When Cami Walker of Los Angeles learned three years ago that she had multiple sclerosis, her health and her spirits plummeted — until she got an unusual prescription from a holistic health educator.

Ms. Walker, now 36, scribbled the idea in her journal. And though she dismissed it at first, after weeks of fatigue, insomnia, pain and preoccupation with her symptoms, she decided to give it a try. The treatment and her experience with it are summed up in the title of her new book, “29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life” (Da Capo Press).

Ms. Walker gave a gift a day for 29 days — things like making supportive phone calls or saving a piece of chocolate cake for her husband. The giving didn’t cure her multiple sclerosis, of course. But it seems to have had a startling effect on her ability to cope with it. She is more mobile and less dependent on pain medication. The flare-ups that routinely sent her to the emergency room have stopped, and scans show that her disease has stopped progressing.

“My first reaction was that I thought it was an insane idea,” Ms. Walker said. “But it has given me a more positive outlook on life. It’s about stepping outside of your own story long enough to make a connection with someone else.”

And science appears to back her up. “There’s no question that it gives life a greater meaning when we make this kind of shift in the direction of others and get away from our own self-preoccupation and problems,” said Stephen G. Post, director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care and Bioethics at Stony Brook University on Long Island and a co-author of “Why Good Things Happen to Good People” (Broadway, 2007). “But it also seems to be the case that there is an underlying biology involved in all this.”

An array of studies have documented this effect. In one, a 2002 Boston College study, researchers found that patients with chronic pain fared better when they counseled other pain patients, experiencing less depression, intense pain and disability.

Another study, at the Buck Institute for Age Research in Novato, Calif., also found a strong benefit to volunteerism, and after controlling for a number of variables, showed that elderly people who volunteered for more than four hours a week were 44 percent less likely to die during the study period.

How giving can lead to mental and physical changes in health isn’t entirely clear, although studies suggest that altruism may be an antidote to stress. A Miami study of patients with H.I.V. found that those with strong altruistic characteristics had lower levels of stress hormones.

By contrast, being self-centered may be damaging to health. In one study of 150 heart patients, researchers found that people in the study who had more “self-references” (those who talked about themselves at length or used more first-person pronouns) had more severe heart disease and did worse on treadmill tests.

And like Ms. Walker, numerous people have reported feeling better after helping others. A 1988 Psychology Today article dubbed the effect the “helper’s high.” Analyzing two separate surveys of a total of 3,200 women who regularly volunteered, the article described a physical response from volunteering, similar to the results of vigorous exercise or meditation. The strongest effect was seen when the act of altruism involved direct contact with other people.

For Ms. Walker, a former creative director for an advertising agency, most of the gifts involved time, emotional support or small acts of kindness. After the first 29 days, she began a new cycle, a pattern she continues. Neither she nor Mbali Creazzo, the spiritual adviser who taught her about the month of giving, knows why it is 29 days rather than 30 or 31 — it may have something to do with the lunar cycle, which is 29.5 days.

Ms. Walker says she now approaches daily giving as a crucial part of her treatment, just like regular medication. She has also found new purpose in her experience and started a Web site, 29gifts.org, that encourages giving to improve health.

“Giving for 29 days is not suggested as a cure for anything,” Ms. Walker said. “It’s simply a coping mechanism and a simple tool you can use that can help you change your thinking about whatever is going on. If you change your thinking, you change your experience.”

Dr. Post, of Stony Brook, agreed. “To rid yourself of negative emotional states,” he said, “you need to push them aside with positive emotional states.

“And the simplest way to do that is to just go out and lend a helping hand to somebody.”

Tara Parker-Pope, New York Times

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/health/01well.html

Loneliness is transmittable, researchers say

Loneliness is like a disease — and what’s worse, it’s contagious.

Although it may sound counterintuitive, loneliness can spread from one person to another, according to research being released Tuesday that underscores the power of one person’s emotions to affect friends, family and neighbors.

The federally funded analysis of data collected from more than 4,000 people over 10 years found that lonely people increase the chances that someone they know will start to feel alone, and that the solitary feeling can spread one more degree of separation, causing a friend of a friend or even the sibling of a friend to feel desolate.

“Loneliness can be transmitted,” said John T. Cacioppo, a University of Chicago psychologist who led the study being published in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “Loneliness is not just the property of an individual. It can be transmitted across people — even people you don’t have direct contact with.”

Moreover, people who become lonely eventually move to the periphery of their social networks, becoming increasingly isolated, which can exacerbate their loneliness and affect social connectedness, the researchers found.

“No man is an island,” said Nicholas A. Christakis, a professor of medicine and medical sociology at Harvard Medical School who helped conduct the research. “Something so personal as a person’s emotions can have a collective existence and affect the vast fabric of humanity.”

The seemingly paradoxical finding is far more than a psychological curiosity. Loneliness has been linked to a variety of medical problems, including depression, sleep problems and generally poorer physical health. Identifying some of the causes could help reduce the emotion and improve health, experts said.

“Loneliness is more than just feeling bad,” said Chris Segrin, a professor of communication and health at the University of Arizona, who was not involved in the research. “It really does have consequences.”

But some researchers expressed skepticism about the findings, saying the study had the same shortcoming as the earlier work and could not necessarily rule out other explanations for the apparent association.

“It is unclear whether their statistical model will ‘find’ social contagion in every outcome they examine because of the limitations,” Jason M. Fletcher of Yale University wrote in an e-mail. He and a colleague conducted a similar analysis using data from a large federal survey to show that acne, headaches and even height could appear to be spread through social networks if not analyzed properly.

Christakis and Cacioppo defended their work, saying their statistical methods accounted for other explanations. And others hailed the work.

“I think it’s an incredible piece of research,” said Mark R. Leary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. “I don’t think we anticipated that something like loneliness would cluster like this in a population. It’s surprising.”

Although the study did not examine how loneliness spreads, Cacioppo said other research has provided clues. People who feel lonely tend to act in negative ways toward those they do have contact with, perpetuating the behavior and the emotion, he said.

“Let’s say for whatever reason — the loss of a spouse, a divorce — you get lonely. You then interact with other people in a more negative fashion. That puts them in a negative mood and makes them more likely to interact with other people in a negative fashion and they minimize their social ties and become lonely,” Cacioppo said.

For the study, Cacioppo teamed up with Christakis and James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego, who have published a series of papers and the book “Connected,” based on data originally collected by the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running government-funded project that has explored a host of health issues.

The researchers used information gathered from the participants over decades, including their friendships, identities of their neighbors, co-workers and family members, and information about their emotional state. Previous studies by Christakis and Fowler concluded that obesity, the likelihood of quitting smoking, and even happiness could spread from one person to another.

Similarly, the new analysis, involving 4,793 people who were interviewed every two years between 1991 and 2001, showed that having a social connection to a lonely person increased the chances of developing feelings of loneliness. A friend of a lonely person was 52 percent more likely to develop feelings of loneliness by the time of the next interview, the analysis showed. A friend of that person was 25 percent more likely, and a friend of a friend of a friend was 15 percent more likely.

The effect was most powerful for a friend, followed by a neighbor, and was much weaker on spouses and siblings, the researchers found. Loneliness spread more easily among women than men, perhaps because women were more likely to articulate emotions, Cacioppo said.

The researchers said the effect could not be the result of lonely people being more likely to associate with other lonely people because they showed the effect over time. “It’s not a birds-of-a-feather-flock-together effect,” Christakis said.

The findings underscore the importance of social networks, several experts said.

“For years, physicians and researchers thought about individuals as isolated creatures,” said Stanley Wasserman, who studies social networks at Indiana University. “We now know that the people you surround yourself with can have a tremendous impact on your well-being, whether it’s physical or psychological.”

The findings suggest that if you help “the people on the margins of the network, you help not only them but help stabilize the whole network ,” Christakis said.

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/30/AR2009113003846.html

LENDING A HAND In research, a child helps an adult find an object dropped through a hole in a box. The evolutionary roots of altruism are complex.

What is the essence of human nature? Flawed, say many theologians. Vicious and addicted to warfare, wrote Hobbes. Selfish and in need of considerable improvement, think many parents.

But biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human.

The somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness to help.

When infants 18 months old see an unrelated adult whose hands are full and who needs assistance opening a door or picking up a dropped clothespin, they will immediately help, Michael Tomasello writes in “Why We Cooperate,” a book published in October. Dr. Tomasello, a developmental psychologist, is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The helping behavior seems to be innate because it appears so early and before many parents start teaching children the rules of polite behavior.

“It’s probably safe to assume that they haven’t been explicitly and directly taught to do this,” said Elizabeth Spelke, a developmental psychologist at Harvard. “On the other hand, they’ve had lots of opportunities to experience acts of helping by others. I think the jury is out on the innateness question.”

But Dr. Tomasello finds the helping is not enhanced by rewards, suggesting that it is not influenced by training. It seems to occur across cultures that have different timetables for teaching social rules. And helping behavior can even be seen in infant chimpanzees under the right experimental conditions. For all these reasons, Dr. Tomasello concludes that helping is a natural inclination, not something imposed by parents or culture.

Infants will help with information, as well as in practical ways. From the age of 12 months they will point at objects that an adult pretends to have lost. Chimpanzees, by contrast, never point at things for each other, and when they point for people, it seems to be as a command to go fetch something rather than to share information.

For parents who may think their children somehow skipped the cooperative phase, Dr. Tomasello offers the reassuring advice that children are often more cooperative outside the home, which is why parents may be surprised to hear from a teacher or coach how nice their child is. “In families, the competitive element is in ascendancy,” he said.

As children grow older, they become more selective in their helpfulness. Starting around age 3, they will share more generously with a child who was previously nice to them. Another behavior that emerges at the same age is a sense of social norms. “Most social norms are about being nice to other people,” Dr. Tomasello said in an interview, “so children learn social norms because they want to be part of the group.”

Children not only feel they should obey these rules themselves, but also that they should make others in the group do the same. Even 3-year-olds are willing to enforce social norms. If they are shown how to play a game, and a puppet then joins in with its own idea of the rules, the children will object, some of them vociferously.

Where do they get this idea of group rules, the sense of “we who do it this way”? Dr. Tomasello believes children develop what he calls “shared intentionality,” a notion of what others expect to happen and hence a sense of a group “we.” It is from this shared intentionality that children derive their sense of norms and of expecting others to obey them.

Shared intentionality, in Dr. Tomasello’s view, is close to the essence of what distinguishes people from chimpanzees. A group of human children will use all kinds of words and gestures to form goals and coordinate activities, but young chimps seem to have little interest in what may be their companions’ minds.

If children are naturally helpful and sociable, what system of child-rearing best takes advantage of this surprising propensity? Dr. Tomasello says that the approach known as inductive parenting works best because it reinforces the child’s natural propensity to cooperate with others. Inductive parenting is simply communicating with children about the effect of their actions on others and emphasizing the logic of social cooperation.

“Children are altruistic by nature,” he writes, and though they are also naturally selfish, all parents need do is try to tip the balance toward social behavior.

The shared intentionality lies at the basis of human society, Dr. Tomasello argues. From it flow ideas of norms, of punishing those who violate the norms and of shame and guilt for punishing oneself. Shared intentionality evolved very early in the human lineage, he believes, and its probable purpose was for cooperation in gathering food. Anthropologists report that when men cooperate in hunting, they can take down large game, which single hunters generally cannot do. Chimpanzees gather to hunt colobus monkeys, but Dr. Tomasello argues this is far less of a cooperative endeavor because the participants act on an ad hoc basis and do not really share their catch.

An interesting bodily reflection of humans’ shared intentionality is the sclera, or whites, of the eyes. All 200 or so species of primates have dark eyes and a barely visible sclera. All, that is, except humans, whose sclera is three times as large, a feature that makes it much easier to follow the direction of someone else’s gaze. Chimps will follow a person’s gaze, but by looking at his head, even if his eyes are closed. Babies follow a person’s eyes, even if the experimenter keeps his head still.

Advertising what one is looking at could be a risk. Dr. Tomasello argues that the behavior evolved “in cooperative social groups in which monitoring one another’s focus was to everyone’s benefit in completing joint tasks.”

This could have happened at some point early in human evolution, when in order to survive, people were forced to cooperate in hunting game or gathering fruit. The path to obligatory cooperation — one that other primates did not take — led to social rules and their enforcement, to human altruism and to language.

“Humans putting their heads together in shared cooperative activities are thus the originators of human culture,” Dr. Tomasello writes.

A similar conclusion has been reached independently by Hillard S. Kaplan, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico. Modern humans have lived for most of their existence as hunter gatherers, so much of human nature has presumably been shaped for survival in such conditions. From study of existing hunter gatherer peoples, Dr. Kaplan has found evidence of cooperation woven into many levels of human activity.

The division of labor between men and women — men gather 68 percent of the calories in foraging societies — requires cooperation between the sexes. Young people in these societies consume more than they produce until age 20, which in turn requires cooperation between the generations. This long period of dependency was needed to develop the special skills required for the hunter gatherer way of life.

The structure of early human societies, including their “high levels of cooperation between kin and nonkin,” was thus an adaptation to the “specialized foraging niche” of food resources that were too difficult for other primates to capture, Dr. Kaplan and colleagues wrote recently in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. We evolved to be nice to each other, in other words, because there was no alternative.

Much the same conclusion is reached by Frans de Waal in another book published in October, “The Age of Empathy.” Dr. de Waal, a primatologist, has long studied the cooperative side of primate behavior and believes that aggression, which he has also studied, is often overrated as a human motivation.

“We’re preprogrammed to reach out,” Dr. de Waal writes. “Empathy is an automated response over which we have limited control.” The only people emotionally immune to another’s situation, he notes, are psychopaths.

Indeed, it is in our biological nature, not our political institutions, that we should put our trust, in his view. Our empathy is innate and cannot be changed or long suppressed. “In fact,” Dr. de Waal writes, “I’d argue that biology constitutes our greatest hope. One can only shudder at the thought that the humaneness of our societies would depend on the whims of politics, culture or religion.”

The basic sociability of human nature does not mean, of course, that people are nice to each other all the time. Social structure requires that things be done to maintain it, some of which involve negative attitudes toward others. The instinct for enforcing norms is powerful, as is the instinct for fairness. Experiments have shown that people will reject unfair distributions of money even it means they receive nothing.

“Humans clearly evolved the ability to detect inequities, control immediate desires, foresee the virtues of norm following and gain the personal, emotional rewards that come from seeing another punished,” write three Harvard biologists, Marc Hauser, Katherine McAuliffe and Peter R. Blake, in reviewing their experiments with tamarin monkeys and young children.

If people do bad things to others in their group, they can behave even worse to those outside it. Indeed the human capacity for cooperation “seems to have evolved mainly for interactions within the local group,” Dr. Tomasello writes.

Sociality, the binding together of members of a group, is the first requirement of defense, since without it people will not put the group’s interests ahead of their own or be willing to sacrifice their lives in battle. Lawrence H. Keeley, an anthropologist who has traced aggression among early peoples, writes in his book “War Before Civilization” that, “Warfare is ultimately not a denial of the human capacity for cooperation, but merely the most destructive expression of it.”

The roots of human cooperation may lie in human aggression. We are selfish by nature, yet also follow rules requiring us to be nice to others.

“That’s why we have moral dilemmas,” Dr. Tomasello said, “because we are both selfish and altruistic at the same time.”

Nicholas Wade, New York Times

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Full article and photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01human.html

Synthetic biology

A genetically engineered bacterium makes a greener plastic

Now biodegradable

ONE of the most promising alternatives to plastics made from oil is polylactic acid (PLA). It is biodegradable, safe enough to be used as food packaging, can be processed like existing thermoplastics into coloured or transparent material and can be manufactured from renewable resources such as maize and sugarcane. Although PLA has been around for decades, it is only in recent years that advances in production techniques, particularly by Cargill, a big American agricultural group, have made it feasible to produce the material commercially. Now a group of researchers led by Lee Sang-yup of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology say they have come up with an even better way to make PLA, using the emerging science of synthetic biology.

At the moment PLA is usually made in two stages. First, a source of starch or sugar, which could be an agricultural by-product, is fermented to produce lactic acid—the same substance made by the body during exercise, only in this case it comes from the bacteria exercising themselves in the fermentation process. In the second stage, lactic-acid molecules are linked into long chains, or polymers, in chemical-reaction vessels, to produce PLA. What Dr Lee and his colleagues have succeeded in doing, as they report in Biotechnology and Bioengineering, is to produce PLA directly, in a one-stage process, in bacteria. No chemical “post processing” is required.

Their bacterial platform is E. coli, the workhorse species of microbial genetics. But their version has had genes from several other bacteria spliced into it. One comes from a bug called Clostridium propionicum, another from a species of Pseudomonas, and two more from Cupriavidus necator. Some of these genes, moreover, have been souped up, because the “wild” versions did not work well enough. The result is a set of synthetic metabolic pathways—ones that do not exist in nature—which turn the polymer out in satisfyingly large quantities.

If the process can be commercialised, the researchers believe it could greatly reduce the cost of making products from PLA. Besides food and drink packaging, PLA is already used to make some other products, such as medical devices. It also has the potential to be used to make biodegradable clothing, furnishings and hygiene products such as nappies— objects which now end up mouldering for decades in rubbish dumps. Moreover, Dr Lee thinks that with further research, genetically engineered bacteria might be capable of making other sorts of plastics and polyesters from renewable resources. Another reason, then, to wonder how much longer the Age of Oil will last.

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Full article and photo: http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14960045&source=hptextfeature

Republican governors

Life is looking rather sunny for the opposition party

THE governors milled around and chatted onstage. Rick Perry, of Texas, muttered to one of his peers, doubtless about the many successes his state has notched up. There were more than a dozen of them (out of a total of 22) in attendance at the annual meeting of the Republican Governors Association, held on November 18th-20th in a rustic-themed resort just outside Austin. Only two were women (Jan Brewer of Arizona and Linda Lingle of Hawaii), but Haley Barbour of Mississippi, the current chairman of the RGA, made sure to propel them close to the podium.

The night before, in Washington, DC, Senate Democrats had presented their version of the health-care reform bill. The Republican governors happily seized on the subject. Tim Pawlenty, of Minnesota, called for a focus on cost containment. Bobby Jindal, of Louisiana, rattled off ten policy proposals for a better approach to reform. Mike Rounds, of South Dakota, made the bluntest speech. He said that his small state currently spends $265m a year for its share of Medicaid, which provides health care for the poor, and that if the House version of the bill passed tomorrow it would go up by $33m. “I can’t afford that,” he concluded.

