Daniel Gross tries to explain why Maine lobster is getting less expensive while other foods are doing the opposite:

At root, the global forces that are driving up the price of food don't significantly affect the vacation lobster business in Maine. Commercial and consumer demand doesn't vary much for off-the-boat lobster. Sure, many lobsters are sold to processing plants. But unlike other seafood products—think of canned tuna, or clam sauce, or frozen fish fillets—lobster is not produced or marketed on a mass global scale, which also means there are no speculators trying to make a killing on lobster futures. The fact that people are eating more and better in China and India isn't much boosting the demand for lobsters from Maine. Even in the United States, lobster remains to a large degree a regional product. [...]

With demand down, and with distributors facing higher costs, there has been significant pressure on lobster producers to keep costs low.

Isn't this analysis too complicated? Isn't Maine lobster simply a luxury good, the price of which falls when times get tough and demand -- primarily from the United States and Canada -- drops? That's what one ShopRite owner thinks:

The price has come down, but more important, what I'm hearing is, the supply side to supermarket retailers is better because tourist consumption is down in Maine," he said. "So there's been more consistent supply."

(Hat tip: Tyler Cowen)

FP contributor John Shoven is getting some much-deserved attention this week for his work on age inflation. Earlier this year, Shoven wrote in Foreign Policy about why we shouldn't fear the aging of the world's baby boomers:

The reason lies in the misleading way in which we measure age. Typically, a person's age has been determined by the number of years since his or her birth. We are so accustomed to measuring age this way that most of us have never given it a second thought. Thanks to the medical revolutions of the past century, however, life expectancies have been radically prolonged. Since 1960, the average Chinese person's life span has increased by 36 years. Over roughly 40 years, South Koreans have seen their lifetimes extended by an average of 24 years, Mexicans by 17 years, and the French by nearly a decade. Given these drastic changes, our conception of what qualifies as "old" has itself become old-fashioned.

Measuring age not by years since birth, but by mortality risk has huge implications for Social Security benefits. In 1940, a 65-year-old American man could expect to live 11 more years; today, he can expect to live 17 more years. Being 65 simply isn't what it used to be.

In a new working paper, Shoven and his co-author Gopi Shah Goda expand on this angle, producing this fascinating chart showing that if Congress had started adjusting benefits to mortality risk instead of traditional age measures in 1940, the percentage of the U.S. population receiving full Social Security benefits would be cut in half by 2050:

If Congress had enacted these changes in 2004, we'd already be looking at a 3 percentage point drop in the next few decades.

We try to keep the focus here on international issues, but some items are too good to pass up. I hope taxpayer dollars aren't paying for this billboard in Kansas City, or anywhere else:

Via Matt Yglesias, who comments:

If anything, characterizing the sex-engineering link in this manner seems overwhelmingly more likely to reduce interest in engineering than to reduce interest in sex.

The drug wars in Mexico have sunk to a new low.

Yesterday, a gang of hooded gunmen shot eight patients to death and wounded six others at a rehab center in Ciudad Juárez in what looks like part of a drug-gang feud in the cartel-ridden city. The gunmen reportedly stormed the center (during a Wednesday night prayer service, no less), then picked out their victims and took them to the back patio to be shot. The gunmen then opened fire inside the rehab center, leaving behind 60 shell casings.

FILE: ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP/Getty Images

These shootings bring the city's total of drug-related killings to a whopping 40 -- for just this week. A major drug transit point, the border city has always run rampant with cartels and crime. But the recent outbreak of murders and kidnappings is something new. So far this year, Ciudad Juárez's murder toll sits just below 800, most of them drug-related.

Things don't look too good for Felipe Calderon, who vowed to crack down on Mexico's drug traffickers at the beginning of his term. This year's wave of violence might just be a reaction to his stepped-up efforts to combat crime, but the Mexican president has some house-cleaning to do. Just today, six members of the government's top organized crime unit were arrested for supposedly leaking information to drug traffickers.

With Mexico still awaiting some $400 million in U.S. drug-war aid, Calderon better step up his efforts to kick out the bad guys soon.

TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images

It's time to get your (Smart)bike on in D.C.

