works well enough plotwise in the books, because it's all just a vehicle for Harry to win at things. If that counts as working well. I like a bunch of characters in the books (Lupin! Hermione! Snape! Dumbledore! Hagrid! Tonks!) but I'm not such a big Harry fan, as I think he's mostly just an Awesome Suit for boys to dress up in.

Threaten Pakistan With India

Pakistan is an enemy, as Spencer Ackerman says, and we've got to deal with it on those terms. Treating it as a wayward friend who needs to be bribed to deal with problems just gets Pakistan keeping the problems in play so that the bribe situation will stay intact.

What Pakistani military officials always think about is conflict with India. (I'm sure they like being bribed too, but as far as actual foreign policy goes, it's India.) They've fought three major wars with India. They like China because it's a powerful counterweight to India. Insofar as they like us, it's as a source of stuff they can use against India, and they just play us for more stuff.

So the kind of thing we'd need to do to get them to do what we want is threaten to strengthen India's position relative to them. I'm not sure exatly what one does here, but I'm thinking of something like regularly updating India on what our spy satellites tell us about what's going on in Pakistan, including precise locations for all their major military hardware.

Ordinary Muslim Man

These quickmeme things are always uneven in quality because it's random people making new ones all the time, but I'm enjoying Ordinary Muslim Man.

There are 1.57 billion Muslims in the world, and a lot of them live in poor countries where there's all kinds of political strife for reasons that go beyond religion. Any group that big is going to have a few really destructive people in it who are actively involved in killing others. And it's going to have a huge majority of people who don't do anything like that.

15% of the population in Singapore is Muslim. It's mostly Malaysians, though there are also some Indians. And it's just about the safest place in the world!

Abortion Restrictions Mapped

Via Amanda Marcotte, here's a nifty map of abortion restrictions around the world. Restrictions are tightest in Latin America (probably due to Catholic influence), Africa, and the Muslim world including Indonesia but excluding Turkey.

It took me a little while to understand the map, because I have a lot of trouble telling these shades of red and green apart. Green is the really problematic color for most people with poor color vision, so it'd be better if mapmakers and other designers could use blue instead.