This was a different and more serious side of the Republicans than one finds at tax-protesting “tea parties”, on talk radio, or going rogue on a book tour. Some of the Republicans distanced themselves from the most vicious flank of the party. “We need to treat the president respectfully,” said Mr Barbour. People still like Barack Obama, he said; it would be better to focus on his policies.

The governors held an upbeat panel on the outlook for next year’s mid-term elections. There were only two gubernatorial contests in the off-year of 2009, in New Jersey and Virginia, and they were won by Republicans Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell, respectively. The party is especially enamoured of Mr McDonnell, who campaigned on economic issues—“Bob’s for jobs”—and carried independent voters by a big margin. Next year there will be gubernatorial elections in 37 states.

Nineteen of those states are currently held by Democrats, and 18 by Republicans. It is early days, but the Republicans are confident of solid gains. Jennifer Duffy of the Cook Political Report, a non-partisan newsletter, said that at this point none of the states with Republican governors are tilting toward the Democrats, though there are ten that the newsletter classes as toss-ups. But several states that now have a Democratic governor, including Oklahoma, Tennessee and Kansas, are designated “leaning” or “likely” Republican.

The Republicans have more ambitious ideas for a couple of rustbelt swing states. In Pennsylvania, the once-popular Democratic incumbent, Ed Rendell, is leaving because of term-limits. In Ohio, Ted Strickland, a fairly conservative Democrat, has found that his feisty Republican challenger, John Kasich, has caught up with him in recent polls, which is probably thanks to worries about the economy.

The Republicans have some big states to defend, including California, where Arnold Schwarzenegger is stepping down because of term-limits and has a 28% approval rating: Cook has that race down as a toss-up. And they have some potentially nasty primaries ahead. One of those will be in Texas, although Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Mr Perry’s opponent, recently announced plans to stay in Washington until the primary in March, which suggests a slackening of the effort. But the omens look good. And after 2010’s races are over, one of these lucky governors, or perhaps an ex-governor, will probably be picked to take on Mr Obama in 2012.

The Economist

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Full article and photo: http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14974299&source=hptextfeature

After Dubai

The global consequences of Dubai’s debt problems

FOR years, Dubai strove to capture the imagination of the financial world, projecting its young financial centre as a “global gateway” for capital. Last week it succeeded in grabbing attention. Its announcement that it would delay repayment of the debts of Dubai World, a vast government-owned conglomerate, swept through global markets like one of the blinding sandstorms that occasionally afflict the emirate, obscuring the gleam of its skyscrapers.

Like those storms, Dubai’s announcement was so damaging because it reduced visibility. Investors had assumed that the Dubai government was willing to rescue the indebted conglomerates it sponsors, and that Abu Dhabi, its well-heeled neighbouring emirate, was willing, in turn, to rescue Dubai. In particular, they had looked forward to the full and timely repayment of a $3.5 billion Islamic bond issued by Nakheel, a Dubai World subsidiary, on December 14th.

Dubai’s failure re-awakened a number of dormant fears in investors. Some worried about banks that had lent heavily to the region. Others wondered if Dubai was carrying far more than the $80 billion or so in debt that it has owned up to. The announcement reminded investors that tacit sovereign guarantees may be worthless. Earlier in November, for example, Ukraine’s state railway firm, Ukrzaliznytsya, failed to repay part of a syndicated loan, and its energy firm, Naftogaz, restructured its debt.

More fundamentally, Dubai’s wobble raised the spectre of a sovereign default. Dubai’s government is not technically on the hook for Nakheel’s debts. But the government’s hesitation in saving its national champions nonetheless demonstrates its fiscal limits.

Elsewhere, governments have emerged from the crisis burdened by debt. Both Greece and Ireland are carrying heavy public liabilities denominated in a currency (the euro) that they cannot print. Doomsayers worry that the world has escaped from the financial frying pan into a fiscal fire.

These wider fears are easy to exaggerate. Despite its self-aggrandisement, Dubai is not yet important enough to bring down the global financial system. Its troubles moved markets last week partly because so many traders were on holiday. Other investors were looking for cues to sell after the long rally in markets since the spring. By Monday November 30th, the principal stock indices were shaking off the dust and venturing upwards again.

But the damage Dubai has done to itself is no passing storm. An emirate that has spent so much money and hired so many flaks to cultivate its image and inspire confidence saw much of that work undone in a single 200-word statement announcing the debt standstill.

Had it announced the restructuring a few months earlier, with the ground properly laid, investors might have taken it in their stride. Those who lent to Dubai World at a premium can have no complaints if the risks for which they were compensated turn out to be real. And a standstill may buy time for the deeper restructuring that Dubai World undoubtedly needs. It is better to weed out the bad businesses within the group rather than cross-subsidise them to save face.

But Dubai had led investors to expect that publicly traded instruments, such as sukuk, or Islamic bonds, would be honoured. And the government offered no satisfactory explanation for its sudden change of stance. Thus even as markets slumped, political speculation mounted. A week earlier, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, Dubai’s ruler, had sidelined three of the men who ran “Dubai Inc” in the boom years. Perhaps, then, the standstill was the result either of a power struggle within the ruling circles of Dubai, or between Dubai and its neighbour, Abu Dhabi.

Abu Dhabi’s conservative rulers have mixed feelings about their brash, go-getting neighbour. They may have asked why they should rescue Dubai from the consequences of its own prodigality. Or why they should resuscitate bankrupt Dubai firms that will compete with Abu Dhabi’s own national champions? At the weekend, a senior Abu Dhabi official told Reuters that it would “pick and choose” which of Dubai’s entities to help.

But many investors in Abu Dhabi bought into the Dubai boom. They will lose money if the bust turns into a protracted slump. And of the banks most exposed to Dubai, several have headquarters in Abu Dhabi. Thus the central bank of the United Arab Emirates has made it clear that it will provide liquidity to any bank, foreign or domestic, operating in the United Arab Emirates. Dubai is not yet a gateway to the financial world. But it can open the door to all sorts of trouble in its neighbourhood.

The Economist

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Full article and photo: http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15004072&source=features_box3

Kosovo and Serbia

Kosovo’s independence from Serbia is scrutinised in the international court

SAY “Battle of Kosovo” and those who live in the Balkans will instantly recall Serbia’s defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1389. So it is clearly no accident that Serbia’s leaders have taken to talking about a new “diplomatic” battle of Kosovo. That fight moved to the UN’s International Court of Justice in The Hague on Tuesday December 1st, which has begun hearing submissions on whether Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia in February 2008 was legal or not.

What the 15 judges have to say will be of keen interest from Catalonia to Tibet and indeed wherever the argument about a people’s right to self-determination appears to clash with a state’s right to preserve its territorial integrity.

Kosovo has a population of over 2m people. The overwhelming majority are ethnic Albanians. Unlike the six republics of the old Yugoslavia which became states, Kosovo was a province of Serbia but it had many of the attributes of a republic, including an assembly, a government and a seat on Yugoslavia’s rotating presidency.

After the Kosovo war, which culminated in NATO’s 11-week bombing of Serbia in 1999, the Serbian administration in Kosovo was replaced by a UN body, which in turn gradually gave way to Kosovo’s own elected institutions. Serbia argues that Kosovo’s assembly did not have the right to declare independence and that the UN’s representative in Kosovo was legally bound to nullify the declaration. The Kosovars answer that this was a constitutional issue and not an international legal matter and besides they had as much right to declare independence as the other parts of Yugoslavia.

To date 63 countries have recognised Kosovo, including America and 22 of the 27 EU states. But China, Russia and many other important countries have not—including Spain, which will hold the EU’s presidency from January. As well as Serbia and Kosovo, 29 countries will give their views in court. After that the judges will deliver a non-binding advisory opinion at some point in the next 12 months.

International law on self-determination and secession is unclear. Most Western countries recognise Kosovo but not Abkhazia or South Ossetia which have broken away from Georgia. However Russia and Venezuela, who will both argue for Serbia at the ICJ, have recognised the two breakaway regions. If the judges could steel themselves to offer clarity on the issue that would be widely welcomed.

In fact their opinion on Kosovo’s status is likely to be ambiguous. But, if it is a draw, argues Remzi Lani, a commentator from Albania, then that will constitute “a defeat for Serbia”, because slowly but surely, countries will continue to recognise Kosovo. However, opposition from Russia and China means Kosovo will never be allowed to join the UN or any other body where they have the power to prevent it.

Even if the court finds in favour of Serbia it is unlikely to make much difference as it is inconceivable that Serbia could ever rule Kosovo again. But that may not be the point at issue here. What Serbia may offer Kosovo in the future is an exchange of the Serb-inhabited north of Kosovo for an Albanian-inhabited bulge into Serbia called the Presevo Valley.

It is noteworthy that the opening of the ICJ case is not the main news in either Kosovo or Serbia. Serbia is celebrating a decision confirmed on Monday to abolish visas for the EU’s Schengen countries for Serbs, Macedonians and Montenegrins. A cartoon in one paper shows Serbia’s president, Boris Tadic, cheerfully carting off a man-sized carrot, a gift from the EU, on his shoulders.

Kosovars have nothing to celebrate. Their news is full of the story of the arrest by the EU’s police mission in the country of a man who claims to have taken part in some 17 murders, attempted murders or beatings on behalf of a murky intelligence service which was previously linked with the PDK, the party of Hashim Thaci, the prime minister. The victims were apparently members of another party, now in coalition with Mr Thaci. The PDK Tdeny the accusations, saying they are politically motivated smears. Mr Thaci says that whoever is responsible must be brought to justice. Although nothing to do with the case before the ICJ such allegations, true or not, do not help Kosovo’s cause.

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Full article and photos: http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15006108&source=features_box2

First, the good news: President Obama will not be wearing a flight suit when he addresses the cadets at West Point on Tuesday night. Nor will he wear a bomber jacket with the presidential seal on the chest, nor even, the White House promises, a windbreaker with the word ARMY in big letters.

“You can count on no military garb,” assures Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director.

Mission Accomplished? Not entirely.

One of the common complaints of George W. Bush’s presidency was his tendency to politicize the military and turn troops into props. The man seemed to make more appearances before military audiences than Bob Hope did. But now Obama is antagonizing many in his party with an expected announcement that he is sending more troops to Afghanistan, and, to rub it in, he’s making the announcement at one of Bush’s favorite military locations: the U.S. Military Academy at West Point — the very birthplace, seven years ago, of the Bush Doctrine.

Obama’s fondness for audiences in uniform is not yet in the same category as his predecessor’s. Beyond the infamous “Top Gun” landing aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, and the Thanksgiving turkey he served to troops in Iraq, Bush routinely used military-themed backdrops for his speeches: fighter jets, camouflage nets, American flags, military bands and, best of all, thousands of troops applauding or shouting “Hoo-ah” at the right moments.

Still, Obama’s flirtation with military imagery should be of concern to his allies on the left, who are already unhappy with the hawkish direction his Afghanistan policy has taken. Already in his young presidency, the Nobel Peace Prize winner has addressed the troops at Osan Air Base in South Korea, Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska, Naval Air Station Jacksonville in Florida, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis and Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. (For different purposes, he also spoke at the memorial for shooting victims at Fort Hood and welcomed home the remains of troops at Dover Air Force Base.) The vice president and the first lady, in turn, have made the rounds at half a dozen other facilities.

Presidential addresses to the uniformed military were relatively rare before Bush. A tally by George Mason University found that in past years, presidents sometimes spoke to military groups only once (Bill Clinton in 1993, Richard Nixon in 1969), twice (Gerald Ford in 1974) or not at all (Ronald Reagan in 1985). But Bush gave “far more” such speeches, including 13 in 2005 alone.

The proliferation began in 2002, when Bush went to West Point for a June 1 speech to the cadets detailing the doctrine of preemptive war. Had Sarah Palin watched that speech, she would have avoided four of the most damaging words of the 2008 presidential campaign, uttered when ABC News’s Charlie Gibson asked whether she agreed with the Bush Doctrine: “In what sense, Charlie?”

In the last days of his presidency, Bush returned to West Point for another speech, reminding everybody about his forgotten doctrine. By then, he had delivered dozens of speeches before crowds of soldiers and sailors under his command. At Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, he wore a bomber jacket and used Air Force One as his backdrop. At MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, he appeared in a hangar with fighter jets, flags, military banners and troops. Then, of course, came the aircraft carrier landing on an S-3B Viking, for which Bush trained in the White House swimming pool, and the premature “Mission Accomplished” banner.

On and on went the speeches to the troops: Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the Army War College, National Defense University, Fort Hood, Fort Bragg, the Air Force Academy. Even his second inauguration, in 2005, served as a vehicle for Bush to surround himself with all things military. As the televised speeches to military audiences became more frequent, so did the complaints of the opposition, which questioned the propriety of Bush attacking Democrats in front of the troops, who are not allowed to participate in political events while in uniform.

Predictably, the cry was picked up by the right after Obama took office and continued the practice of speeches to the troops. Two weeks ago, Fox News’s Glenn Beck played an image of Obama speaking in front of uniformed troops and complained: “I’m sick of it, especially when it comes to the soldiers. They are not props.”

But they are required to be loyal, and when their commander in chief talks, whether it’s Bush or Obama, they salute. Or applaud. Or yell “Hoo-ah.” And on Tuesday night, this military pageantry will only compound the sense on the left that Obama is not the man they thought he was.

In an open letter to Obama on his Web site Monday, liberal activist Michael Moore wrote that by increasing troops in Afghanistan, “you will do the worst possible thing you could do — destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you.”

“With just one speech tomorrow night,” Moore continued, “you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they’ve always heard is true — that all politicians are alike.”

The bomber jacket is definitely out for Tuesday night’s speech. But with this kind of hostility from Obama’s own supporters, maybe the White House should consider dressing him in camouflage?

Dana Milbank, Washington Post

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/30/AR2009113003284.html

Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev with President Obama in Singapore last month.

It was Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who observed that relations between two actors really involve six “persons”: each actor’s self-image, each actor’s image of the other and, finally, what each actor actually is. Under this rubric, the success of President Obama’s “reset” policy with Russia will depend not only on getting U.S. actions toward Moscow right but also on getting insight into the way the Kremlin views the United States and its new president.

Unlike many of its critics, the new Obama administration is not inclined to view Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a paperback edition of the Soviet Union. Russia today is not a democratic state, but it is not an ideology-driven tyranny, either. Russians are wealthier and enjoy more freedoms than they have at any other period in their history. Russian elites are no longer in the business of destroying capitalism — they are in the business of enjoying it. The majority of Russians favor democracy, but most are also deeply suspicious of America’s desire to bring democracy to their country. So any hopes that American pressure can bring democratic change in Russia are illusory.

Obama is also right to believe that Russia is more of a declining power than an insurgent power and that its recent revisionism — manifested last August during its war with Georgia — is better understood as evidence of the Kremlin’s insecurity rather than its imperial designs. In the aftermath of the global economic crisis, the Kremlin is terrified by Russia’s weakness and its irrelevance in the post-Cold War era. Russian officials are desperate to preserve the country’s “great power” status at a time of major geopolitical shifts. As Putin said in 2008, “Russia will either be a great power, or it will not be at all.”

So, Obama has good reasons to believe that a policy based on pragmatism and respect can win over Moscow. For the Kremlin, it is more feasible to preserve its great-power status in cooperation with the United States than in confrontation. The United States and Russia probably do not have common aims and dreams, but they have common worries: Both Washington and Moscow are concerned about the rise of China and are threatened by the rise of radical Islam. (Russia is the European country with the largest Muslim minority and is therefore most vulnerable to Islamic radicalism.) Despite its numerous weaknesses, Russia also possesses strategic potential that could be critical to Washington’s effort to rebalance the world order.

Where this White House may be wrong is in its understanding of Russia’s view of American power and its future role in the world. There are reasons to believe that President Dmitry Medvedev has decided to bet on Obama’s success, but Russia is not only, or even primarily, Medvedev. Russian foreign policy is profoundly shaped by the Soviet Union’s collapse and its aftermath. Russian elites tend to think about the United States today through direct analogies with the Soviet experience of the late 1980s. Many in Russia are ready to read America’s difficulties in Afghanistan as a repetition of the failure of Soviet occupation of that country and to judge the political consequences of the decline of Wall Street as similar to the effect the fall of the Berlin Wall had on Soviet global influence.

For example, Igor Panarin, a professor at Moscow’s Diplomatic Academy, has gone so far as to predict the disintegration of the United States in the next decade. His view is extreme but symptomatic of such mind-sets. In an article in “Russia in Global Affairs,” Alexander Kramarenko, the head of the policy planning department of Russia’s Foreign Ministry, wrote that “the current crisis in the U.S. falls in the same category as the breakup of the Soviet Union.” Russians clearly perceive America’s global influence as being in irreversible decline and American society shattered by major political, economic and ideological crises.

Obama himself is largely viewed in Russia as the American Mikhail Gorbachev, but Russians are less impressed than other Europeans have been with Obama’s brilliance and rock-star popularity. They remember the Gorbi-mania that conquered the globe at the moment the Soviet Union was about to crumble. Russians are tempted to view Obama’s global reformism and his progressive agenda as an expression of American weakness and not as an expression of America’s regained strength and legitimacy.

What does all this mean for the “reset” policy? First, it means that Russians will not be in a hurry to respond to the positive signals coming from Washington, and any perception of Washington weakness will diminish Moscow’s willingness to cooperate even in areas of common interest and common concern. It is not Obama’s deference but his strength that can persuade the Kremlin to cooperate with Washington. Simply put, to persuade Russians to join him, Obama must first demonstrate that he does not need them. He needs a clear victory, whether against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Iran’s nuclear ambition or Beijing’s habit of devaluing its currency. Obama must show strength for the “reset” policy to succeed.

Ivan Krastev is chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, and a founding member of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

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Full article and photo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/30/AR2009113003156_pf.html

How to escalate in Afghanistan without adding to the national debt

IF PRESIDENT Obama proposes a troop increase for Afghanistan, one of the first objections raised will be that of cost. Liberal Democrats not usually known as deficit hawks have been decrying any escalation of the war as unaffordable. Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.) recently claimed that the Afghan war would cost as much over the next decade as the House’s health-care bill — about $900 billion — and proposed paying for it with an income tax surcharge. “Ain’t going to be no money for nothing if we pour it all into Afghanistan,” the House defense appropriations chair told CNN.