The long-awaited bike-rental program kicks off this week in Washington, which joins the ranks of Barcelona and Paris as a leader in promoting ecofriendly transportation. Washington's program is less ambitious than its European counterparts -- with just 120 bikes to Paris's 20,000 -- but Jim Sebastian, bike and pedestrian program manager for the D.C. Transportation Department, expects the Smartbikes to be a big hit:

It's really going to be replacing cab rides and car trips for a lot of folks looking to get around the city quickly... Plus they won't have to worry about parking."

An annual fee of $40 gets riders a program membership card and up to three hours' use of a SmartBike. There's no limit on the total number of daily trips, so riders could theoretically tool around all day on the cherry-red cycles.

No matter how long riders use the bikes, though, the city hopes they'll be safe: Each SmartBike member gets a safe-cycling guide, a bike map of the district, and a manual outlining D.C.'s cycling laws. The program doesn't provide helmets, but Sebastian does encourage riders to wear their own.

Riders will also have to provide their own locks, at least for the time being, which might pose potential problems of theft and vandalism (something Paris knows about). Still, the real litmus test will be how much use the program gets in its first few weeks. D.C.'s unseasonably mild August might spur some people to try the bikes. I'm tempted to give it a try this afternoon, if the weather holds.

Adam Pretty/Getty Images

While Americans have been enthralled with the performances of God-King Michael Phelps, their neighbors to the north are starting to get a bit worried. The reason? Canada hasn't won a medal yet.

The team, which won 12 overall medals in Athens, does expect some wins in the coming days. And the hapless Canucks are nowhere close to some of the worst Olympians of all time, thanks largely to their prowess in winter sports. Still, as Mark Spector laments in the Toronto-based National Post, folks in Canada are starting to get a bit worried:

Togo has a medal. Michael Phelps has five. Azerbaijan has three. Kyrgyzstan has two.

We'll pass them all by the end, barring an absolute disaster, but still, as the calls from editors begin to roll into the press centres here - all looking for the "What's going wrong?" angle that usually doesn't arrive for a few more days at these things - it is clear that Canadians are getting edgy."

Spector's piece also speaks to the incredibly high cost of churning out top-tier Olympic athletes, comparing powerhouses like China and the United States to the New York Yankees, who pay obscene amounts of money and are highly successful (although he should have used a team that actually wins these days, such as, ahem, my own Boston Red Sox).

It's tough to argue with his point. The deck is obviously stacked for the likes of China and the United States, where no matter the price for Olympic glory, people are willing to pay for it. Of course, it also helps when you hand-pick your gymnasts at age three or four, cut them off from their families, and then have them compete in the Olympics when they're 13.

Once middle-aged British intellectuals started paying to be waterboarded, it was only a matter of time before the controversial interrogation technique became a tourist attraction. Just next to the famous amusement park in Brooklyn's Coney Island, visitors can now experience the new "Waterboard Thrill Ride":

It looks at first like any other shuttered storefront near the boardwalk: some garish lettering and a cartoonish invitation to a delight or a scam — in this case there’s SpongeBob SquarePants saying, “It don’t Gitmo better!”

If you climb up a few cinderblock steps to the small window, you can look through the bars at a scene meant to invoke a Guantánamo Bay interrogation. A lifesize figure in a dark sweatshirt, the hood drawn low over his face, leans over another figure in an orange jumpsuit, his face covered by a towel and his body strapped down on a tilted surface.

Feed a dollar into a slot, the lights go on, and Black Hood pours water up Orange Jumpsuit’s nose and mouth while Orange Jumpsuit convulses against his restraints for 15 seconds. O.K., kids, who wants more cotton candy!

Artist Steve Powers, the installation's creator, intends it to be a provacative political commentary but -- this being Coney Island -- some visitors seem to find it legitimately entertaining.

It's truly disgusting that this freak-show huckster is making a buck by depicting torture for entertainment while the U.S. government is actually practicing these techniques. That's Fox's job!

China Photos/Getty Images

With the Olympic torch making the final rounds in Beijing, the era of the global torch relay may be coming to a close. According to reports, both the Vancouver 2010 and London 2012 torch relays will be confined within Canada and Great Britain, respectively.

