Some memorable moments:

A) PM Stein and a panel of foreign affairs scholars judging an American Idol-style remake of Win Ben Stein's Money (scroll down for photo).

B) PM Stein explains the difficulties of settlement incursions to a Western aid official over a Starbucks.

C) Stein lets loose in Vegas for a last hurrah just before heading over to Palestine for his swear-in.

B) Of course, who can forget Prime Minister Stein's poignant narrative video of the Palestinian Nakba (refugee catastrophe) of 1948.

(My grandfather was right, darnit - he always avoided tefillin like the plague, to the extent that he would ditch Hebrew school, but wrap a rope tightly around his forearm in proper tefilln style, so his parents would see the welts on his arm and wouldn't figure out that he hadn't gone.)

Seriously, where will the stupidity and/or madness end?

Social pressures weigh on poorest Arab state

Just over a month ago, Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s president, joined international oil executives to inaugurate his impoverished country’s biggest industrial venture – a liquefied natural gas project.

For a veteran leader of the Arab world’s poorest nation, the launch of the plant could not have come soon enough. The $4.5bn (£2.8bn, €3.3bn) project is expected to generate between $30bn and $50bn in income for the government over the plant’s 25-year lifespan.

There's a commentary in The National on the relative negotiating positions of the banks and Dubai Inc which is to put it mildly a bit unbalanced. It seems much of this is based on comments from the borrower.

It's unclear if this article is meant as propaganda to raise morale on the home front. Or it reflects the thinking of decision makers at Dubai Inc - that they really believe they are in the driver's seat. If it does, a very dangerous delusion.

Certainly, Dubai Inc is not without leverage. The sheer quantum of debt and the government connection give Dubai a good deal of negotiating power. But that power is not unlimited. It cannot serve up whatever dish it wants.

As a pre commentary, the article highlights a key problem in the MENA region and in particular the Gulf with its pet press and ostentatious obsession with Praise remains: lack of critical thinking or at least public critical thinking.

It is worthwhile noting that globally, business press and business reporting - even in the USA - is not particularly literate or well informed, let alone critical. One only gets critical reporting in business issues on Big Items from Big Papers (most literately - in my order of preference - from Financial Times and from Wall Street Journal). Regional / local equivalents exists of various quality, but sadly well-informed business reporting available to the public is rare (quality subscriptions are available of course).

All this aside, the FT article is spot on (if a bit narrow in its focus on the Gulf - sadly although understandably  - most MENA conversation in Anglophone media really is about the Gulf and Indoafpak lands). Some comments on the article:

First on transparency:

Abu Dhabi’s recent Dubai bail-out may have removed some of the immediate risks of default in the emirate but the saga has left a bitter taste in the mouths of many investors – and led to calls for greater transparency in the United Arab Emirates.

Dubai has admitted that it owes about $80bn, but the restructuring of the Dubai World conglomerate announced earlier this month has revealed a mass of undisclosed loans. Some analysts estimate that the emirate could owe as much as $150bn in total.

Primo, everyone suspected this. Second, the approach of dribbling out (at metaphorical gunpoint) clarifications only worsens the doubts of investors and renders the Emirates (I used that deliberately) image. Rather better to get all the known bad news out now, price it all in, and move forward.

But not if:
(i) One is in reality treating this as a "domestic affaire" and foreign (non Emirate perhaps non Gulf) creditors are secondary considerations (conracts be fucked)
(ii) One is deeply underwater relative to obligations, and believes that in short term nothing is clear.

Anyway, this is almost obvious. Stating that

The disparity highlights the fact that the official statistics and forecasts that are available are often either lacking or misleading, say bankers.

If anyone believed Emirati official projections since say 2005 (and clearly some people really did - although post fact denials muddy the water) they were morons... or corrupt dupes.

This has meant that during the past year and more, the research teams of international and regional banks have proved vital sources of information and analysis.

Ahem.

Well that would not be my call (I would say the fucking cunts were Johnny fucking come lately useless fuckers).

Public and Private analysis that I have seen have been post facto ass covering. I will admit that a few high cost services I will not cite as I am not in the business of pimping non-public sourcing and fucking blogs (e.g. Suq Al Mal and some others would have given better insight than the faux numbers coming out of Dubai.

In any case the observation that [the] "series of negative reports produced in the wake of the financial crisis has not been welcomed by local executives and officials – who in the preceding years were accustomed to a muzzled local press and uniformly glowing reports is no surprise.

We can skip over the details of the article, although it deserves a close analysis, to a core and key observation: a relatively free and critical business press (however illiterate) is useful to have as a reality check.

No matter how stupid or illiterate they are, an actively critical press is useful in to help reign in the worst idiocies. I will try to expand on this later, but a major lesson I have taken away from my experience in investing or operating in emerging markets is that even a "yellow press" -if it is reasonably free and competitive - is useful.

And the complaint is littered with attempts to illicit anti-American sentiments from the marks, who rarely return with anything more damning than a “God Willing” or two. Clearly the US government expects that everyone who hates America is on the same page, plotting across ideological lines, continents, and religions to hurt us. By selling drugs. To Europeans.

The counterpoint of blind nationalism here is blind paranoia, the thought that everyone must be scheming about you behind your back, that all “evil doers” are doing evil as part of a grand conspiracy to bring you down. If you wave several million dollars in front of three people from one of the poorest countries in the world, do you think when you say “You love Al-Qaeda, right?” they’ll launch into a subtle discussion of international terror? Or will they say “Oh yeah, you’re my brother cause we hate America too! And I’ll take that %50 up front in Euros.”

But this is par for the US government anti-terrorism law enforcement. The policing enforcement of US terrorism policy is as hamfisted as the military “war on terror”, except that the policing war is usually motivated by the desire for good domestic press. They tend to create their own terrorist plots, convince criminal idiots to accede to the plans invented by the US, and then arrest the patsies. The example of the recent Bronx terror plot in which the FBI informant took several not very bright young men recently released from jail, created a plot, bought gifts for them until they agreed to help, gave them the supplies, and then arrested them as “dangerous Al Qaeda terrorists.” Of course there are real terrorists out there, but it’s much easier to disrupt plots you invent yourself.

I think I lack the words to adequately express how morally outrageous Tom Friedman’s call for a Muslim civil war is. But we can at least focus a bit on how factually inaccurate it is.

A couple of days ago, a suicide bombing in Pakistan killed 27. In July, militants hit a Pakistani hotel killing eleven. On December 8 12 were killed in Multan. That same day 100 Iraqis were killed in car bombs. Back in 2006 and 2007 there was regular fighting between Hamas and Fatah in which hundred were killed. And of course there’s ongoing violence in Iraq, in Yemen, in Sudan, and in many other Muslim countries.

Any normal person would conclude the obvious—Muslim-majority countries are suffering from an excess of civil wars most of which have some element of religious overtones. There’s quite a lot of violence and fighting. And it’s bad. People get maimed and killed. Children are turned into orphans. Hospitals and schools and productive infrastructure are destroyed. And while moral culpability for bad acts always adheres primarily to the bad actor, the fact of the matter is that the dominant theme of US foreign policy since 9/11 has been to intensify and exacerbate these conflicts, leading to vast quantities of death, destruction, and displacement.

[R]esearchers at Tel Aviv University - part of an international team - have developed a "synthesis technique" to overcome the "bots" by generating images of animated 3-D objects that are detectable by humans but difficult for an automatic algorithm to recognize. The team . . . included colleagues at King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia, The University of Delhi in India and researchers in Taiwan.... Their findings are being presented this week ... in Yokohama, Japan