Perhaps The Two Are Related

Two items that have recently come out of the Maldives.

Item #1: Back in February, the president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, was forced out of office in what he maintains is a coup, at gunpoint. Nasheed had made bringing attention to the Maldives' impending doom from rising sea levels a cornerstone of his administration.

Today, his successor, Mohamed Waheed Hassan, who has denied anything about a coup, has gone on record as saying the Maldives will not in fact sink beneath the waves. Presumably, he has gotten the Indian Ocean to pinky-swear to this arrangement.

Item #2: The country is trying to get $250 million to build a floating golf course. (A course which merely through someone mentioning the idea seems to have gotten most of the media to completely forget about the sea level and start fantasizing about 5-irons.) Surely the presence of Phil Mickelson and Rory McIlroy will solve everything. And after all, nobody would build such a thing in a country they thought would soon cease to exist. That would just be crazy. Any sort of actual usefulness of such a project appears to stem from the fact that, by creating manmade islands, you can pile them as high above sea level as you need them to be. A usefulness that should be tempered by the fact that you'd be basically trading an entire sovereign nation for a nation that is literally nothing more than a golf course.