We’re ready to support a tax increase to pay for the war. But first it’s worth correcting Mr. Obey’s distortions. So far $60 billion is budgeted for Afghanistan in the next year. Mr. Obama will probably propose sending 30,000 more troops, and White House officials have been estimating that every 1,000 will cost $1 billion. But the Pentagon says the price will be half that much and that any troop escalation will occur gradually over the next year and a half.

So the actual cost of the troop increase next year will almost certainly be less than the $30 billion reduction in spending that the administration expects this year in Iraq because of planned troop withdrawals. Even if all the fresh forces remain in Afghanistan for several years, by 2012 total war spending would be half the $180 billion of 2008. Mr. Obey’s comparison to health care notwithstanding, no one is projecting a decade of unreduced Afghanistan costs; and entitlement programs, unlike war costs, never disappear.

But let’s accept that Mr. Obey and other congressional leaders are serious about paying for the war. An income tax surcharge hardly seems like the right approach, since the House already has voted to tax high incomes to pay for health care, and raising the income taxes of middle-class families makes little sense when the nation is struggling to recover from a recession. But Congress could adopt the measure it took in 1940 to help pay for World War II, and again in 1951, when money was needed for the Korean War: an increase in the gasoline tax.

As we have pointed out before, the federal gas tax of 18.4 cents a gallon has not been raised since 1993 and is long overdue for an increase. Two federal commissions have proposed one in the past couple of years. In January the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission said its recommended hike of 10 cents a gallon for gasoline and 15 cents for diesel would raise $20 billion a year.

A 40-cent increase over five years, proposed by a second federal commission, would cover most or all of the war’s costs and still leave gasoline prices well short of where they were in the summer of 2008. Those months showed that higher prices could do much to reduce U.S. carbon emissions — another national imperative. While most proponents of a higher gasoline tax want to use the money for highway infrastructure, or refund it to taxpayers, Congress could shift funding to those purposes once the U.S. mission in Afghanistan begins to wind down.

We don’t expect a rush to embrace this idea: So far proponents of paying for the war in Afghanistan heavily overlap with those who want to end it. But if Mr. Obey — or Mr. Obama — believes that wars should be governed by the pay-as-you-go principle, a means to cover this one is readily available.

Editorial, Washington Post

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/30/AR2009113003665.html

Blogger Andrew Sullivan charged Sunday that, whereas in December of last year I advocated a gasoline tax, in my “latest column” on climate change, “the gas tax idea is missing.”

“Why?” asks Sullivan. Because: “In the end, the conservative intelligentsia is much more invested in obstructing and thereby neutering Obama and the Democrats than in solving any actual problems in front of us. It’s a game for them, and they play it with impunity.”

He calls this “The Positioning Of Charles Krauthammer,” a demonstration of rank partisanship and bad faith.

It is quite a charge: This “latest column” proves that I’ve positioned my views on a gasoline tax for reasons cynically partisan, mindlessly anti-Obama, interested only in the game of power and not in the welfare of the country. In other words, so blinded by selfishness as to be unpatriotic.

However, there’s a slight problem with Sullivan’s analysis. If you click on the column of mine that he cites, which he calls my “latest” and which betrays my anti-Obama fanaticism, you will find that it begins with the following headline:

Carbon Chastity
The First Commandment of the Church of the Environment
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 30, 2008

Note the date: May 30, 2008. A year and a half ago. At the time, George Bush was president. Barack Obama hadn’t even won the Democratic nomination, let alone become president of the United States. The column has absolutely nothing to do with Barack Obama.

Sullivan’s entire ad hominem conclusion — that my views are animated by nothing but the basest, most corrupt partisan motives — turned out to be a complete invention based on his inability to read dates.

And, characteristically, on total ignorance of the subject he is writing about — in this case, my views on a gasoline tax. I’ve been an advocate of a tax on oil not since December 2008 but since 1983 (“The Oil Bust Panic,” The New Republic, February 21, 1983). I have not changed my position in the intervening 26 years. I’ve criticized every administration, Republican and Democratic, for not taxing petroleum, beginning with the Reagan administration, which I repeatedly criticized for the idiocy of trying to persuade the Saudis to curtail production and raise the world price rather than impose some kind of oil tax on our own.

I’ve advocated a petroleum tax at least 20 times over the years. (The only thing I have changed is the form the levy should take: from an oil import fee to the more simply administered and refunded gasoline tax.) I have never changed my views.

Sullivan’s conclusion that I advocated a gas tax in December ’08 and then dropped it this year because I’m only interested in neutering Obama shows that he knows absolutely nothing about my views. The column in question — the one Sullivan thinks I wrote just now, but in fact was published in May 2008 — is not “positioning.” Bush was president, Obama not even an issue. The gas tax wasn’t mentioned because it’s not particularly relevant to the subject I was addressing — the ideological rigidity of climate-change activism. And because my views on the gas tax had been repeated so many times, writing about it again would have been superfluous.

Nine months later (March 5, 2009), I gave a public presentation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies to a group of around 30 economists and energy analysts on my proposed “Net-Zero” gas tax. I’m no historian, but that appears to have occurred during the Obama presidency.

Sullivan’s post merits reading as the quintessential Sullivan, leaping from nonexistent fact to blanket ad hominem without even a pause for a reality check.

Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post

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Full article: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2009/11/the_quintessential_andrew_sull.html

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See also:

The Positioning Of Charles Krauthammer

His latest column, fanning the flames of climate change denialists, nonetheless marks out a position different from them:

I’m a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can’t be very good to pump lots of CO2into the atmosphere but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.

Given the extreme difficulties of projecting climate into the distant future, Krauthammer’s skepticism is indeed worth something. (I share Jim Manzi’s view of the recent email kerfuffle.) And in the recent past, Krauthammer has advocated something the Dish strongly supports: a clear and simple gas tax offset by a payroll tax cut for economic, climate and national security reasons. His excellent piece on the subject can be read here. It concludes in advocating for a gas tax of around $1.25 or more to keep gas prices around $3. At the time of his essay, gas was at a rare low of around $1.65. Now it’s back up to around $2.65. But surely a gas tax remains a good idea, even if it is less than might have been achievable last December. We could start with a 50 cent hike and add 50 cents a year. That and that alone wil prompt Americans to adjust their habits. Less than a year ago, Krauthammer argued that a big gas tax hike was

a once in a generation opportunity that we cannot afford to miss.

And yet, for some reason, the gas tax idea is missing from his current column. Why?

Here are his current proposals:

First, more research — untainted and reliable — to determine (a) whether the carbon footprint of man is or is not lost among the massive natural forces (from sunspot activity to ocean currents) that affect climate, and (b) if the human effect is indeed significant, whether the planetary climate system has the homeostatic mechanisms (like the feedback loops in the human body, for example) with which to compensate.

Second, reduce our carbon footprint in the interim by doing the doable, rather than the economically ruinous and socially destructive. The most obvious step is a major move to nuclear power, which to the atmosphere is the cleanest of the clean.

I know of no one opposing more research on either side of the debate, although the overwhelming conclusion of almost all the research is that man-made CO2 is indeed heating the planet dramatically and in a manner in which feedback loops, far from “compensating”, actually intensify the effects of warming beyond even the direst projections. Nuclear power is indeed one part of the solution. But leaving no mechanism, even a low and slowly rising carbon tax, to combat CO2 strikes me as a shift from last December. Again one asks: why?

In the end, the conservative intelligentsia is much more invested in obstructing and thereby neutering Obama and the Democrats than in solving any actual problems in front of us. It’s a game for them, and they play it with impunity.

Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic

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Full article: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/11/the-positioning-of-charles-krauthammer.html

FOR those of us with long memories, crashing a White House party, as a Virginia couple did when they sneaked into a state dinner last week, is nothing new. Consider something that happened nearly 71 years ago, on New Year’s Eve.

That night, Dec. 31, 1938, my kid brother, Robert, and I were invited to join our parents and a small gathering of Roosevelts and friends upstairs in the White House family quarters. My father, Henry Morgenthau Jr., was secretary of the Treasury, a job that included supervision of the Secret Service. He took his responsibility for safeguarding President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s life very seriously. A few weeks before his first inaugural, the president had narrowly escaped an assassin’s bullet, which killed Mayor Anton J. Cermak of Chicago, who was sitting next to him in an open touring car.

Around 11 p.m., escorting Eleanor Flood and young Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady’s niece, Robert and I headed to the White House after a night on the town to join our parents to see in the new year. When the four of us arrived at the North Portico, we were questioned by a Secret Service guard much more closely than I had recalled on other occasions. After we were escorted upstairs, my father came to greet us in a state of high agitation.

Earlier that night, a 16-year-old high school student named Joe Measell; his date, Beatrice White; and his 14-year-old brother, Donald, had driven up to the White House. Their friends had dared them to get the autographs of the president and Eleanor Roosevelt. As Measell recounted in a newspaper article published in the following days, “We just walked right up to the main door of the White House and I told the policeman there we wanted to see the president.”

Because my father had instructed the Secret Service detail on duty to expect my brother and me with our dates, Measell was mistaken for a Morgenthau son. So, as Measell described it, he and his date “were ushered right in, and someone took our coats and led us upstairs.”

He continued: “I waited outside the room where Mr. Roosevelt and his guests were watching a movie. When the lights went on, I walked in and said to the president, ‘Excuse me, Your Honor, but I’m here on a dare from a party and would like to have your autograph.’”

According to Measell, the president did not appear at all taken aback until some men rushed into the room and hurried him out.

Meanwhile, Beatrice had been taken in to see Mrs. Roosevelt and obtained her autograph. But before their unceremonious departures, the first lady warned the two youngsters of the dangers of entering the White House living quarters uninvited. Throughout the episode, Joe’s younger brother had waited in the family car parked outside the White House.

A few days later, in her My Day column, Mrs. Roosevelt commented at length on the interrupted celebration. Before midnight, she wrote, “my niece, Eleanor Roosevelt, came from the dance she had been attending accompanied by Robert and Henry Morgenthau and Miss Eleanor Flood.” As she explained, it was “the president’s custom as the midnight hour strikes to drink the first toast of the year … ‘to the United States.’ After that come personal toasts, but I rather think few people who have the privilege of drinking the first toast in this historic house can do so without a thrill.”

Mrs. Roosevelt described her annoyance at the “rather unfortunate incident which a thoughtless boy and girl brought about by their intrusion.” Their “rude and unmannerly behavior,” she said, could have resulted in truly unfortunate consequences. Mrs. Roosevelt said it was “rather sad to have young people grow up at present so thoughtless and unmindful of others.” She also commented that “behavior of this kind will make this young couple seem rather heroic” to some of their peers, but said for her part, she “would not wish to have in my employ any young people who acted with so little thought and consideration for others.”

In this time for change, some things have not changed very much.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/opinion/01morgenthau.html

A DESOLATE island in a frozen sea brings the world’s nations together with a new type of agreement: one giving an international commission the right to govern a landmass through unanimous vote. The year was 1912; the subject was the island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean. Thereafter, it and the surrounding archipelago were to belong to no nation, its natural resources open to all.

That agreement was no doubt on the minds of the drafters of the Antarctic Treaty, which was signed to much fanfare 50 years ago Tuesday by 12 nations: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Britain, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the Soviet Union and the United States.

The pact was a remarkable achievement considering the circumstances: it was the height of the cold war and a time of heightened tensions, including an exchange of gunfire in 1952 between Argentine and British expeditions. Seven nations had carved out overlapping territories on the bottom of the earth and had been previously unwilling to cooperate.

Nonetheless, thanks to the treaty, Antarctica was demilitarized, its frozen peaks and glaciers transformed into the world’s largest nature preserve and an international scientific laboratory. The land claims of the seven nations were neither recognized nor disputed — they were “left to die a natural death,” as The Times’s correspondent Walter Sullivan put it — but each keeps a proprietary eye over its patch of tundra.

The treaty dictates use of the continent to this day. At its annual meeting this fall in Tasmania, the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources — a body created under the treaty in 1982 to protect marine life — agreed to create the first marine protected area in the region, which will put 36,000 square miles of ocean near the South Orkney Islands off limits to fishing or waste disposal.

Sound impressive? Actually, the newly protected area covers just a tiny fraction of the southern ocean. The original proposal was broader, but people who were involved tell me it was whittled down to make room for an experimental crab fishery. A plan to put scientific observers on every krill-fishing boat was also scaled back.

Worse, this sort of environmental timidity on the ocean pretty much sums up the 50-year history of the Antarctic Treaty. Year after year, the marine conservation commission defeats or defangs nearly every progressive proposal put before it. As we consider the treaty’s anniversary, it is worth considering whether the waters off Antarctica would be better off without it, instead leaving each nation with a historical claim to defend its own slice of the ocean’s bounty.

When I traveled to Antarctica as part of a scientific team in 2001, I devoured a delicious, flaky filet of Antarctic toothfish that had been harvested from the Ross Sea by a team from the University of Illinois. Little did I know how privileged I was. In the last six years, that research team has not caught another toothfish. Poor management and pirate fishing boats operating under flags of convenience have depleted the stock, threatening an ecosystem that supports penguins and killer whales. In October, Australian authorities discovered an illegal gill net, 80 miles long, swelling with 31 tons of toothfish.

The problem is not just a matter of powerful fishing countries like Norway and Japan outmaneuvering the conservation lobby, but a fundamental shortcoming of international agreements like the Antarctic Treaty. Because the conservation commission requires a unanimous vote for any sort of environmental action, it can be held hostage by a single party.

At the recent annual meeting, the commission again ignored scientific advice and struck down a market-based measure to fight rogue fisheries. The plan would have allowed nations to reject fish imports from countries that allow illegal vessels into their ports, but Argentina scuttled it, arguing that it was a threat to international law.

Other measures, like a blacklist of boats connected to illegal fishing, are rarely enforced and easily circumvented. For instance, when a Russian vessel called the Volna was placed on a provisional list in 2006, Russia disputed the evidence and vetoed the decision. New Zealand called Russia’s move a threat to the Antarctic Treaty system. But even if the boat had been added to the blacklist, it is doubtful that it would have been denied service at ports. According to a report from the Pew Environment Group, since 2004 blacklisted vessels have made 27 visits to ports that are committed to the treaty system.

By contrast, many countries that have their own island territories in the region have fought back against illegal fishing. In the 1990s, an estimated one-third of the toothfish harvest around Heard Island, an Australian territory, was illegally obtained; but since Australia and France, which controls other nearby islands, stepped up enforcement in 2002, that number has dropped to about one-tenth. Recently an Australian court ruled that it was illegal for Japanese boats to hunt whales within 200 nautical miles of Australia’s Antarctic land claim.

Perhaps it is time that other nations defend their own Antarctic claims. This would no doubt put the agreement in jeopardy, but rather than bowing down to an international body that has failed in its stated mission, individual states could negotiate their own regulatory and licensing agreements for fisheries. For example, New Zealand would be within its right to unilaterally establish a much-needed marine protected area in the Ross Sea. The Chileans and the Argentines, whose claims overlap along a peninsula south of the Falkland Islands, could hash out their own deals. Norway might well fish its own waters to depletion, but that would be the price of environmental gains elsewhere.

Most conservationists and fans of international law would be horrified by the idea of ditching the Antarctic Treaty. But consider this: the Spitsbergen Convention did not survive — since 1920 the island has effectively become part of Norway. Yet Norway, which has dug in its heels at nearly every meeting of the Antarctic conservation commission, has shown far more concern over an island it considers its own. It has established environmental protections at Spitsbergen, shut hazardous mining operations and reined in Russian fishing trawlers. It’s not a perfect system, but it might be a better one for Antarctica than the toothless treaty that many will be celebrating Tuesday.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/opinion/01borrell.html

“I hate war,” said Dwight Eisenhower, “as only a soldier who has lived it can, as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

He also said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”

I suppose we’ll never learn. President Obama will go on TV Tuesday night to announce that he plans to send tens of thousands of additional American troops to Afghanistan to fight in a war that has lasted most of the decade and has long since failed.

After going through an extended period of highly ritualized consultations and deliberations, the president has arrived at a decision that never was much in doubt, and that will prove to be a tragic mistake. It was also, for the president, the easier option.

It would have been much more difficult for Mr. Obama to look this troubled nation in the eye and explain why it is in our best interest to begin winding down the permanent state of warfare left to us by the Bush and Cheney regime. It would have taken real courage for the commander in chief to stop feeding our young troops into the relentless meat grinder of Afghanistan, to face up to the terrible toll the war is taking — on the troops themselves and in very insidious ways on the nation as a whole.

More soldiers committed suicide this year than in any year for which we have complete records. But the military is now able to meet its recruitment goals because the young men and women who are signing up can’t find jobs in civilian life. The United States is broken — school systems are deteriorating, the economy is in shambles, homelessness and poverty rates are expanding — yet we’re nation-building in Afghanistan, sending economically distressed young people over there by the tens of thousands at an annual cost of a million dollars each.

I keep hearing that Americans are concerned about gargantuan budget deficits. Well, the idea that you can control mounting deficits while engaged in two wars that you refuse to raise taxes to pay for is a patent absurdity. Small children might believe something along those lines. Rational adults should not.

Politicians are seldom honest when they talk publicly about warfare. Lyndon Johnson knew in the spring of 1965, as he made plans for the first big expansion of U.S. forces in Vietnam, that there was no upside to the war.

A recent Bill Moyers program on PBS played audio tapes of Johnson on which he could be heard telling Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, “Not a damn human thinks that 50,000 or 100,000 or 150,000 [American troops] are going to end that war.”

McNamara replies, “That’s right.”

Nothing like those sentiments were conveyed to the public as Johnson and McNamara jacked up the draft and started feeding young American boys and men into the Vietnam meat grinder.

Afghanistan is not Vietnam. There was every reason for American forces to invade Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. But that war was botched and lost by the Bush crowd, and Barack Obama does not have a magic wand now to make it all better.

The word is that Mr. Obama will tell the public Tuesday that he is sending another 30,000 or so troops to Afghanistan. And while it is reported that he has some strategy in mind for eventually turning the fight over to the ragtag and less-than-energetic Afghan military, it’s clear that U.S. forces will be engaged for years to come, perhaps many years.

The tougher choice for the president would have been to tell the public that the U.S. is a nation faced with terrible troubles here at home and that it is time to begin winding down a war that veered wildly off track years ago. But that would have taken great political courage. It would have left Mr. Obama vulnerable to the charge of being weak, of cutting and running, of betraying the troops who have already served. The Republicans would have a field day with that scenario.