The London Olympic Organizing Committee apparently wants to "bring the torch relay back to basics" and showcase the torch within 30 minutes of every British citizen. But the real reasoning is likely to avoid the headaches that marred the Beijing torch route:

Dick Pound, a former IOC vice-president and a representative for Canada, said that the anti-Chinese protests that pursued the torch through major cities on its global tour had brought the Games “close to disaster”. He added that only goodwill generated after a devastating earthquake hit Sichuan province in May, claiming at least 70,000 lives, averted a boycott.

Sure, Vancouver and London are less controversial than Beijing. But maybe they're worried that some bitter Parisians, having been snubbed in their bid for the 2012 games, will try to grab the torch again.

JOHN THYS/AFP/Getty Images

During the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many social scientists have decried the U.S. Defense Department's lack of cultural sensitivity. Now, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a former president of Texas A&M University, is doing something about it. He has announced Project Minerva, which will fund research by social scientists on topics such as the influence of religion and economics on terrorism.

Rather than welcoming Project Minerva, however, many academics, particularly anthropologists, oppose it. In the recent FP Web exclusive "When Professors Go to War," anthropologist Hugh Gusterson wrote that many anthropologists -- who are in a largely left-leaning discipline -- simply won't stomach being funded by the Pentagon. Thus, those social scientists who do apply for funding will be a thin slice who have no qualms about accepting the Defense Department's money. This will lead to "selection bias," in which only a narrow range of perspectives end up being funded.

In response, Duke University professor Peter Feaver argues this week in "Pentagon Funding? Bring It On." that the challenge of selection bias can be overcome and that Gates is committed to openness and academic freedom. Proposals will be selected on the importance of the topic being investigated and the quality of the methodology -- and not on whether the results will end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy for the military.

What do you all think? Should social scientists be funded by the Defense Department in an effort to bring more cultural sensitivity to the military's methods? Who's right? Gusterson or Feaver?

Osama bin Laden once said that his goal is "bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy." Maybe he should have gotten into the mortgage business instead of becoming a terrorist.

Zubin Jelveh blogs a new IMF working paper by Hui Tong and Shang-Jin Wei, who look at the responses by economic forecasters and consumers to 9/11 vs. their reactions to the subprime mortgage crisis. As you can see, everybody pretty much shrugged off 9/11 (at least when it comes to the economy; emotional grief is, of course, beyond measure) after about six months, but subprime has brought a steady decline in confidence:

Boston Red Sox slugger Manny Ramirez apparently has great faith in the success of the surge. Look at this press conference brilliance:

I don't care where I play. I can even play in Iraq if need be. My job is to play baseball."

If this latest from Ramirez comes as even a remote surprise to you, you're probably not a baseball fan.

Minot Air Force Base is not having a good news year. Last year, cruise missiles armed with nuclear weapons left the base by accident; this March, the Air Force discovered it had inadvertently shipped fuse components for nuclear weapons to Taiwan in 2006; and in May, Minot's 5th Bomb Wing failed a security test. Now we have news of another mishap, this time involving classified material at Minot.

In a story that more properly belongs in the beginning of a bad made-for-TV drama, a missile crew in possession of a nuclear launch code "component," while waiting for transport in a crew rest area, fell asleep.

An initial report simply said that "a nuclear launch code was lost or misplaced," but the Air Force later clarified that the codes in possession of the sleeping crewmembers had been superseded by a new set and were no longer usable. In addition, according to the press release, the codes were locked up with a combination known only to the crew and the entire facility was secured throughout the incident by Air Force Security Forces.

Now, it is true that the codes were probably never in danger of being compromised. It would also be understandable in almost any other circumstance that the crew would fall asleep while waiting for transport; generally, missile crews consist of three people who rotate watches over a three-day period. These rotations are likely tiring, and indeed the crews have been complaining about the length of the new rotations (for more about life as a "missileer," check out this fascinating article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists). And the punishment for the people at fault looks to be swift.

More worrisome, though, is the pattern incidents like these are beginning to reveal. The "loose nukes" incident last year resulted from a whole cascade of minor security slip-ups just like this one, and where one such incident is reported many more are likely present. The prestige of working with U.S. nuclear forces continues to drop -- how do we make sure the ultimate weapons stay secure if things continue to get worse?

iStockphoto.com

A few weeks back, I blogged a Times of India story about how China's construction boom was driving up iron prices, resulting in widespread theft of manhole covers in Mumbai.

