Friday linkage

• I'm over a month late to this but, for the record, the Council on Foreign Relations now has an Asia blog.
• Bangkok Pundit reads a New York Times article on the sad state of the Mekong River and asks whether the Mekong River Commission is doing its job. But as Milton Osborne argued on Tuesday, the MRC isn't equipped to save the Mekong.
• Japan's new government cuts funding for ballistic missile defence.
• When you order a coke in Egypt, why do you never get Coca Cola? Two theories on how Pepsi came to dominate this market, illustrating some broader themes about the Egyptian economy.
• Wired magazine reports on an Australian-made hovering drone aircraft that would look at home in Avatar.
• Jim Manzi is a smart critic of the prevailing wisdom on policy responses to climate change. This piece summarises his views well:

This is the central problem for advocates of rapid, aggressive emissions reductions. Despite the rhetoric, the best available estimate of the damage we face from unconstrained global warming is not “global destruction,” but is instead costs on the order of 3 percent of global GDP in a much wealthier world well over a hundred years from now. It should not, therefore, be surprising that formal efforts to weigh the near-term costs of emissions abatement against the long-term benefits from avoided global warming show few net benefits, even in theory.