Lyndon Johnson is heard on the tapes telling Senator Richard Russell, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, about a comment made by a Texas rancher in the days leading up to the buildup in Vietnam. The rancher had told Johnson that the public would forgive the president “for everything except being weak.”

Russell said: “Well, there’s a lot in that. There’s a whole lot in that.”

We still haven’t learned to recognize real strength, which is why it so often seems that the easier choice for a president is to keep the troops marching off to war.

Bob Herbert, New York Times

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/opinion/01herbert.html

In late 2006, Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. James F. Amos released a brilliant book with a thrilling title. It was called the “Army/Marine Corps Field Manual 3-24.” In its quiet way, this book helped overturn conventional wisdom on modern warfare and gave leaders a new way to see the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It’s a mistake to think you can succeed in conflicts like these by defeating the enemy in battle, the manual said. Instead, these wars are better seen as political arguments for the loyalty of the population. Get villagers to work with you by offering them security. Provide services by building courts and schools and police. Over the long term, transfer authority to legitimate local governments.

This approach, called COIN, has reshaped military thinking, starting with the junior officers who developed it and then spreading simultaneously up and down the chain of command.

When President Obama conducted his first Afghanistan strategic review last winter, he too gravitated toward the COIN mentality, appointing Gen. Stanley McChrystal, one of the chief architects of COIN, to run the war effort there.

This fall, General McChrystal came back with his own report, and made two key recommendations. First, the U.S. should deliver a sharp blow, to regain the initiative and reverse the Taliban’s momentum. Second, he wrote, “Success demands a comprehensive counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign.”

But over the past few months, senior members of the Obama administration have lost some of their enthusiasm for COIN. It may be a good approach in the abstract, they say, but there are problems with applying it in this particular context.

First, they say, COIN is phenomenally expensive. It consists of doing a lot of things at once — from increasing troop levels to nation-building — and doing them over a long period of time. America no longer has that kind of money, and Americans won’t accept a new 10-year commitment having already been there for eight.

Second, it may be possible to clear and hold territory, but it is looking less likely that we will be able to transfer it to any legitimate Afghan authority. The Karzai government is like an organized crime ring. The governing talent is thin. Plans to build a 400,000-man Afghan security force are unrealistic.

Third, they continue, the population in Afghanistan is too dispersed for COIN to work properly. There would be a few bubbles of security, where allied troops are massed, but then vast sanctuaries for the insurgents.

Fourth, COIN is too Afghan-centric and not enough Pakistan-centric. The real threats to U.S. interests are along the Afghan-Pakistani border or involve the destabilization of the Pakistani government. The COIN approach does little to directly address that.

The administration seems to have spent the past few months trying to pare back the COIN strategy and adjust it to real world constraints. As it has done so, there has been less talk in the informed policy community about paving the way for a new, transformed Afghanistan. There has been more talk of finding cheap ways to arrange the current pieces of Afghanistan into a contraption that will stay together and allow us to go home.

What’s emerging appears to be something less than a comprehensive COIN strategy but more than a mere counter-terrorism strategy — shooting at terrorists with drones. It is a hybrid approach, and as we watch the president’s speech Tuesday night, we’ll all get to judge whether he has cut and pasted the different options into a coherent whole. It’s not the troop levels that matter. What matters is how this war will be fought.

Some very smart people say that the administration’s direction is already fatally flawed. There is no such thing as effective COIN-lite, they argue. All the pieces of a comprehensive strategy have to be done patiently and together because success depends on the way they magnify one another.

These experts may be right. But none of us get to have our first choice on this matter. President Obama faces such a devilishly complex set of constraints that the policy he announces will be partially unsatisfying to every American and to every member of his administration. The fights inside have been so brutal that there have been accusations that the Defense and State Departments have withheld documents from the president to bias his thinking.

Nonetheless, my impression, pre-speech, is that Obama has negotiated these constraints in a serious manner, and improved some of his options — for example, by accelerating troop deployments. He has not been enthusiastic about expanding the U.S. role in Afghanistan, but he has not evaded his responsibility as commander in chief, and he’s taking brave political risks.

It may not be the complete COIN strategy, which offers the best chance of success. But it may be the best strategy under the circumstances.

David Brooks, New York Times

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/opinion/01brooks.html

Today is Monday, Nov. 30, the 334th day of 2009. There are 31 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History

On Nov. 30, 1939, the Russo-Finnish War, also known as the Winter War, began as Soviet troops invaded Finland. (The conflict ended the following March with a Soviet victory.)

On this date

In 1718, Charles XII, king of Sweden, was killed during a siege of the fortress of Fredriksten, east of Oslo Fjord, ending Sweden’s “Age of Greatness.”

In 1782, the United States and Britain signed preliminary peace articles in Paris, ending the Revolutionary War.

In 1803, Spain completed the process of ceding Louisiana to France, which had sold it to the United States.

In 1804, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase went on trial, accused of political bias. He was acquitted by the Senate.

In 1835, Samuel Langhorne Clemens – better known as Mark Twain – was born in Florida, Mo.

In 1874, Sir Winston Churchill, the British statesman, orator and author who served as prime minister during World War II, was born.

In 1900, Irish writer Oscar Wilde died in Paris at age 46.

In 1908, the United States and Japan signed the Root-Takahira Agreement, which averted a drift toward possible war through the mutual acknowledgment of certain international policies and spheres of influence in the Pacific.

In 1936, London’s famed Crystal Palace, constructed for the Great Exhibition of 1851, was destroyed in a fire.

In 1949, Chinese communist troops captured Chongqing.

In 1962, U Thant of Burma, who had been acting secretary-general of the United Nations following the death of Dag Hammarskjold the year before, was elected to a four-year term.

In 1966, Barbados, an island nation in the Caribbean situated about 100 miles (160 km) east of the Windward Islands, had gained internal self-rule in 1961 and achieved its full independence from Britain on this day in 1966.

In 1979, the album “The Wall” by Pink Floyd was released.

In 1981, the United States and the Soviet Union opened negotiations in Geneva aimed at reducing nuclear weapons in Europe.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Brady bill, which requires a five-day waiting period for handgun purchases and background checks of prospective buyers.

In 1993, authorities in California arrested Richard Allen Davis, who confessed to abducting and killing 12 year-old Polly Klaas of Petaluma.

In 1994, almost 1,000 people are forced to abandon the Achille Lauro in the Indian Ocean after it catches fire.

In 1995, President Clinton became the first U.S. chief executive to visit Northern Ireland.

In 1999, ten years ago, the opening of a 135-nation trade gathering in Seattle was disrupted by at least 40,000 demonstrators, some of whom clashed with police.

In 2004, five years ago, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced his resignation.

In 2004, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume announced he was stepping down after a nearly nine-year tenure.

In 2004, President George W. Bush tried to repair strained U.S.-Canada relations during a visit to Ottawa.

In 2004, “Jeopardy!” fans saw Ken Jennings end his 74-game winning streak as he lost to real estate agent Nancy Zerg.

In 2008, one year ago, space shuttle Endeavour returned to Earth after a nearly 16-day mission to repair and upgrade the international space station.

In 2008, the world’s most comprehensive legalized heroin program became permanent with overwhelming approval from Swiss voters, who simultaneously rejected the decriminalization of marijuana.

Today’s Birthdays

Historian Jacques Barzun is 102. Actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr. is 91. Actor Robert Guillaume is 82. TV personality and producer Dick Clark is 80. Radio talk show host G. Gordon Liddy is 79. Country singer-recording executive Jimmy Bowen is 72. Movie director Ridley Scott is 72. Singer Rob Grill (The Grassroots) is 66. Movie writer-director Terrence Malick is 66. Rock musician Roger Glover (Deep Purple) is 64. Playwright David Mamet is 62. Actress Margaret Whitton is 59. Actor Mandy Patinkin is 57. Musician Shuggie Otis is 56. Country singer Jeannie Kendall is 55. Singer Billy Idol is 54. Historian Michael Beschloss is 54. Rock musician John Ashton (The Psychedelic Furs) is 52. Comedian Colin Mochrie is 52. Former football and baseball player Bo Jackson is 47. Rapper Jalil (Whodini) is 46. Actor-director Ben Stiller is 44. Rock musician Mike Stone is 40. Actress Sandra Oh is 39. Country singer Mindy McCready is 34. Singer Clay Aiken is 31. Actress Elisha Cuthbert is 27. Actress Kaley Cuoco is 24.

Today’s Historic Birthdays

Andrea Doria
11/30/1466 – 11/25/1560
Italian admiral and naval leader

Andrea Palladio
11/30/1508 – 8/19/1580
Italian architect

Jonathan Swift
11/30/1667 – 10/19/1745
Anglo-Irish author and satirist

John Toland
11/30/1670 – 3/11/1722
Irish-born British religious philospher

William Livingston
11/30/1723 – 7/25/1790
First governor of New Jersey

Oliver Winchester
11/30/1810 – 12/11/1880
American gun and ammunition manufacturer; developed the Winchester rifle

Mark Twain
11/30/1835 – 4/21/1910
American author

Frederick Charles Cavendish
11/30/1836 – 5/6/1882
English statesman

Winston Churchill
11/30/1836 – 5/6/1882
English statesman

I.J. Singer
11/30/1893 – 2/10/1944
Polish-born American author

Donald Ogden Stewart
11/30/1894 – 8/2/1980
American playwright and actor

Thought for Today

“‘Plain English’ – everybody loves it, demands it – from the other fellow.” – Jacques Barzun, French-born American historian.

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/30/AR2009113000004.html

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/20091130.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/30/default.stm

http://www.britannica.com/eb/dailycontent/rss

President Obama has no trouble making them! Well, except when they’re hard.

If it seems as though the world is moving faster than ever before, maybe that’s just because the White House is moving so slowly. To take an example at random, on Sept. 20, 2001, President Bush gave an address to a joint session of Congress about the war on terror. On Nov. 13, 54 days later, allied troops liberated Kabul. On Sept. 9, 2009, President Obama gave an address to a joint session of Congress in which he pointedly mentioned Afghanistan only as part of an illogical argument for massively higher domestic spending. Tomorrow, 83 days later, Obama will give another speech, this one on Afghanistan.

What a speech it will be! The New York Times gives a preview:

“It’s accurate to say that he will be more explicit about both goals and time frame than has been the case before and than has been part of the public discussion,” said a senior official, who requested anonymity to discuss the speech before it is delivered. “He wants to give a clear sense of both the time frame for action and how the war will eventually wind down.”

The officials would not disclose the time frame. But they said it would not be tied to particular conditions on the ground nor would it be as firm as the current schedule for withdrawing troops in Iraq, where Mr. Obama has committed to withdrawing most combat units by August and all forces by the end of 2011.

Officials of one allied nation who have been extensively briefed on the president’s plan said, however, that Mr. Obama would describe how the American presence would be ratcheted back after the buildup, while making clear that a significant American presence in Afghanistan would remain for a long while.

This is going to be stirring, isn’t it? With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will give a clear sense of both the time frame for action and how the war will eventually wind down! Let every nation know that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, to ratchet back our presence after the buildup! Either you are with us or you are with those who would fail to make clear that a significant American presence will remain, not just for a while but for a long while!

It sounds as though, after months of indecision, the president has finally resolved to be irresolute. It seems that his central strategic goal is to displease no one. Unless the speech turns out to be markedly different from what the Times leads us to expect–and let us hope it does–it will only reinforce the impression that he is a ditherer.

Last week Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post tried to rebut this stereotype. Here’s how his story began:

President George W. Bush once boasted, “I’m not a textbook player, I’m a gut player.” The new tenant of the Oval Office takes a strikingly different approach. President Obama is almost defiantly deliberative, methodical and measured, even when critics accuse him of dithering. When describing his executive style, he goes into Spock mode, saying, “You’ve got to make decisions based on information and not emotions.”

Obama’s handling of the Afghanistan conundrum has been a spectacle of deliberation unlike anything seen in the White House in recent memory. The strategic review began in September. Again and again, the war council convened in the Situation Room. The president mulled an array of unappealing options. Next week, finally, he will tell the American public the outcome of all this strategizing.

“He’s establishing his decision-making process as being almost diametrically the opposite of the previous administration,” says Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s chief of staff. Wilkerson, who teaches national security decision-making at George Washington University, says the Bush-Cheney style was “cowboy-like, typical Texas, typical Wyoming, and extremely secretive.”

This story appeared on page A1. That is, at the Washington Post, it is still front-page news that “the new tenant of the Oval Office,” who has been there for nearly a quarter of a term, is different from his predecessor. But actually, there’s a lesson here, for journalists and politicians alike. With Achenbach’s comments about Bush in mind, read this excerpt from the former president’s Jan. 10, 2007, speech announcing the surge in Iraq:

It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq. So my national security team, military commanders and diplomats conducted a comprehensive review.

We consulted members of Congress from both parties, allies abroad, and distinguished outside experts.

We benefited from the thoughtful recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton. In our discussions, we all agreed that there is no magic formula for success in Iraq. And one message came through loud and clear: Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States.

It was a spectacle of deliberation unlike anything seen in the White House in recent memory. Or it would have been, if anyone remembered it. But no one does, because the stereotype of Bush as “cowboy-like” stuck. The stereotype of Obama as indecisive, detached and irresolute is sticking, too. Achenbach has made a manful effort to counter it, but let’s look at another passage from his piece and see how well he did:

Stephen Wayne, who teaches about the presidency at Georgetown, said: “He’s not an instinctive decision-maker as Bush was. He doesn’t go with his gut, he thinks with his head, which I think is desirable.” Referring to the Afghanistan decision, Wayne said, “I don’t think he is an indecisive person, I just think this is a tough one.”

The defense of Obama is that he’s not indecisive, he just has trouble making tough decisions. When decisions are easy, bang, he makes them just like that! Imagine him sitting in a diner:

Waiter: Would you like eggs for breakfast?

Obama: Yes, I most certainly would!

Waiter: How would you like them cooked?

Obama: Hmm, let’s see. Bush liked deviled eggs, so that’s out. Sunny-side up? No, wait! Scrambled–that way they’re cooked through, so the risk of food poisoning is less. Or I could compromise and have them over easy. Then again, there’s something to be said for hard-boiled . . . Gosh, this is tough . . .

You know what? I’ll let you know at dinnertime. I’m just gonna eat my waffle right now.

Achenbach’s eagerness to portray Obama’s vacillation in a positive light reinforces another stereotype: that of journalists as courtiers rather than critics of the “new” president.

James Taranto, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574567780798946274.html

Arlen Specter would make it easier for terrorists to sue.

If you think it’s outrageous that Navy SEALs who helped capture one of Iraq’s most wanted terrorists now face court-martial on charges they roughed him up, just wait. It may get worse. Tomorrow morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on a bill introduced by Arlen Specter (D., Pa.) that would make it easier for terrorists to sue military and federal law-enforcement officials.

That’s not Mr. Specter’s intent, of course. It would, however, be the effect of a bill that only a trial lawyer could love: the Notice Pleading Restoration Act of 2009. If successful, it would undo a recent Supreme Court ruling that gave us this common sense standard: Before you can sue someone, you have to have a plausible claim they did something wrong.

Mr. Specter, a former trial lawyer, finds the plausibility standard onerous. The reason has to do with the discovery process. Rightly used, discovery allows lawyers from both sides to gain access to evidence—documents, email, depositions, etc.—that support their case. In practice it can be abused, as when lawyers use discovery to go fishing for a case they don’t have. And because compliance alone can be expensive and time-consuming, many companies find it cheaper to settle.

Greg Garre, a former solicitor general for the Bush administration who will testify at tomorrow’s hearing, puts it this way: “If passed and signed into law, the bill would drive a truck through the Supreme Court ruling and dramatically lower the standards for pleading lawsuits.”

When Mr. Specter introduced his bill in July, he said that insisting on plausible evidence before a lawsuit can proceed will “deny many plaintiffs with meritorious claims access to the Federal courts.” So he aims to reverse the standard: Unless the Court has absolute proof that a claim will not succeed, his bill would effectively waive it through. There may be another, less altruistic interest: At a time when Mr. Specter is in a tough primary fight in his new party, he needs all the generosity he can get from his supporters in the plaintiff’s bar.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce naturally opposes the bill, saying it would impose a hefty “litigation tax” on American business and encourage frivolous lawsuits. But where do the terrorists come in?

The answer goes back to the original Supreme Court ruling this bill hopes to overturn. That case involved Javaid Iqbal, a Pakistani Muslim who was arrested in the days after Sept. 11, 2001, designated a person of “high interest,” and detained under restrictive conditions. After pleading guilty to criminal charges and serving time, he was released and sent back to Pakistan.

Once free, Mr. Iqbal filed a lawsuit against more than three dozen federal officials and corrections officers. That included everyone from the warden and the guards outside his cell to former Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller. The complaint alleged that Messrs. Ashcroft and Mueller discriminated against him based on race, religion or national origin.

The Supreme Court limited itself to the charges against Messrs. Ashcroft and Mueller. The ruling came down to this: While Mr. Iqbal was free to sue those who he says abused him, he needed to show his allegations were plausible. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy defined a plausible claim as “factual content that allows the court to draw the reasonable inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged.”

That may not sound like much, but consider the alternative. We know that al Qaeda operatives are trained to claim abuse when they are captured. If Mr. Specter’s legislation succeeds, what is to prevent them from alleging all sorts of violations so they can go on discovery expeditions against, say, Gen. David Petraeus or Defense Secretary Robert Gates? And how would that affect the ability of these men to prosecute the war?

Justice Kennedy made this point when he wrote about the “heavy costs” imposed on government officials trying to do their jobs. These costs, he noted, “are only magnified when Government officials are charged with responding to, as Judge [Jose] Cabranes aptly put it, ‘a national and international security emergency unprecedented in the history of the American Republic.’”

As bad as this bill is, it’s an opportunity for Barack Obama. When he speaks at West Point this evening, he will ask for support for his new strategy for Afghanistan. With many Americans still reeling from the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal criminal court, coming out strongly against the Specter bill would burnish the president’s war-fighting credentials—and limit al Qaeda’s ability to manipulate the courts.

It wouldn’t hurt that in so doing, the president would also be showing himself willing to stand up to a key Democratic constituency. Let’s hope he recognizes this bill for the gift it is.

William McGurn, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574568130713843644.html

The surge in temp hiring is not a sign of a malfunctioning economy. It is the face of the future.