Now, the New York Times is reporting that the epidemic of manhole theft is spreading throughout the United States as well. In Philadelphia alone, 2,500 covers have been stolen in the last year, costing the city at least $300,000. Widespread manhole-cover theft has also been reported in Long Beach, Cleveland, Memphis, Miami, and Milwaukee. Some cities are now switching to plastic covers or welding down the metal ones.

Police are trying to crack down on junkyards, but as one North Philadelphia scrap metal collector reports, the demand curve is not in their favor:

These guys here," Mr. Sergeant said, pointing at one scrap yard, "They’d buy a police cruiser and melt it down if we brought it in. The prices for metal are just that good these days."

The McCain campaign has taken to mocking the press corps left behind to cover the Arizona senator while Barack Obama is overseas, Hotline reports. Here are the luggage tags McCain staffers jokingly put on reporters' bags yesterday:

Chuck Todd and company at MSNBC's First Read comment, "Why does McCain think belittling his own press corps is a good idea?" Good question.

Al Bello/Getty Images

It was only a matter of time before the declining dollar affected the world of sport. In years past, the Europe's prime basketball talent bolted across the pond for the superior pay and play of the NBA. Now, the trend appears to be heading in the opposite direction, thanks to the rising euro and an influx of Russian investment in the European league. Suddenly, playing in Europe doesn't sound like such a bad idea after all.

Former New Jersey Net Bostjan Nachbar (above left, with Dallas's Dirk Nowitzki) is the latest player to spurn the NBA and sign a more lucrative contract with a European team, which pays in the much more attractive euro, and often tax-free:

The NBA had better be careful," Nachbar said. "European teams are offering a lot of money. It's much more, considering there are no taxes, than what I could make signing for the midlevel exception."

Once confined to players with previous overseas experience, the trend is spreading to home-grown Americans, too. Highly rated high schooler Brandon Jennings, struggling with academic issues, shocked the college basketball world by opting to play in Europe instead of attending school. And Atlanta's Josh Childress, unhappy with the state of contract negotiations with the Hawks, is weighing an offer to play in Greece.

Although the NBA, already cultivating the Chinese market, has been eyeing European expansion, I don't think this is exactly what Commissioner David Stern had in mind.

A show of hands: Who remembers anything that happened during John McCain's travels to Colombia and Mexico?

Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?

Well, I'd bet you have a good handle on what Barack Obama is up to this week. He just came from Afghanistan, and now he's in Iraq, where he got a big boost when Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki basically endorsed his withdrawal plan. After a few more days in the Middle East, he'll head to Europe, where by all accounts he'll be treated like a savior coming to rescue transatlantic relations from George W. Bush.

His trip is getting major, wall-to-wall coverage -- with much more to come -- but in fact, Obama has gotten the lion's share of media attention since the general election began:

Since June 9th, when Obama effectively clinched the votes for the nomination, the Project For Excellence In Journalism took a weekly look at 300 political stories in newspapers, magazines and television. In 77 percent of the stories, Obama played an important role, and 51 percent featured McCain.

A quick look at Google Trends shows that McCain hasn't even been able to capitalize on the times he has made news. Here's a graph of searches and news mentions for the past 30 days, with Obama in blue and McCain in red. As you can see, McCain's Latin America trip was during the first week of July (point A), and it barely made a dent:

Many conservatives, no doubt, will see the dark hand of media bias at work here. But is that really the case? Is McCain the victim of the liberal media? Or is Obama just more interesting and new than McCain? Discuss.

UPDATE: As for this, maybe the New York Times did McCain a favor. Check out this line from the op-ed that the Times supposedly spiked:

[Obama] makes it sound as if Prime Minister Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable, when all he has said is that he would like a plan for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops at some unspecified point in the future.

Well, 2010 is getting fairly specific, no?

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Scrap metal is piled up at a metal recycling facility on July 17 in Chicago, Illinois. With scrap metal prices near historic highs, many communities are experiencing an increase in thefts of metal including cemetery ornaments, plumbing pipe, gutters, and even manhole covers.

KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP/Getty Images

This week, an elite team of Iranians landed in Utah and began training exercises. Yet the act sparked no alarm. Why?

The 25 men are members of the Iranian national basketball team, invited to participate in the NBA summer league in Utah as they prepare for their first Olympics in 60 years. Meanwhile, the 18-year old captain of the Iranian junior national team has been training in Texas, hoping to become the first of his countrymen to play college hoops in the United States.

Despite the bluster and bellicose rhetoric on both sides, this basketball diplomacy is one of several recent signs of greater U.S. engagement with Tehran. U.S. Undersecretary of State William J. Burns, who is heading to Geneva for international talks with Iran this weekend, told Congress last week that the athletic outreach, which includes hosting the Iranian table tennis and soccer teams, is part of a broader effort to repair relations with the Iranian people:

Over the long-term, we hope to build connections among our people through educational, cultural, and other exchanges which can overcome 30 years of estrangement that has severed links between our societies.

Hopefully, basketball is just the beginning. These types of arrangements don't get the same types of headlines as sanctions or cigarettes, but they're an important piece of the diplomatic puzzle. And after all, there's really nothing for the United States to lose -- other than perhaps, embarassingly, a basketball game.

Here's some fodder for the offshore drilling debate:

Photo by David McNew/Getty Images

A rare and endangered blue whale, one of at least four feeding 11 miles off Long Beach Harbor in the Catalina Channel, spouts near offshore oil rigs after a long dive July 16, 2008, near Long Beach, California. In decades past, blue whales were rarely seen along California's coastline, but their migration and feeding patterns are changing. In the past four years sightings in southern California have increased dramatically and blue whales have been reported almost daily this summer. Scientists suspect that climate change is having an effect on the food of the blues but other factors have not been ruled out. Before whalers stepped up their kill rate in the 1800s, there were at least 220,000 to 300,000 around the world. Today less than 11,000 survive worldwide with 1,200 to 2,000 in the Pacific waters off California. Blue whales are the largest animals on the planet, growing up to 110 feet long and reaching a weight of 200 tons. The U.S. Navy uses loud sonar blasts in submarine detection training exercises off Southern California that can harm or kill whales at great distances, a controversial issue that has reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and the high price of gas has increased political pressure to increase oil drilling in the waters where the whales live.

Last year, a lot of folks noticed when Col. H.R. McMaster, the by-all-accounts brilliant commander who led counterinsurgency efforts in Tal Afar, got passed over for promotion to one-star general. Commenting on the move, Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly wrote, "it certainly doesn't inspire confidence that the military has any intention of supporting serious institutional change in response to 9/11." Desert storm veteran James Joyner called McMaster "just the type of scholar-warrior that the military needs in its flag ranks right now." The counterinsurgency gurus at the Small Wars Journal saw it as "a type of reverse Peter Principle" at work.

These commentators will be pleased to note that McMaster was not doomed to be a lowly colonel forever. After failing to make the Pentagon's annual promotion list twice, he's just been given his first star:

[President Bush nominates] Army Col. Herbert R. McMaster Jr. for promotion to the grade of brigadier general. He is currently enroute to serve as director, concepts development and experimentation, Army Capabilities Integration Center [ARCIC], U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, Fort Monroe, Va.

The ARCIC is a relatively new center that has the potential to be very influential in setting Army doctrine. As the Washington Post's Ann Scott Tyson suggests, the promotion indicates that the counterinsurgency types in the Petraeus mold are gaining the upper hand against the big war crowd.

UPDATE: Via e-mail, retired Lt. Col. John Nagl (now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security) comments:

The selection of my friend and mentor H.R. McMaster for promotion to Brigadier General is another indication that the Army is learning and adapting to the wars of this century--and putting the right people in the right places to drive change. H.R. has had strategic influence on the Army since he was a Major, and he'll be able to do even more with the power of a star behind him. Although I don't know many of the other officers selected for promotion to Brigadier, and many great officers didn't make this list, from all accounts these officers who were picked have the experience, vision, and drive to continue to improve one of America's best learning organizations."