"When songbirds perceive some sign of danger — a roosting owl, a hawk, a neighborhood cat — a group of them will often do something bizarre: fly toward the threat. When they reach the enemy, they will swoop down on it again and again, jeering and making a racket, which draws still more birds to the assault. The birds seldom actually touch their target (though reports from the field have it that some species can defecate or vomit on the predator with "amazing accuracy"). The barrage simply continues until the intruder sulks away. Scientists call this behavior "mobbing."

The impulse to mob is so strong in some birds that humans have learned to use predators as lures. Birders play recordings of screech owls to attract shy songbirds. In England, an ancient duck-hunting technique involved stationing a trained dog at the edge of a pond: First the dog got the ducks' attention, and then it fled down the mouth of a giant, narrowing wickerwork trap, with the mob of waterfowl hot in pursuit all the way.

Birds mob for a couple of reasons. One of them is educational: Youngsters learn whom to mob, and whom to fear, by watching others do it. But the more immediate purpose of mobbing is to drive the predator away — or, in the words of the eminent Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz, to make "the enemy's life a burden..." (2) (Emphasis mine.)

"...When Tanya goes away for a couple of weeks on business, Sapna falls for a dashing young Indian metrosexual named Rahul (Ashish Choudhary). Upon Tanya's return, Sapna is overjoyed to tell her best friend that she is in love - -an announcement followed by a percussive crash and a sudden close-up of Tanya's panicked face. Aside from Tanya's forthcoming jealous fits, the greatest tribulation that Sapna and Rahul's relationship must withstand is Sapna's confession one day at the beach (where most of the film seems to take place) that, one night some time ago, she and Tanya got drunk and ended up in bed. Well, not just in bed - -they sleep together all the time, as naturally as Shakespearean bedfellows - -but _doing funny things in bed._ The accompanying love-scene-in-flashback is a biomechanical marvel: With black satin sheets between them, the two women are depicted essentially engaged in a long, languorous bout of rubbing against each other - - with Tanya, of course, on top. And while there's lots of eye-rolling and moist lips, the camera doesn't record a single kiss between the two. (Indian censors don't take kindly to snogging, no matter the genders involved.) Rahul accepts Sapna's drunken indiscretion as a wild hair and takes her back into his arms. But the poor guy can't get those steamy, kinky, anatomically baffling girl-on-girl scenes out of his head. Which makes for some pretty sultry Tanya-Sapna dream sequences later on - -to show how tormented Rahul is, of course.

The movie plugs along like this with all the hormonal melodrama of a "Baywatch" episode until its final act, which veers off into the territory of werewolf and slasher flicks - - dark and windy nights, with full moons standing against black skies. Sapna finally figures out that her best friend is more than just the clingy type when Tanya starts stalking her around the room, huskily yelping, "We don't need men." But the monster really jumps out of the closet when Tanya confronts Rahul, declaring, "I'm a lesbian," as the camera spirals into her deranged face and the orchestra gives a menacing swell. Moments later, she is panting, with blood streaked across her face and a knife in her hand, and Rahul is lying unconscious (but not dead) amid the semi-translucent wreckage of his designer bachelor pad. The movie finally ends with Tanya charging blindly at the two frightened heterosexuals, inadvertently disposing of herself by crashing through a window. In a parting gesture, director Razdan supplies her with a very, very long fall. At my theater - - Delhi's Regal Cinema, where Nehru liked to watch movies - - the house lights came up before Tanya had even hit the ground..." (4)

"John Gravois, a staff reporter at the _Chroncile (sic) of Higher Education_ (and an editor of SixBillion.org, “An Online Magazine of Narrative Journalism”) has now written a quite poorly argued but insolent attack on de Soto’s work in Slate.

Much of Gravois’s case rests on the strategic use of dismissive phrases as “voilà!”; if you take the time to think about his critique, however, you can see what a poor job he’s done at undermining de Soto’s work.

Let’s start with Gravois’s admission that “Secure property rights probably are indeed, as he puts it, the ‘hidden architecture’ of modern economies—or something like that, anyway.” Well, are they, or are they not? Let’s compare countries with well defined and legally secure property rights with those without. Want to take the bet, Mr. Gravois?

Then let’s go on to his unsourced claim that,

Government studies out of de Soto’s native Peru suggest that titles don’t actually increase access to credit much after all. Out of the 200,313 Lima households awarded land titles in 1998 and 1999, only about 24 percent had gotten any kind of financing by 2002—and in that group, financing from private banks was almost nil. In other words, the only capital infusion—which was itself modest—was coming from the state.

A citation would have helped (but he’s only editor of an online magazine of narrative journalism, so maybe he doesn’t know about links and online sourcing and putting PDF files up and all that). But even so, it sounds like…maybe 24 percent would be better than, say, 0 percent. What’s the baseline? The paragraph makes no serious point that I can discern..." (6)

"Stop the presses! Hernando de Soto is harming the poor!

So argues John Gravois, a reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education, in a recent Slate article. Gravois sets out to debunk the man he considers "the patron saint of the global elite." He makes some good points—more on those later—but his charges against de Soto are off-base.

Gravois accuses de Soto of selling this elite—gathered at powwows like the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland—an economic snake oil panacea that has been "packaged and peddled all over the Third World." That snake oil is "one solution—individual property titles—for all kinds of poor people in all different kinds of poor places," by which "dead assets are turned—voila!—into live capital."

This is a gross distortion of de Soto's ideas. To say that something is necessary is not to say that it is also sufficient. Gravois implies that is what De Soto is doing. Gravois acknowledges that, "De Soto is right to point out the importance of legally sorting out who owns what in the Third World." But then he goes on to build up "titling-is-all-you-need" straw man around De Soto..." (7)