The White House is turning its nose up at last month’s spurt in temporary work—the one bright spot in an otherwise grim jobs report. It claims that such work is proof that the economy is still malfunctioning. The truth is that this surge in temporary workers is not only good news for the economy, it’s the future of the 21st century labor market. If Washington wants to jump start job growth for the 3.5 million white-collar workers who have lost jobs in this recession, it should start by scrapping the outdated legal and regulatory hurdles to temporary work.

I know something about this because I run a business that places talented individuals into temporary consulting and interim executive assignments. Amid the worst recession in decades, our business is up 70%. Yet there would be much more growth in this sector if Americans—from the White House down to the personnel department—stopped discriminating against temporary work as inferior or anomalous.

Today, demand for high-end temporary business talent is not focused on cost-cutting projects, as some might suspect. Instead, firms use temporary executives to drive innovation. In uncertain times, firms are simply more comfortable with deploying talent on a flexible basis.

Temporary work also boosts economic efficiency because not all executive roles require permanent staff. For example, one pharmaceutical company client took on a temporary marketing executive to help launch a new drug. The old way of doing this was to make a new permanent hire (or a small team) who would have been under-utilized after the launch. The availability of temporary staff who can get the job done quickly means that firms can rethink how work is organized.

Which brings us to another case for temporary work: Top business talent increasingly wants to work this way. In one situation, a VP-level executive we placed was developing his own new business. He valued the way a part-time senior role allowed him to support his family while he worked on his own project. For others, working in a series of temporary assignments may be their preferred full-time occupation.

Given the contribution that temporary work makes to the economy, it’s time Washington embraced it. Here are three things the feds could do immediately to make it easier for firms and executives to work this way:

First, the Obama administration should create a two-year “safe harbor” for independent professionals doing temporary work. Currently, the rules governing independent contractors are determined on a case-by-case basis and are subject to state law variations. This leaves risk-averse personnel departments wary of hiring temporary executives for fear that they could be reclassified as employees, saddling employers with liabilities. The solution is to create a two-year safe harbor provision that lays out a clear test for being classified as an independent contractor. The White House could streamline these rules, beginning with the IRS, if it made it a priority.

Second, Washington should apply any new employment tax subsidy to temporary jobs. There is much talk of a new jobs tax subsidy, but as it currently stands it would exclude temporary work. This is 20th century thinking. Any new subsidy should seek to boost temporary roles as well.

Third, the feds should let independent workers buy into the congressional health plan. A huge barrier to temporary employment for professionals who prefer to work this way is their inability to access group health coverage outside the permanent employment setting. Though Congress may pass health reform this year, the new insurance exchanges that would remedy this problem won’t come into play until at least 2013. Congress should allow temporary workers to buy into the congressional health plan until then.

As we reboot the great American jobs machine, it’s time to shelve outdated assumptions and accept that a portfolio of multiple assignments is what growing legions of companies and executives want. This new relationship between talent and firms isn’t a failure to be stigmatized, but the latest sign of our economy’s endless capacity for renewal and innovation.

Ms. Miller is the founder and CEO of the Business Talent Group. She served as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1995

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574567942566170348.html

The Senator is now in favor of more troops after he was against them.

President Obama unveils his new Afghanistan strategy today, and in the nick of time Senator John Kerry has arrived with a report claiming that none of this would be necessary if former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had only deployed more troops eight years ago. Yes, he really said more troops.

In a 43-page report issued yesterday by his Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Kerry says bin Laden and deputy Ayman Zawahiri were poised for capture at the Tora Bora cave complex in late 2001. But because of the “unwillingness” of Mr. Rumsfeld and his generals “to deploy the troops required to take advantage of solid intelligence and unique circumstances to kill or capture bin Laden,” the al Qaeda leaders escaped.

This in turn “paved the way for exactly what we had hoped to avoid—a protracted insurgency that has cost more lives than anyone estimates would have been lost in a full-blown assault on Tora Bora.”

The timing of the report’s release suggests that Mr. Kerry intends this as political cover for Mr. Obama and Democrats, and some in the press corps have even taken it seriously. But coming from Mr. Kerry, of all people, this criticism is nothing short of astonishing.

In 2001, readers may recall, the Washington establishment that included Mr. Kerry was fretting about the danger in Afghanistan from committing too many troops. The New York Times made the “quagmire” point explicitly in a famous page-one analysis, and Seymour Hersh fed the cliche at The New Yorker.

On CNN with Larry King on Dec. 15, 2001, a viewer called in to say the U.S. should “smoke [bin Laden] out” of the Tora Bora caves. Mr. Kerry responded: “For the moment what we are doing, I think, is having its impact and it is the best way to protect our troops and sort of minimalize the proximity, if you will. I think we have been doing this pretty effectively and we should continue to do it that way.” The Rumsfeld-General Tommy Franks troop strategy may have missed bin Laden, but it reflected domestic political doubts about an extended Afghan campaign.

Remarkably, Mr. Kerry is now repeating those same doubts about Mr. Obama’s troop decision, saying that the “Afghans must do the heavy lifting” and that he supports additional troops only for “limited purposes” and wants the U.S. out within “four to five years.” Adapting his legendary 2004 campaign locution, Mr. Kerry is now in favor of more troops after he was against them, but in any case not for very long.

Editorial, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574567941741432788.html

Confident predictions of catastrophe are unwarranted.

Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming? Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, and occasionally—such as for the last dozen years or so—it does little that can be discerned.

Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.

The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode. At the same time that we were emerging from the little ice age, the industrial era began, and this was accompanied by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. CO2 is the most prominent of these, and it is again generally accepted that it has increased by about 30%.

The defining characteristic of a greenhouse gas is that it is relatively transparent to visible light from the sun but can absorb portions of thermal radiation. In general, the earth balances the incoming solar radiation by emitting thermal radiation, and the presence of greenhouse substances inhibits cooling by thermal radiation and leads to some warming.

That said, the main greenhouse substances in the earth’s atmosphere are water vapor and high clouds. Let’s refer to these as major greenhouse substances to distinguish them from the anthropogenic minor substances. Even a doubling of CO2 would only upset the original balance between incoming and outgoing radiation by about 2%. This is essentially what is called “climate forcing.”

There is general agreement on the above findings. At this point there is no basis for alarm regardless of whether any relation between the observed warming and the observed increase in minor greenhouse gases can be established. Nevertheless, the most publicized claims of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deal exactly with whether any relation can be discerned. The failure of the attempts to link the two over the past 20 years bespeaks the weakness of any case for concern.

The IPCC’s Scientific Assessments generally consist of about 1,000 pages of text. The Summary for Policymakers is 20 pages. It is, of course, impossible to accurately summarize the 1,000-page assessment in just 20 pages; at the very least, nuances and caveats have to be omitted. However, it has been my experience that even the summary is hardly ever looked at. Rather, the whole report tends to be characterized by a single iconic claim.

The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn’t reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.

Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false.

Of course, none of the articles stressed this. Rather they emphasized that according to models modified to account for the natural internal variability, warming would resume—in 2009, 2013 and 2030, respectively.

But even if the IPCC’s iconic statement were correct, it still would not be cause for alarm. After all we are still talking about tenths of a degree for over 75% of the climate forcing associated with a doubling of CO2. The potential (and only the potential) for alarm enters with the issue of climate sensitivity—which refers to the change that a doubling of CO2 will produce in GATA. It is generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 will only produce a change of about two degrees Fahrenheit if all else is held constant. This is unlikely to be much to worry about.

Yet current climate models predict much higher sensitivities. They do so because in these models, the main greenhouse substances (water vapor and clouds) act to amplify anything that CO2 does. This is referred to as positive feedback. But as the IPCC notes, clouds continue to be a source of major uncertainty in current models. Since clouds and water vapor are intimately related, the IPCC claim that they are more confident about water vapor is quite implausible.

There is some evidence of a positive feedback effect for water vapor in cloud-free regions, but a major part of any water-vapor feedback would have to acknowledge that cloud-free areas are always changing, and this remains an unknown. At this point, few scientists would argue that the science is settled. In particular, the question remains as to whether water vapor and clouds have positive or negative feedbacks.

The notion that the earth’s climate is dominated by positive feedbacks is intuitively implausible, and the history of the earth’s climate offers some guidance on this matter. About 2.5 billion years ago, the sun was 20%-30% less bright than now (compare this with the 2% perturbation that a doubling of CO2 would produce), and yet the evidence is that the oceans were unfrozen at the time, and that temperatures might not have been very different from today’s. Carl Sagan in the 1970s referred to this as the “Early Faint Sun Paradox.”

For more than 30 years there have been attempts to resolve the paradox with greenhouse gases. Some have suggested CO2—but the amount needed was thousands of times greater than present levels and incompatible with geological evidence. Methane also proved unlikely. It turns out that increased thin cirrus cloud coverage in the tropics readily resolves the paradox—but only if the clouds constitute a negative feedback. In present terms this means that they would diminish rather than enhance the impact of CO2.

There are quite a few papers in the literature that also point to the absence of positive feedbacks. The implied low sensitivity is entirely compatible with the small warming that has been observed. So how do models with high sensitivity manage to simulate the currently small response to a forcing that is almost as large as a doubling of CO2? Jeff Kiehl notes in a 2007 article from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the models use another quantity that the IPCC lists as poorly known (namely aerosols) to arbitrarily cancel as much greenhouse warming as needed to match the data, with each model choosing a different degree of cancellation according to the sensitivity of that model.

What does all this have to do with climate catastrophe? The answer brings us to a scandal that is, in my opinion, considerably greater than that implied in the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit (though perhaps not as bad as their destruction of raw data): namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of “bait and switch” scams. It is only such a scam that lends importance to the machinations in the emails designed to nudge temperatures a few tenths of a degree.

The notion that complex climate “catastrophes” are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on the confluence of many factors.

Our perceptions of nature are similarly dragged back centuries so that the normal occasional occurrences of open water in summer over the North Pole, droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level variations, etc. are all taken as omens, portending doom due to our sinful ways (as epitomized by our carbon footprint). All of these phenomena depend on the confluence of multiple factors as well.

Consider the following example. Suppose that I leave a box on the floor, and my wife trips on it, falling against my son, who is carrying a carton of eggs, which then fall and break. Our present approach to emissions would be analogous to deciding that the best way to prevent the breakage of eggs would be to outlaw leaving boxes on the floor. The chief difference is that in the case of atmospheric CO2 and climate catastrophe, the chain of inference is longer and less plausible than in my example.

Mr. Lindzen is professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574567423917025400.html

Climate change researchers must believe in the reality of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.

Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called—without irony—the climate change “consensus.”

To read some of the press accounts of these gifts—amounting to about 0.0027% of Exxon’s 2008 profits of $45 billion—you might think you’d hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.

Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world’s leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week’s disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, or CRU.

But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists’ follow-the-money methods right back at them.

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he’d been awarded in the 1990s.

Al Gore wins the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize: Doing well by doing good?

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?

Thus, the European Commission’s most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that’s not counting funds from the EU’s member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA’s climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA’s, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls “green stimulus”—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.

Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.

Today these groups form a kind of ecosystem of their own. They include not just old standbys like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, but also Ozone Action, Clean Air Cool Planet, Americans for Equitable Climate Change Solutions, the Alternative Energy Resources Association, the California Climate Action Registry and so on and on. All of them have been on the receiving end of climate change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.

None of these outfits are per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent—including the thousands of jobs they provide—vanishes. This is what’s known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.

Which brings us back to the climategate scientists, the keepers of the keys to the global warming cathedral. In one of the more telling disclosures from last week, a computer programmer writes of the CRU’s temperature database: “I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!”

This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble.

Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574566124250205490.html

In many ways, MySQL embodies the ideals of the populist software movement known as open source, in which a program’s creator releases it to the world free of charge, and legions of volunteers contribute improvements that are also freely shared.

The start-up company came out of nowhere, building a database application beloved by vibrant, young Internet companies. Logging in from homes scattered around the globe, its workers seemed more a part of a virtual commune than a corporate monolith, and they relished taking on proprietary software giants like Microsoft.

But like most open-source companies, MySQL’s sales, tied to support deals, never matched the astronomical number of downloads for its product, about 60,000 a day. In January 2008, the founders decided to sell the company for $1 billion to Sun Microsystems. And this year, Sun agreed to sell itself to Oracle, which makes database software aimed at larger companies and tougher jobs, for $7.4 billion.

Now, disagreement over the value of MySQL — both as a stand-alone entity and as part of a big company — lies at the heart of a bitter public battle between Oracle and the European Union over the Sun acquisition. The fight illuminates a larger truth about open-source companies: their societal and strategic importance far exceeds their financial value as operating businesses.

European regulators view MySQL as sort of a database of the people, a low-cost alternative to Oracle’s costly proprietary products. The regulators worry that Oracle may stop improving MySQL in favor of protecting its core traditional products, and customers will lose an important option in the database market.

Neelie Kroes, Europe’s competition commissioner, wants open-source software to be available.

“In the current economic context, all companies are looking for cost-effective I.T. solutions, and systems based on open-source software are increasingly emerging as viable alternatives to proprietary solutions,” said the European Commission’s competition chief, Neelie Kroes, in a recent statement. “The commission has to ensure that such alternatives would continue to be available.”

Oracle, meanwhile, insists that it will continue to develop MySQL and other Sun technologies. Oracle’s chief executive, Lawrence J. Ellison, contends that MySQL serves a different part of the database market than Oracle’s main products do — an assessment supported by many analysts. One main incentive for Oracle to keep improving MySQL is that the program serves as a bulwark against Microsoft’s SQL Server database, which challenges Oracle’s products on the low end.

“The commission’s statement of objections reveals a profound misunderstanding of both database competition and open source dynamics,” Oracle said in a statement.

To Ms. Kroes’s point, there is an open-source alternative, and usually a pretty good one, to just about every major commercial software product. In the last decade, these open-source wares have put tremendous pricing pressure on their proprietary rivals. Governments and corporations have welcomed this competition.

Whether open-source firms are practical as long-term businesses, however, is a much murkier question.

The best-known open-source company is Red Hat, which produces a variant of the Linux operating system for server computers. Like most of its peers, Red Hat offers a free version of its base product and relies on selling support services and extra tools for revenue. In its last fiscal year, which ended in March, the company’s revenue rose 25 percent to $653 million, and it reported net income of $79 million.

But Red Hat is a rare case. “There’s only one company making real money out of open source, and that’s Red Hat,” said Simon Crosby, the chief technology officer at Citrix Systems, which acquired the open-source software maker XenSource for $500 million in 2007. “Everyone else is in trouble.”

The enduring appeal of open-source software revolves more around its disruptive nature than blockbuster sales.

As long as there has been software, there have been some people eager to share and improve it for the common good. The rise of the Internet made such sharing easier than ever, enabling people the world over to work together on projects outside the confines of a formal corporate structure.

Open-source software has thrived and played a prominent role in the building of the Internet’s infrastructure. Many companies rely on Linux-based computers and Apache Web server software to display their Web pages. Similarly, the Mozilla Firefox Web browser has emerged as the most formidable competitor to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

The grass-roots nature of open source has led advocates to view the projects as a populist foil to proprietary software, where a company keeps the inner workings of its applications secret.

But in the last decade, open-source software has become more of a corporate affair than a people’s revolution.

In some cases, dominant technology companies have used open-source projects as pawns. Google, for example, has needled Microsoft by providing financial support to the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which oversees of the development of Firefox. I.B.M. has been a major backer of Linux, helping to raise it as a competitor to Microsoft’s Windows and other proprietary operating systems.

Many of the top open-source developers are anything but volunteers tinkering in their spare time. Companies like I.B.M., Google, Oracle and Intel pay these developers top salaries to work on open-source projects and further the companies’ strategic objectives.

In the last three years, there have been five big acquisitions in which a major technology company bought an up-and-coming open-source company for many times its annual revenue. Sun, for example, bought MySQL for about 10 times its revenue, while Citrix bought XenSource for more than 150 times its revenue, according to people familiar with the companies’ sales.

Most recently, VMware, the leading maker of virtualization software, brought SpringSource for $420 million, or about 20 times its annual sales.

“A lot of these guys were getting close to an I.P.O., but they elected to go the acquisition route instead,” said Michael Olson, the chief executive of Cloudera, an open-source start-up. “A lot of open-source firms are one-product companies, and it’s hard to build a long-term, successful business that way.”

The larger technology companies have tended to buy these one-trick ponies for strategic purposes. With its core server business declining, Sun hoped it could piggy-back on MySQL’s momentum with Internet companies. In SpringSource, VMware acquired a company that had cultivated deep interest with software developers and helped VMware diversify beyond its virtualization roots.

“VMware took into consideration that which money can’t buy, which is a critical mass of adoption,” said Peter Fenton, a venture capitalist at Benchmark Capital, who has been involved in some fashion with many of the large open-source deals. “SpringSource’s main product was the equivalent of a best-selling novel.”

Citrix took perhaps the biggest risk of all, paying a huge premium for XenSource in the hopes of disrupting VMware’s position in the virtualization market.

“I don’t think Citrix would ever say it paid too much,” Mr. Crosby said. “Citrix leaped to the forefront of a whole software category. The ability to talk credibly about virtualization is worth a huge amount in its own right.”

Meanwhile, the ideal of an independent open-source giant has faded.

Mr. Fenton said that many open-source advocates had once hoped Red Hat would scoop up the top open-source start-ups, keeping these crown jewels out of the hands of proprietary software makers. But the company failed to go after other open-source companies initially and later could not afford to pay the high prices offered by larger companies.

“You could make the case there was a window of opportunity to do that three to five years ago,” Mr. Fenton said. “That opportunity has gone away. And it’s hard to put Humpty Dumpty back together again now.”

Ashlee Vance, New York Times

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/technology/business-computing/30open.html

Dave Ramsey

Dave Ramsey looks nothing like a televangelist. He’s a little on the short side, neither fat nor thin, and he wears jeans and a sports jacket, not a shiny suit and an oily smile. With his goatee and what’s left of his graying hair trimmed close to his head, he looks mostly like what he is—a well-groomed, middle- to upper-middle-class American professional. But when he runs out onstage and starts dispensing financial advice, you realize that he could have been a great preacher.

On a fine summer day at the end of August, I paid $220 for front-row seats on the floor of a minor-league hockey rink in Detroit, just to hear Ramsey talk for five hours. The ostensible topic: getting your financial life in order. Afterward, my fiancé, who grew up in the Bible Belt, called me to ask what I’d thought.

“I think I just attended my first prayer meeting,” I told him.

There was, of course, a great deal of talk about money, and what to do with it. But the format was more tent revival than accounting seminar, with the first 90 minutes or so mostly devoted to Ramsey’s personal story of ruin and redemption. We heard how, during the second half of the 1980s, a young Ramsey built up a multimillion-dollar real-estate empire—then lost it all as the bank got nervous and called his loans, ultimately forcing him and his wife into bankruptcy. How, searching for help in his hour of need, he turned to the Bible and discovered Proverbs 22:7: “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave of the lender.” At that moment, he told an audience so hushed that we could hear the ice squeak, Ramsey decided to never borrow another dollar again.

By all accounts, he hasn’t—a commitment that many business owners would like to catch him out on, since his disciples routinely shun lucrative financing deals at car dealerships, furniture stores, and electronics warehouses. The merchants’ loss is Ramsey’s gain: he has become rich spreading his debt-free gospel. The Dave Ramsey program got traction in evangelical churches, which are still one of the biggest distribution networks for his 13-week video program, Financial Peace University. Ramsey is not the first evangelical to sell financial advice to his co-religionists, of course. Jim Sammons, Crown Financial Ministries, and others all offer similar messages to get out of debt, tithe, and so on—not to mention the far more numerous proponents of the so-called prosperity gospel, who encourage consumption rather than restraint because they believe that God will shower the faithful with riches (see “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?,” page 38).

But although other evangelical financial advisers flourish mostly within their religious communities, Ramsey has made himself the breakout act, bringing his basic message to the wider world. His programs are available in high schools and on military bases, and Ramsey himself can be heard through his daily radio show, his nightly Fox Business broadcast, his Web sites, his live events, and his many books, including a special line of children’s stories. His company, the Lampo Group, now has hundreds of employees.

Ramsey offers some investment advice (much of which would have struck horror in my business-school professors), but for most of his followers, the main attraction is a simple program: give 10 percent of your income to charity, save 15 percent for retirement, build up a sizable emergency stash and a college fund for your kids, and above all, stop borrowing money. Ramsey devotees pay cash for everything they can. They are allowed only one exception to the no-more-debt rule: a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage. He is so serious about shunning debt that his Web site takes only debit cards; try to pay with a Capital One Visa, and the system rejects the card, then tut-tuts at you. These simple, austere, unbreakable rules are, as Ramsey likes to say, “the advice that God and Grandma gave you.”

Most things sound a lot crazier from the outside, and so once I’d decided to write about the friendly, slightly bombastic man on the television screen, I thought I should try his program, as outlined in his book The Total Money Makeover. At the beginning of August, I had dutifully sat down with Peter, my fiancé, to draft a budget. Once we’d given every dollar a name (as the book puts it), I drove to the bank and withdrew 1,800 of them. Huddled over the wheel to hide this stupendous wad of cash from prying eyes, I doled out the money among various envelopes for groceries, parking, entertainment, clothing, and so on, as recommended by Ramsey—and, funnily enough, by my grandmother, who invented a nearly identical system to manage my grandfather’s meager earnings from delivering groceries during the Great Depression.

When you pay for something with a credit card, or even a debit card, you can easily spend a few extra dollars here and there. But as Ramsey explained—while waving a handful of hundred-dollar bills to illustrate the point—if you have to actually hand over some of your dwindling cash supply, you tend to ponder every purchase. That impulsive latte buy becomes a little less enjoyable when every time you haul out your wallet, a quavering voice inside your head asks, “You want to send Uncle Abe away?” And sure enough, though we thought we’d budgeted conservatively for just the necessities, we nonetheless finished the month with extra money in every envelope.

It’s also hard to spend cash, because so many people look at you funny when you try. The very first day, I spent almost 20 minutes trying to check out in the “better dresses” section of a department store. The saleslady stared at the hundred-dollar bill in her palm as if I’d just handed her an eel. After a series of plaintive looks at my obviously card-free wallet, she started stabbing at the cash-register keyboard with a sort of bleak despair. To my immense surprise and relief—and clearly, also to hers—the cash drawer eventually opened.

Ramsey calls this “being weird.” The phrase came up over and over again in his five-hour spiel, always punctuated with the same rejoinder: “Normal is broke.” During our first month on the Dave Ramsey program, I was startled to find out how true this is. When I described my project, a really shocking number of people, many of them married professionals with good incomes, confessed that they had no control over their money.

They aren’t much different from most of America. According to a recent survey from CareerBuilder, six of every 10 workers “always” or “usually” live paycheck to paycheck. Affluent, educated people do a little better, but they certainly aren’t immune—three in 10 of those with salaries above $100,000 also report that they’re spending it as fast as they make it.

In fact, in some ways, education makes living above your means easier. In business school, my fellow students and I became big fans of the idea of “consumption smoothing,” as laid out in the work of economic luminaries like Milton Friedman and Laurence Kotlikoff. At least as we read it, the theory told us to do what we wanted, which was to spend money on stuff we didn’t quite need. After all, we’d be making good money when we graduated, so why not borrow a little against that future income to buy a car or go to Cancún?

Ramsey could have told me why not, but I doubt I would have listened; it’s a lesson you can perhaps learn only firsthand. I graduated into the teeth of the 2001 recession $100,000 in debt. My six-figure job offer evaporated when the consulting firm fell on hard times. It took me two years to find a permanent job, and when I did, that job was in journalism, which paid about a third of what I’d been expecting.

Just like me, our nation has experimented with the “educated” overuse of leverage, aka debt. Homeowners who believed that they would have been fools to rent when a mortgage-interest tax deduction was available have poured their savings and their hearts into homes they are now losing to foreclosure. M.B.A.s are shuttering the companies they leveraged to the hilt as they chased tax deductions and higher returns. Even our politicians speak of deficit spending as a sort of investment opportunity. In industries from autos to housing, even as the private sector has retreated to repair its balance sheets, the government has dangled money it has borrowed in front of potential buyers to tempt them to further purchases.

Debt magnifies our fortunes, whichever way they’re going. When incomes are rising, debt helps us live even better. When incomes are falling, fixed debt payments can push us into the abyss. If you have substantial assets, you can lose a lot more than your sterling FICO score in a bankruptcy, and bankruptcy makes it hard to save, or start over. Even if you don’t go bankrupt, debt payments make it difficult for you to accumulate wealth, or to take the kind of risks that can make your life better, like switching jobs, starting a business, or getting married. And of course, if everyone takes on too much leverage at once, the whole system can collapse.

Really, we know all this. We knew it before. Just as G. K. Chesterton once remarked of Christianity, the Grandma Plan hasn’t been tried and found wanting, so much as found difficult and left untried. It’s hard to make a collective decision to delay gratification—and even harder to “get your grandma on” when everyone else is out charging the good life to MasterCard.

After all, many people who got caught out in the housing bubble didn’t exactly want to take out an adjustable-rate mortgage with a 3 percent down payment. But there was no other way they could afford even a modest-size house in a decent school district. Houses were being priced, not on some notion of intrinsic value, but on the maximum payment that likely buyers could afford. As other buyers and many bankers became more willing to take absurd risks, even previously prudent consumers felt they had to follow suit. They couldn’t get “weird” without sacrificing their children’s education.

Dave Ramsey has little patience with this sort of argument. Some of his most scathing mockery is reserved for people who take out loans to pay tuition at an expensive private college. No school, he avers, is so much better than the local college that it’s worth gambling with your financial future.

There’s some evidence that he’s right about this; a study by the economists Stacy Berg Dale and Alan Krueger famously found that students who were accepted by schools with high average SAT scores, but chose to go somewhere else, earn about the same as those who actually attend the higher-ranked school. But there is also evidence to the contrary; and what nice upper-middle-class family is willing to, well, gamble with their child’s financial future?

This may be why Ramsey and the other evangelists for a debt-free existence have thrived most in a subculture that offers something even more sacred than a Harvard education. Though Ramsey’s television and radio shows have attracted a large secular audience, his hard-core followers still seem to be overwhelmingly evangelical. Ramsey closed his talk in Detroit with a sober lecture on taking care of yourself mentally, physically, emotionally, and of course, spiritually. “Bluntly,” he said, “I’m talking about this man named Jesus, and if you don’t know him, you need to be introduced.” The arena erupted in a joyous roar.

Though I did take the audio CD of Ramsey’s personal witness being handed out free at the exit, I’m afraid that Jesus and I aren’t really any better acquainted than we were before. Nonetheless, Ramsey has made a convert out of a secular journalist with one of the pricey M.B.A.s he likes to poke fun at. I have never felt as serenely in control of my finances as I have during these months of knowing that every single dollar is where it is supposed to be: either in the bank, or on a well-chaperoned date with our envelope organizer. The process has been surprisingly painless but, even more surprisingly, pleasant.

Of course, both my fiancé and I have already acquired our expensive educations and a pair of decent cars. We don’t have any kids, we don’t own a home, and it won’t hurt us to rent a few extra years until we have paid off the last of our student loans and can afford a 20 percent down payment on a house. It is easier for us to be weird than for most of our peers.

On the other hand, Americans aren’t going to fix our national financial problems until a lot more people decide to drop out of the “normal” competition to see who can borrow the most money in order to bid on a fixed number of homes in affluent school districts and places at selective colleges. You don’t need to be a Christian to look for a better way. Even an unbeliever knew enough to listen up when he saw the bright light on the road to Damascus.

Megan McArdle is The Atlantic’s business and economics editor, and the editor of the business channel at theatlantic.com.

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Full article and photo: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/mcardle-ramsey-debt

Nick Tennant, 24, the founder of Med Grow Cannabis College, something of a trade school for medical marijuana growers

At most colleges, marijuana is very much an extracurricular matter. But at Med Grow Cannabis College, marijuana is the curriculum: the history, the horticulture and the legal how-to’s of Michigan’s new medical marijuana program.

“This state needs jobs, and we think medical marijuana can stimulate the state economy with hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars,” said Nick Tennant, the 24-year-old founder of the college, which is actually a burgeoning business (no baccalaureates here) operating from a few bare-bones rooms in a Detroit suburb.

The six-week, $485 primer on medical marijuana is a cross between an agricultural extension class covering the growing cycle, nutrients and light requirements (“It’s harvest time when half the trichomes have turned amber and half are white”) and a gathering of serious potheads, sharing stories of their best highs (“Smoke that and you are … medicated!”).

The only required reading: “Marijuana Horticulture: The Indoor/Outdoor Medical Grower’s Bible” by Jorge Cervantes.

Even though the business of growing medical marijuana is legal under Michigan’s new law, there is enough nervousness about the enterprise that most students at a recent class did not want their names or photographs used. An instructor also asked not to be identified.

“My wife works for the government,” one student said, “and I told my mother-in-law I was going to a small-business class.”

While California’s medical marijuana program, the country’s oldest, is now big business, with hundreds of dispensaries in Los Angeles alone, the Michigan program, which started in April, is more representative of what is happening in other states that have legalized medical marijuana.

Under the Michigan law, patients whose doctors certify their medical need for marijuana can grow up to 12 cannabis plants themselves or name a “caregiver” who will grow the plants and sell the product. Anyone over 21 with no felony drug convictions can be a caregiver for up to five patients. So far, the Department of Community Health has registered about 5,800 patients and 2,400 caregivers.

A hydroponic system

For Mr. Tennant, who is certified as both a caregiver and a patient — he said he has stomach problems and anxiety — Med Grow replaces the auto detailing business he started straight out of high school, only to see it founder when the economy contracted. Med Grow began offering its course in September, with new classes starting every month.

On a recent Tuesday, two teachers led a four-hour class, starting with Todd Alton, a botanist who provided no tasting samples as he talked the students through a list of cannabis recipes, including crockpot cannabutter, chocolate canna-ganache and greenies (the cannabis alternative to brownies).

The second instructor, who would not give his name, took the class through the growing cycle, the harvest and the curing techniques to increase marijuana’s potency.

Mr. Tennant said he saw the school as the hub of a larger business that will sell supplies to its graduate medical marijuana growers, offer workshops and provide a network for both patient and caregiver referrals. Already, Med Grow is a gathering place for those interested in medical marijuana. The whiteboard in the reception room lists names and numbers of several patients looking for caregivers, and a caregiver looking for patients.

The students are a diverse group: white and black, some in their 20s, some much older, some employed, some not. Some keep their class attendance, and their growing plans, close to the chest.

“I’ve just told a couple of people I can trust,” said Jeffery Butler, 27. “It’s a business opportunity, but some people are still going to look at you funny. But I’m going to do it anyway.”

Scott Austin, an unemployed 41-year-old student, said he and two partners were planning to go into medical marijuana together.

“I never smoked marijuana in my life,” he said. “I heard about this at a business expo a couple of months ago.”

Because the Michigan program is so new, gray areas in the law have not been tested, creating real concern for some students. For example, it is not legal to start growing marijuana before being officially named a caregiver to a certified patient, but patients who are sick, certified and ready to buy marijuana generally do not want to wait through the months of the growing cycle until a crop is ready. So for the time being, coordinating entry into the business feels to some like a kind of Catch-22.

Students say they are getting all kinds of extra help and ideas from going to class.

“I want to learn all the little tricks, everything I can,” said Sue Maxwell, a student who drives each week from her home four hours north of Detroit. “It’s a big investment, and I want to do it right.”

Ms. Maxwell, who works at a bakery, is already a caregiver — in the old, nondrug sense of the word — to a few older people for whom she thinks medical marijuana might be a real boon.

“I fix their meals, and I help with housekeeping,” Ms. Maxwell said. “I have an 85-year-old lady who has no appetite. I don’t know if she’d have any interest in medical marijuana, but I bet it would help her.”

Ms. Maxwell said her plan to grow marijuana was slow in hatching.

“We were talking at the bakery all summer,” she said. “Just joking around, I said: ‘I’m going to grow medical marijuana. I’m a gardener, I’ve always dreamed of having a greenhouse, I think it would be great.’ And then I suddenly thought, hey, I really am going to grow medical marijuana.”

Tamar Lewin, New York Times

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Full article and photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/education/29marijuana.html

King Louis XIV of France never said L’état c’est moi,  Louis XV never said Après moi le déluge and Queen Marie Antoinette never said let them eat cake [Qu'ils mangent de la brioche]

Of course true scholars here on the blog already knew this but I didn’t. Those famous royal remarks are among dozens of misattributed, misunderstood and outright false quotations in a fun little book just published by two academics.

In their Petit Inventaire des Citations Malmenées [Little inventory of mishandled quotations] Paul Desalmand and Yves Stallini delight in knocking down famous lines that were outright invented or wrongly attributed to great figures of the past. They blame lazy journalists and historians for popularising dodgy quotes and making them up because they sound right.

Among these apocryphal quotations is King Henri IV’s Paris vaut bien une messe [Paris is well worth a mass]. No trace of this legendary quip by the ex-protestant king can be found in historical records. They suggest that it may have been invented by enemies of the popular 16th century ruler who switched to catholicism in order to have the crown.

Another quote spread by enemies is certainly Marie-Antoinette’s Qu’ils mangent de la brioche, say the authors. The doomed queen never uttered the line or anything like it when the hungry Parisians were at the gates of Versailles. They trace the quote to the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who described how, long before the revolution, there was a legend about a princess who said of hungry peasants ‘let them eat cake’.

As for Louis XV and his supposed remark on the flood, the quote should be more accurately attributed to Madame de la Pompadour, the king’s favourite in the 1750s. She is said to have joked to the king after a defeat by Prussia in the Seven Year War: “Après nous, le déluge“. But even that is dubious and the remark was more likely to have been spread as gossip at the time, the authors say.

Louis XIV never uttered the boast about being the embodiment of the state, says the book. The legend took off in 1655 when the 17-year-old monarch exerted his authority over the Paris parliament. There is no record of his using such language, which in any case would have contradicted his lifelong belief that he was the servant of l’Etat, not its incarnation.

Here are more made up or misattributed quotes:

Voltaire (see picture)  never uttered anything like his famous line on free speech “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. The authors say the quotation was invented in the United States and popularised in dictionaries of quotations there. 

Machiavelli never formulated the concept of divide and rule [divides ut regnes in Latin, diviser pour mieux régner in French]. It is apocryphal.

Herman Goering never said “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver“. It came from a 1933 play by Hanns Johst, a pro-Nazi writer, whose character said “When I hear the word culture, I load my Browning”.

Sartre’s famous line l’enfer c’est les autres [Hell is other people] has been taken completely out of context, says the book. A character in Sartre’s wartime play Huis Clos says the words but he meant that the presence of other people forces one to practise moral behaviour. It is used now as a way of saying ‘I can’t stand other people’.  

And a final quote to end, La vieillesse est un naufrage [Old age is a shipwreck]. General Charles de Gaulle is famous for using the line, but it is often attributed to Chateaubriand. In reality de Gaulle invented it. Writing about Philippe Pétain, he said that he believed that the World War One hero would not have collaborated with the Nazis in 1940 if he had been his younger self.

Charles Bremmer, London Times

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Full article and photos: http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/charles_bremner/2009/11/things-french-kings-never-said.html

Last week the New Oxford American Dictionary named “unfriend” as word of the year.

“Unfriend” is a verb that means to remove someone as a friend on a social networking site. Reading the shortlist for word of the year was depressing. There was “funemployed” — referring to those who take advantage of being out of work to have fun — and “sexting” — when someone sends sexy messages by phone. Perhaps even more disturbing: “Tramp stamp” — a tattoo on a woman’s lower back.

I knew someone once who had a “tramp stamp”. By coincidence, it was the same person who “unfriended” me.

I’m not a fan of hybrid words. I remember when I first heard the term, “metrosexual” I thought: no way this will ever catch on. Turns out there’s a word for what I was. Wrong.

Maybe it all started with the labradoodle. A crossbreed of a labrador retriever and a poodle, these adorable (and hypoallergenic) dogs introduced a whole new area of possibilities for cute word combinations. In my building in New York, there’s a cockerpoo, a shnoodle, a spoodle, a doodle and an eskimoodle. Those are fine but then there’s also a bug. This is a boston terrier and a pug.

And therein lies the problem. No one will ever know what a bug is. It’s far too obtuse. As soon as you start saying you’re dog is a bug, you’re asking for trouble.

Which is why I’ve never understood why someone would use the word: ‘frenemy.’ It just seems so lazy. How much extra time does it really take to explain the situation. Does everything have to be shortened?

Then the other day, I was telling someone about a friendship that had developed very quickly and this person said, “I know what you mean – it’s a ‘friendmance’.” A what? A friendmance. It is, she explained, a friendship that’s like a romance.

Even worse than a frenemy is a friendmance. Because at least “frenemy” has some lyricism to it. A “friendmance” is just two words cut-and-pasted together.

I was at dinner with my friend, Laura, talking about this and she agreed that she too, can’t stand the current trend towards the conflation of two words. “I have a word for it,” she said. “Combocabulary.”

I love that she has made up a word to describe how much she hates made up words.

When it comes to technological terms, I don’t mind the blending as much. Possibly because there’s a functional definition behind it and the terminology used is specific to the medium. For instance a “webcast” or a “webisode” Even a “vlog” — a form of blogging with video — seems appropriate. Anything that’s web-based is acceptable because it makes me sound tech-savvy. And I need all the help I can get.

It seems like every other week, there’s a new word that’s come up. I took an informal poll and the one that everyone currently hates the most is: staycation. I can see why. A staycation became a popular neologism during the recent financial crisis — when in the UK, the weak pound made going overseas prohibitively expensive.

Staycationers stay at home, check e-mail, do chores and try not to spend money. In other words, they are writers.

The Urban Dictionary is filled with all sorts of these made-up words. From shopaholic to mantrum (when a grown man throws a tantrum). I’m not sure how authoritative it is though. The word “bromance” has 42 definitions.

I asked a straight male friend if he would ever use the word “bromance”.

“No,” he said. “It makes me cringe, probably because I hate the word ‘bro’ I have never, even in jest, called anyone ‘bro.’ Guys who call each other ‘bro’, I imagine are frat brothers or investment bankers (same thing) and I don’t relate.”

The only thing that bothers me more than when people use fake words is when someone adds “gate” on to the end of a situation.

The other night I was having dinner with a friend who asked if I’d heard about “waxing-gate”. This was a conspiratorial incident that involved a Russian eyebrow-waxer, and two frenemies. It was at that point that I decided I’m not made for this world.

When I told her this, you know what she said?

“Oh my god, that’s sarcasmic.”

Ariel Leve, London Times

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Full article: http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/ariel_leve/article6936529.ece

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Full article: http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/ariel_leve/article6936529.ece

Historically, young women and men who sought to thrive in publishing made their way to Manhattan. Once there, they were told, they would work in marginal jobs for indifferent bosses doing mundane tasks and then one day, if they did all of that without whimper or complaint, they would magically be granted access to a gilded community, the large heaving engine of books, magazines and newspapers.

Beyond that, all it took to find a place to stand on a very crowded island, as E. B. White suggested, was a willingness to be lucky. Once inside that velvet rope, they would find the escalator that would take them through the various tiers of the business and eventually, they would be the ones deciding who would be allowed to come in.

As even casual readers of media news know, those assumptions now sound precious, preposterous even. Calvinistic ideals are no match for macromedia economics that have vaporized significant components of the business model that drives traditional publishing.

The most popular books of the holiday season have become cat toys in a price war between online and offline retailers. Newspapers still hang onto a portion of seasonal ads, but the retail chains that place them have consolidated into a much smaller cohort, and much of their spending is bifurcated between old and new media marketing. Magazines intended to help the reader primp for Christmas parties are, in many cases, half as big as they were just a few short years ago.

Pages are down, spending is down, revenues are down, and the biggest feature of this holiday season in the media kingdom has been layoffs and buyouts at Condé Nast, Time Inc., The Associated Press, and yes, The New York Times.

(And it’s not just Manhattan-centric endeavors. Published ambition has been diminished by new realities elsewhere, most recently in the announced closing of The Washington Post’s remaining domestic bureaus. Last week, in an interview with Howard Kurtz, the executive editor, Marcus Brauchli, said it plainly: “We are not a national news organization of record serving a general audience.” Yeow.)

That feeling of age, of a coming sunset, is tough to avoid in all corners of traditional publishing. Earlier in November, the New York comptroller said that employment in communications in New York had lost 60,000 jobs since 2000, a year when the media industry here seemed at the height of its powers.

I arrived in New York that same year as part of Inside.com, a digital news site conceived to cover a media space that was converging and morphing into something wholly new. The site covered the mainstream media’s efforts to come to grips with new realities and efforts by new players to cash in on emerging technology.

Few of us could have conceived that in the next decade some of the reigning titans of media would be routed. Profligate dot-com ad money that had fattened print went away in a digital wipeout, and when digital media came back, it was to dine on the mainstream media rather than engorge it. After 2000, jobs in traditional media industries declined at a rate of about 2.5 percent annually and then went into a dive in 2008 or so. (Inside.com, an idea before its time — hey, let’s charge for high-quality, business-oriented content — disappeared after about 18 months.)

That carnage has left behind an island of misfit toys, trains whose cabooses have square wheels and bird fish who are trying to swim in thin air. The skills that once commanded $4 for every shiny word are far less valuable at a time when the supply of both editorial and advertising content more or less doubles every year.

Where do all the burgeoning pixels come from? Everywhere, and cheap at that. An outfit called Demand Media now tests headlines for reader salience and cranks out thousands of articles and videos daily that it pays about $20 apiece for.

Web crawlers grab expensive content and replicate it far away from the organizations that produce it. Various media labs are now testing algorithms that assemble facts into narratives that deliver information, no writers required. The results would not be mistaken for literary journalism, but on the Web, pretty good — or even not terrible — is often good enough.

For those of us who work in Manhattan media, it means that a life of occasional excess and prerogative has been replaced by a drum beat of goodbye speeches with sheet cakes and cheap sparkling wine. It’s a wan reminder that all reigns are temporary, that the court of self-appointed media royalty was serving at the pleasure of an advertising economy that itself was built on inefficiency and excess. Google fixed that.

Certain stalwart brands will survive and even thrive because of a new scarcity of quality content for niche audiences that demand more than generic information. The chip that was implanted in me when I arrived at this newspaper — you might call it New York Times Exceptionalism — leads me to conclude that this organization will be one of those, but the insurgency continues apace.

Those of us who covered media were told for years that the sky was falling, and nothing happened. And then it did. Great big chunks of the sky gave way and magazines tumbled — Gourmet!? — that seemed as if they were as solid as the skyline itself. But to those of us who were here back in September of 2001, we learned that even the edifice of Manhattan itself is subject to perforation and endless loss.

So what do we get instead? The future, which is not a bad deal if you ignore all the collateral gore. Young men and women are still coming here to remake the world, they just won’t be stopping by the human resources department of Condé Nast to begin their ascent.

For every kid that I bump into who is wandering the media industry looking for an entrance that closed some time ago, I come across another who is a bundle of ideas, energy and technological mastery. The next wave is not just knocking on doors, but seeking to knock them down.

Somewhere down in the Flatiron, out in Brooklyn, over in Queens or up in Harlem, cabals of bright young things are watching all the disruption with more than an academic interest. Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago. And they are ginning content from their audiences in the form of social media or finding ways of making ambient information more useful. They are jaded in the way youth requires, but have the confidence that is a gift of their age as well.

For them, New York is not an island sinking, but one that is rising on a fresh, ferocious wave.

David Carr, New York Times

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/business/media/30carr.html

Military trucks in Arunachal Pradesh, where India has maintained a heavy military presence since its 1962 war with China.

During President Obama’s recent visit to China, many in India speculated that an emerging “G2” would leave their nation out in the cold.

“Obama’s China (credit) card casts shadow on PM’s US visit” ran a headline on The Times of India’s Web site shortly before India’s prime minister left for America and his own meeting last week with Mr. Obama — highlighted by the president’s first state dinner.

The country’s prickly response points to the lingering distrust with which India, which often leaned toward Moscow during the cold war, still views the United States. It is a reminder, also, of the many sensitivities that drive Indian foreign policy — sensitivities that are not always recognized in America.

For all the talk of a new era of Indo-American collaboration, Americans tend to view India through the narrow prisms of two shared concerns — a battle against Islamic extremists, and the benefits of international trade. But India is a complicated country in a complex part of the world — buffeted by internal insurgencies, surrounded by hostile neighbors, marginalized until recently as underdeveloped.

In the last decade, four of India’s neighbors (Pakistan, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka) have dealt with rebellions that, to varying degrees, have filtered into India. Since independence in 1947, India has been involved in armed conflicts in at least five nearby lands (Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, China, the Maldives); it has also become a nuclear power.

Pakistan is the most intense flashpoint, and was on many minds in a week that marked the first anniversary of attacks by Muslim extremists, traced by India to Pakistan, that left 163 people dead in Mumbai. But it is only one potential flashpoint.

Another is China, which humiliated India in a border war in 1962. Last summer, after reports surfaced in the Indian media about increased border incursions by China’s army, India began moving aircraft and soldiers closer to China. In October, an editorial in The People’s Daily, a Chinese Communist Party publication, accused India of “recklessness and arrogance.” For Indians, the verbal and military jousting that followed has stirred deep anxiety, now heightened by suspicions that America is playing up to China. When Presidents Obama and Hu issued a joint statement that appeared to open the door to Chinese involvement in South Asia, the Indian press and political establishment responded with fury, born out of a sense of betrayal.

In adddition to its regional challenges, India is entangled in a host of complicated global negotiations — on climate change, trade, nuclear proliferation, intellectual property rights. As the country emerges onto the world stage, it has often had a hard time balancing its parochial interests with its desire to play the role of a responsible global power.

India’s response to all these challenges is complicated by its own difficulty in articulating an overarching strategic doctrine.

Writing in 1992, the late American political scientist George Tanham drew attention to the lack of a broad cohesive vision. Indian foreign policy, he argued, was fragmented; he pointed, for example, to the very different threat perceptions in northern India, which tends to worry about Pakistan and China, and in the south, which is more focused on northern dominance and seaward threats.

It hasn’t always been this way. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, envisioned his nation as a force for global peace and justice. He committed India to policies of nonproliferation and anti-imperialism, and professed nonalignment in the cold war. Arguably, India’s moral high ground was always somewhat shaky; the country has rarely hesitated to use force to protect its interests. (After Indian troops marched into the then-Portuguese colony of Goa in 1961, President John Kennedy was reported to have remarked that maybe now he could be spared India’s lectures about a moral foreign policy.) Nonetheless, India’s expression of a moral foreign policy did provide an element of cohesiveness that has frayed in recent decades.

Today, as India tries to define its role as an emerging superpower, the search for a cohesive foreign policy that could articulate a response to the myriad challenges confronting the country continues.Pratap Bhanu Mehta, an Indian political scientist, says a big question for India is how to handle its new status, and in particular whether it wants to adhere to the notion of a moral foreign policy. “Now that we have in a sense arrived, what do we do?” he asked. “Do we participate in the standard great-power exceptionalism, or do we leverage our power to create a rule-bound system?”

Just as for any great power, that would be an easier question for India to answer were it not for problems in its own backyard. Indeed, Mr. Mehta argues that India is in a sense caught in a “defensive crouch” — tied to its neighbors, forced to react to regional security threats, and held back in its aspirations as a global superpower by the volatility of its neighborhood.

Akash Kapur, New York Times

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Full article and photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/weekinreview/29kapur-web.html

BLUSHING AT THE THOUGHT There is no corresponding drug like Viagra for women, who see men enjoying the benefits of a little blue pill.

CHARLOTTE McLAUGHLIN was married for 35 wonderful years. “He was the only partner in my life, a terrific guy,” said Ms. McLaughlin, a retired cosmetics consultant. But in 2001, her husband, Bill, died of heart disease at 60, and to help cope with the loss, Ms. McLaughlin, who was in her 50s, began taking an antidepressant.

Then in 2004 she met another terrific guy, a 65-year-old widower named Sanford, and felt an attraction, though she worried about keeping up. Antidepressants can inhibit sex drive. “I was afraid of pain at my age, after three or four years of not having … you know, relations.”

So Ms. McLaughlin did what a lot of middle-aged women here do when they are not ready to give up on sex. She visited the Pelvic and Sexual Health Institute, which treats about 200 women a week, mostly from the Philadelphia-New York City corridor, but some from as far away as Canada, South America and Britain. Half the patients seen by the staff of 20 are boomer women. A lot have husbands and boyfriends who’ve been given a recharge via Viagra or even a penile implant, and, as Ms. McLaughlin said, “We need something, too.”

Ms. McLaughlin first had a pelvic exam with the medical director, Dr. Kristene Whitmore, a urologist, and then a sexual medicine consultation with Susan Kellogg, who has a doctorate in human sexuality and is a nurse practitioner. Dr. Kellogg told her about antidepressants with fewer side effects and gave her a topical oil for heightening sexual arousal.

“Oh yes, it worked, absolutely,” said Ms. McLaughlin, who reports that for the next three years, she and Sanford enjoyed a healthy sex life. That is, until 2007, when at 68, Sanford died of a brain tumor.

By then Ms. McLaughlin had reached 60, but she was not yet ready to be alone. Two months ago she was at a funeral and met an old girlfriend who set her up with a guy — now a widower — they’d known in high school. Ms. McLaughlin and her new man have been going out for six weeks, and things, she reports, are clicking. So Ms. McLaughlin made a recent return visit to Dr. Whitmore and Dr. Kellogg. “In case I need — I don’t know if I need anything,” she said. “To tell you the truth, it’s been pretty hot.”

Ms. McLaughlin counts herself lucky, and statistically she’s right. Several studies, including one published in 1999 in The Journal of the American Medical Association, have indicated that sexual dysfunction is more common in women (43 percent) than men (31 percent). And it’s worse for middle-aged women. A survey of 31,581 women published in 2008 in Obstetrics & Gynecology found 44.6 percent of those age 45 to 64 reported a problem with desire, arousal or orgasm, compared with 27.2 percent of women age 18 to 44.

Since 1998, men have had Viagra, and for many years, doctors prescribed hormone replacement therapy for women to ease menopause symptoms and improve sex drive. But in 2002, hormone therapy was linked to small increases in breast cancer, heart attacks and strokes. Since then, Dr. Kellogg said, “We’ve had to be more creative.”

The typical boomer patient they see, she said, “is a woman 52 to 54, a year or two after menopause, and she’s saying, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t keep up.’ ” Dr. Kellogg said 10 to 15 percent point to Viagra.

“Viagra has brought women out of the closet on this,” Dr. Whitmore said. “It’s given them a way to talk about it. Suddenly he’s got a sex life again and she’s crying in pain. No one’s talked about the impact Viagra would have on her, which is why it’s important to work with the couple. She needs to understand what she’s going through is normal.” Their practice includes six sex therapists and a psychologist who often wind up seeing both partners.

Originally, Dr. Kellogg and Dr. Whitmore had separate practices and referred patients to each other. They estimate that in 50 percent of cases, there’s an overlap between pelvic-area health problems and sexual dysfunction, which led them to merge their practices 15 years ago.

Dr. Owen Montgomery, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Drexel University medical school, said that the treatment model Dr. Kellogg and Dr. Whitmore have created for women — a combination of sophisticated pelvic and urinary care along with sexual medicine and therapy all under one roof — is one of just a few in the country. “They’re on the cutting edge of a new field,” he said. “I used to have a gynecologist partner and if a middle-aged woman asked him about sex, he’d say, ‘I don’t talk about sex.’ Thankfully, that’s changing.”

Patty Maisano, 50, a nurse who’s been married to her second husband for 13 years, first visited the office with pain problems that required a hysterectomy and urinary surgery. But once these issues were addressed, she said, she continued to have pain during sex. Dr. Kellogg and her team offered a variety of medications, injections, lubricants, sprays and exercises over the next few years, which Ms. Maisano said made only “moderate improvements” in her sex life. What finally worked, she said, was a nonhormonal topical product called Zestra, made from botanical oils and meant to heighten sensitivity to touch. “This last month, I feel like I’m back in my 20s,” Ms. Maisano said. “My husband is just thrilled that we can be intimate and both get pleasure out of it. I can see a sigh of relief that I’m not in pain.”

“So many women give up,” she added. “That’s a shame. It’s so important. You marry your best friend, but intimacy is what makes a marriage work.”

Zestra is a favorite of the center’s patients, said Dr. Kellogg, who has worked as a paid consultant for Semprae Laboratories, which makes the product. But she cautions that even if a product helps arousal, that is not the same as desire, and rekindling desire is the most complex challenge in her work.

To date, there has been no elixir for Sue, 49, a paralegal who’s been married 26 years, and asked that her last name not be used. She first came to the office in 2005 with health-related pain issues that required surgery. “A year later,” she said, “I was feeling better, but had no sexual desire.” She also used Zestra and said she found it improved her sex life for a while. “But now I’m going through the same situation again — no sex drive,” she said. “My husband does occasionally have to take the Viagra. He’ll say, ‘Please, please, please.’ I’m like, ‘All right, all right, all right.’ His drive’s stronger than mine and he’s 73.”

“So I’m going back to see Dr. Kellogg,” she said.

Dr. Kellogg has patients who somehow have decided that 58 is the age it’s permissible to stop having sex. “I just had one today,” she said. “She told me 58 is when partners start sleeping in separate beds. I said some do, many do not. She said her partner’s O.K. with it. I said, ‘Are you sure?’ She’s going to bring him in and we’re going to verify that. We’ll see what happens next visit.”

Ms. McLaughlin, the 60-something who is dating again and still going strong, counts her blessings. “I’m very fortunate, very blessed, very thankful,” she said. “I have great faith. Every day I go to Mass and thank God that I am just full of life.”

Michael Winerip, New York Times

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/fashion/29genb.html

In-depth knowledge of a subject is not enough. Professionalism and integrity are essential too, says senior judge

The illegal trade is increasingly lucrative, with dire results for science

Fossilised remains in a museum in Kunming, China

Armed with rock chisels, it took the thief only a few minutes to wipe out 135 million years of history. The fossilised iguanodon footprint was hacked out of the limestone slab where it had lain in a Dorset quarry and spirited away by an illicit collector.

 Some 5,000 miles away in southern India, scientists last month issued a plea for villagers and even student palaeontologists to halt the mass looting of hundreds of dinosaur eggs whose petrified embryos could shed new light on the extinction of a species.

Fascination with the ferocious beasts has never been greater, with scientists announcing almost weekly the discovery of new prehistoric species from giant crocodiles to feathered lizards that bear testimony to an evolutionary link with birds. But with a pristine Tyrannosaurus rex specimen fetching up to $8.3m (£5m), there is growing concern that a booming trade in stolen or illicit fossils is wrecking unique sites and seeing previously unknown species disappear into private collections, where they are lost to science.

One of the world’s leading palaeontologists told The Independent that fossil rustling had become a “huge international problem” stretching from developed markets like Britain to dinosaur hotspots such as Mongolia and China. The speed and anonymity of the internet has led to a thriving black market linking unscrupulous dealers to private collectors interested in “trophy” fossils for display rather than study. Once a fossil is dug out of the ground without proper recording of information such as its location and depth, at least half its scientific value is lost.

Even a correctly-recorded specimen which ends up in private hands is lost to science because scientific journals do not publish research on specimens which cannot be readily accessed or peer reviewed.

Professor Philip Currie of the University of Alberta, an eminent Canadian scientist who is chairman of the ethics committee of the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology, said: “This is a huge international problem that affects most of us who do research in the field. I do a lot of work in China and Mongolia, where highly significant fossils, including new species of animals, feathered dinosaurs and birds, are regularly smuggled out illegally and sold at big international fossil shows and over the web. I have seen many quarries [in Mongolia] where, in the quest for illicit profit, specimens have been destroyed by incompetent collectors looking for teeth and claws. The destruction of specimens that survived underground for 75 million years only to be ripped up for a few dollars is heart-rending.”

After a spate of thefts in Scotland and northern England seven years ago, when fossil hunters armed with diggers, electric saws and dynamite stole stones worth ten of thousands of pounds, police and wildlife conservation bodies launched a campaign to crack down on illegal collectors.

A voluntary code of conduct for Britain’s army of enthusiasts has also been successful in ensuring that specimens are submitted for assessment to museums and conservation groups. But there is evidence that the plundering of Britain’s dinosaur-bearing rocks is continuing. Earlier this year, a thief carved the 18in iguanodon footprint out of the Coombefield Quarry on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast at Portland.

The discovery of the theft prompted the owner of the site, Portland Gas, to order the removal and secure storage of another 25 slabs containing footprints from various two-legged and four-legged dinosaurs.

More than 30 imprints from a three-toed dinosaur stolen from Bendrick Rock, near Barry in Wales, have been found for sale on eBay and fossil shops on the south coast of England.

Jonathan Larwood, senior palaeontologist with Natural England, said: “The vast majority of collectors out there are law-abiding and will let the appropriate people know if they find something of interest. A lot of fossils are found on our eroding coasts and this type of collecting is really important. It is something we want to encourage. But there have always been unscrupulous collectors who will steal fossils and seek to sell them on, and the internet has provided them with a much more easily accessible market.”

In order to shut down illicit dealers, landowners are increasingly resorting to injunctions to restrict the activities of repeat offenders. The Independent understands that the National Trust is currently seeking an injunction against one fossil collector who has repeatedly ignored demands to stop digging at one of Britain’s richest fossil sites. The Trust declined to comment on the case, saying that proceedings were still ongoing. But while the trade in illegally recovered fossils from Britain may be limited to a few dozen specimens every year, the problem is on a far greater scale elsewhere. In the village of Senthurai in Tamil Nadu, southern India, scientists had to call in police last month when storms uncovered hundreds of dinosaur eggs that had been concealed by sand 8ft below the ground. As news spread of the discovery, the site was plundered by villagers and students accused of selling on the eggs. Professor K Kumaraswamy, head of geosciences at Bharathidasan University, said: “We are unable to stop the plundering. Each egg or egg cluster may provide a unique insight into the life and extinction of the dinosaur species.”

The allure of the open market means that potentially unique or important specimens like the eggs will soon be circulating in a fossil-selling industry worth at least £100m a year. A spate of museum openings in Japan and a booming market in North America in recent years has led to eye-watering prices for so-called “voucher” specimens such as a T. rex skeleton. A private buyer last week paid between $5m and $8m for a T. Rex fossil, which will now be displayed in an unnamed American museum.

The risks of mixing academia with the fossil business were highlighted 10 years ago when an archaeoraptor bought on the open market for an American museum and hailed by National Geographic magazine as proof of the missing link between birds and dinosaurs turned out to be a “composite” – two fossils cleverly fused together to make a convincing fake.

Decades of expertise in fossil cleaning mean that Britain is also profiting from the commercial trade. Consignments of Chinese dinosaur eggs discovered in the 1990s were prepared in the UK, revealing beautifully preserved dinosaur embryos. But, because they have been sold to private collections and question marks remain about whether they were legally exported from China, scientists have not been able to study the specimens.

Paul Barrett, a dinosaur researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, said: “Fossils are a finite resource. In cases where they are recovered illicitly or illegally, and sold on, there is a loss of data to science. I would not like to estimate just how big that loss is.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/fossil-theft-one-of-our-dinosaurs-is-missing-1826931.html

America’s mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated—one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material optimism. It pumped air into the housing bubble. And one year into the worst downturn since the Depression, it’s still going strong.

Pastor Fernanado Garay preaches at the Casa del Padre’s church in Charlotteville, Virginia.

Like the ambitions of many immigrants who attend services there, Casa del Padre’s success can be measured by upgrades in real estate. The mostly Latino church, in Charlottesville, Virginia, has moved from the pastor’s basement, where it was founded in 2001, to a rented warehouse across the street from a small mercado five years later, to a middle-class suburban street last year, where the pastor now rents space from a lovely old Baptist church that can’t otherwise fill its pews. Every Sunday, the parishioners drive slowly into the parking lot, never parking on the sidewalk or grass—“because Americanos don’t do that,” one told me—and file quietly into church. Some drive newly leased SUVs, others old work trucks with paint buckets still in the bed. The pastor, Fernando Garay, arrives last and parks in front, his dark-blue Mercedes Benz always freshly washed, the hubcaps polished enough to reflect his wingtips.

It can be hard to get used to how much Garay talks about money in church, one loyal parishioner, Billy Gonzales, told me one recent Sunday on the steps out front. Back in Mexico, Gonzales’s pastor talked only about “Jesus and heaven and being good.” But Garay talks about jobs and houses and making good money, which eventually came to make sense to Gonzales: money is “really important,” and besides, “we love the money in Jesus Christ’s name! Jesus loved money too!” That Sunday, Garay was preaching a variation on his usual theme, about how prosperity and abundance unerringly find true believers. “It doesn’t matter what country you’re from, what degree you have, or what money you have in the bank,” Garay said. “You don’t have to say, ‘God, bless my business. Bless my bank account.’ The blessings will come! The blessings are looking for you! God will take care of you. God will not let you be without a house!”

Pastor Garay, 48, is short and stocky, with thick black hair combed back. In his off hours, he looks like a contented tourist, in his printed Hawaiian shirts or bright guayaberas. But he preaches with a ferocity that taps into his youth as a cocaine dealer with a knife in his back pocket. “Fight the attack of the devil on my finances! Fight him! We declare financial blessings! Financial miracles this week, NOW NOW NOW!” he preached that Sunday. “More work! Better work! The best finances!” Gonzales shook and paced as the pastor spoke, eventually leaving his wife and three kids in the family section to join the single men toward the front, many of whom were jumping, raising their Bibles, and weeping. On the altar sat some anointing oils, alongside the keys to the Mercedes Benz.

Later, D’andry Then, a trim, pretty real-estate agent and one of the church founders, stood up to give her testimony. Business had not been good of late, and “you know, Monday I have to pay this, and Tuesday I have to pay that.” Then, just that morning, “Jesus gave me $1,000.” She didn’t explain whether the gift came in the form of a real-estate commission or a tax refund or a stuffed envelope left at her door. The story hung somewhere between metaphor and a literal image of barefoot Jesus handing her a pile of cash. No one in the church seemed the least bit surprised by the story, and certainly no one expressed doubt. “If you have financial pressure on you, and you don’t know where the next payment is coming from, don’t pay any attention to that!” she continued. “Don’t get discouraged! Jesus is the answer.”

America’s churches always reflect shifts in the broader culture, and Casa del Padre is no exception. The message that Jesus blesses believers with riches first showed up in the postwar years, at a time when Americans began to believe that greater comfort could be accessible to everyone, not just the landed class. But it really took off during the boom years of the 1990s, and has continued to spread ever since. This stitched-together, homegrown theology, known as the prosperity gospel, is not a clearly defined denomination, but a strain of belief that runs through the Pentecostal Church and a surprising number of mainstream evangelical churches, with varying degrees of intensity. In Garay’s church, God is the “Owner of All the Silver and Gold,” and with enough faith, any believer can access the inheritance. Money is not the dull stuff of hourly wages and bank-account statements, but a magical substance that comes as a gift from above. Even in these hard times, it is discouraged, in such churches, to fall into despair about the things you cannot afford. “Instead of saying ‘I’m poor,’ say ‘I’m rich,’” Garay’s wife, Hazael, told me one day. “The word of God will manifest itself in reality.”

Many explanations have been offered for the housing bubble and subsequent crash: interest rates were too low; regulation failed; rising real-estate prices induced a sort of temporary insanity in America’s middle class. But there is one explanation that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in American culture—a shift in the American conception of divine Providence and its relationship to wealth.

In his book Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American dream, each intertwined with religious faith. The traditional Protestant hero is a self-made man. He is disciplined and hardworking, and believes that his “success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan.” The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man—a “speculative confidence man,” Lears calls him, who prefers “risky ventures in real estate,” and a more “fluid, mobile democracy.” The self-made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance, with “grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God.” The Gilded Age launched the myth of the self-made man, as the Rockefellers and other powerful men in the pews connected their wealth to their own virtue. In these boom-and-crash years, the more reckless alter ego dominates. In his book, Lears quotes a reverend named Jeffrey Black, who sounds remarkably like Garay: “The whole hope of a human being is that somehow, in spite of the things I’ve done wrong, there will be an episode when grace and fate shower down on me and an unearned blessing will come to me—that I’ll be the one.”

I had come to Charlottesville to learn more about this second strain of the American dream—one that’s been ascendant for a generation or more. I wanted to try to piece together the connection between the gospel and today’s economic reality, and to see whether “prosperity” could possibly still seem enticing, or even plausible, in this distinctly unprosperous moment. (Very much so, as it turns out.) Charlottesville may not be the heartland of the prosperity gospel, which is most prevalent in the Sun Belt—where many of the country’s foreclosure hot spots also lie. And Garay preaches an unusually pure version of the gospel. Still, the particulars of both Garay and his congregation are revealing.

Among Latinos the prosperity gospel has been spreading rapidly. In a recent Pew survey, 73 percent of all religious Latinos in the United States agreed with the statement: “God will grant financial success to all believers who have enough faith.” For a generation of poor and striving Latino immigrants, the gospel seems to offer a road map to affluence and modern living. Garay’s church is comprised mostly of first-generation immigrants. More than others I’ve visited, it echoes back a highly distilled, unself-conscious version of the current thinking on what it means to live the American dream.

One other thing makes Garay’s church a compelling case study. From 2001 to 2007, while he was building his church, Garay was also a loan officer at two different mortgage companies. He was hired explicitly to reach out to the city’s growing Latino community, and Latinos, as it happened, were disproportionately likely to take out the sort of risky loans that later led to so many foreclosures. To many of his parishioners, Garay was not just a spiritual adviser, but a financial one as well.

Many of the terms and concepts used by prosperity preachers today date back to Oral Roberts, a poor farmer’s son turned Pentecostal preacher. Garay grew up watching Roberts on television and considers him a hero; he hopes to send all three of his children to Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the late 1940s, Roberts claimed his Bible flipped open to the Third Epistle of John, verse 2: “Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health. Even as thy soul prospereth.” Soon Roberts developed his famous concept of seed faith, still popular today. If people would donate money to his ministry, a “seed” offered to God, he’d say, then God would multiply it a hundredfold. Eventually, Roberts retreated into a life that revolved around private jets and country clubs.

Roberts’s fame had faded by the late 1980s, and prosperity preaching briefly imploded soon after. We all remember Tammy Faye Bakker and her mascara tears, along with her husband, Jim, and his various scandals. They took their place in a procession of slick, showy faith healers on Christian television who ultimately succumbed to earthly temptation.

But since that time, the movement has made itself over, moving out of the fringe and into the upwardly mobile megachurch class. In the past decade, it has produced about a dozen celebrity pastors, who show up at White House events, on secular radio, and as guests on major TV talk shows. Kirbyjon Caldwell, a Methodist megapastor in Houston and a purveyor of the prosperity gospel, gave the benediction at both of George W. Bush’s inaugurals. Instead of shiny robes or gaudy jewelry, these preachers wear Italian suits and modest wedding bands. Instead of screaming and sweating, they smile broadly and speak in soothing, therapeutic terms. But their message is essentially the same. “Every day, you’re going to live that abundant life!” preaches Joel Osteen, a best-selling author, the nation’s most popular TV preacher, and the pastor of Lakewood Church, in Houston, the country’s largest church by far.

Among mainstream, nondenominational megachurches, where much of American religious life takes place, “prosperity is proliferating” rapidly, says Kate Bowler, a doctoral candidate at Duke University and an expert in the gospel. Few, if any, of these churches have prosperity in their title or mission statement, but Bowler has analyzed their sermons and teachings. Of the nation’s 12 largest churches, she says, three are prosperity—Osteen’s, which dwarfs all the other megachurches; Tommy Barnett’s, in Phoenix; and T. D. Jakes’s, in Dallas. In second-tier churches—those with about 5,000 members—the prosperity gospel dominates. Overall, Bowler classifies 50 of the largest 260 churches in the U.S. as prosperity. The doctrine has become popular with Americans of every background and ethnicity; overall, Pew found that 66 percent of all Pentecostals and 43 percent of “other Christians”—a category comprising roughly half of all respondents—believe that wealth will be granted to the faithful. It’s an upbeat theology, argues Barbara Ehrenreich in her new book, Bright-Sided, that has much in common with the kind of “positive thinking” that has come to dominate America’s boardrooms and, indeed, its entire culture.

On the cover of his 4 million-copy best seller from 2004, Your Best Life Now, Joel Osteen looks like a recent college grad who just got hired by Goldman Sachs and can’t believe his good luck. His hair is full, his teeth are bright, his suit is polished but not flashy; he looks like a guy who would more likely shake your hand than cast out your demons. Osteen took over his father’s church in 1999. He had little preaching experience, although he’d managed the television ministry for years. The church grew quickly, as Osteen packaged himself to appeal to the broadest audience possible. In his books and sermons, Osteen quotes very little scripture, opting instead to tell uplifting personal anecdotes. He avoids controversy, and rarely appears on Christian TV. In a popular YouTube clip, he declines to confirm Larry King’s suggestion that only those who believe in Jesus will go to heaven.

Osteen is often derided as Christianity Lite, but he is more like Positivity Extreme. “Cast down anything negative, any thought that brings fear, worry, doubt, or unbelief,” he urges. “Your attitude should be: ‘I refuse to go backward. I am going forward with God. I am going to be the person he wants me to be. I’m going to fulfill my destiny.’” Telling yourself you are poor, or broke, or stuck in a dead-end job is a form of sin and “invites more negativity into your life,” he writes. Instead, you have to “program your mind for success,” wake up every morning and tell yourself, “God is guiding and directing my steps.” The advice is exactly like the message of The Secret, or any number of American self-help blockbusters that edge toward magical thinking, except that the religious context adds another dimension.Your Best Life Now, which has fueled a TV show that Osteen claims is now seen in 200 million homes worldwide, opens with a story of a man on vacation in Hawaii. He was “a good man who had achieved a modest measure of success, but he was coasting along, thinking that he’d already reached his limits.” While sightseeing, he and his wife admired a gorgeous house on a hill. “I can’t even imagine living in a place like that,” he said. For this bit of self-deprecation and modesty, Osteen pities the man: “His own thoughts and attitudes,” he writes, “were condemning him to mediocrity,” or what is known in the gospel as the “defeated life.”A few pages later comes the corrective, the model of a “victor” and not a “victim.” Osteen and his wife, Victoria, are walking around their neighborhood in Houston when they pass a beautiful house being built. “Most of the other homes around us were one-story, ranch-style homes that were forty to fifty years old, but this house was a large two-story home, with high ceilings and oversized windows,” he writes. “It was a lovely, inspiring place.” Victoria desperately wanted a house “just like it,” but Joel was worried about how stretched they already were. “Thinking of our bank account and my income at the time, it seemed impossible to me,” he writes. But this, of course, is an example of ungodly, negative thinking. With her unwavering faith, Victoria wouldn’t let it drop. Soon she convinced Joel and then he, too, started to believe that “God could bring it to pass.” There is no explanation of how they came to own such a house—whether Osteen worked hard to grow his ministry or got rich from his TV show or received an inheritance from his father’s estate. In this story they are standing in for an average middle-class couple who set their sights on a bigger house and believed, despite all the financial evidence, that God would bestow it upon them, like a gift. And he did.

Theologically, the prosperity gospel has always infuriated many mainstream evangelical pastors. Rick Warren, whose book The Purpose Driven Life outsold Osteen’s, told Time, “This idea that God wants everybody to be wealthy? There is a word for that: baloney. It’s creating a false idol. You don’t measure your self-worth by your net worth. I can show you millions of faithful followers of Christ who live in poverty. Why isn’t everyone in the church a millionaire?” In 2005, a group of African American pastors met to denounce prosperity megapreachers for promoting a Jesus who is more like a “cosmic bellhop,” as one pastor put it, than the engaged Jesus of the civil-rights era who looked after the poor.

More recently, critics have begun to argue that the prosperity gospel, echoed in churches across the country, might have played a part in the economic collapse. In 2008, in the online magazine Religion Dispatches, Jonathan Walton, a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Riverside, warned:

Narratives of how “God blessed me with my first house despite my credit” were common … Sermons declaring “It’s your season of overflow” supplanted messages of economic sobriety and disinterested sacrifice. Yet as folks were testifying about “what God can do,” little attention was paid to a predatory subprime-mortgage industry, relaxed credit standards, or the dangers of using one’s home equity as an ATM.

In 2004, Walton was researching a book about black televangelists. “I would hear consistent testimonies about how ‘once I was renting and now God let me own my own home,’ or ‘I was afraid of the loan officer, but God directed him to ignore my bad credit and blessed me with my first home,’” he says. “This trope was so common in these churches that I just became immune to it. Only later did I connect it to this disaster.”

Demographically, the growth of the prosperity gospel tracks fairly closely to the pattern of foreclosure hot spots. Both spread in two particular kinds of communities—the exurban middle class and the urban poor. Many newer prosperity churches popped up around fringe suburban developments built in the 1990s and 2000s, says Walton. These are precisely the kinds of neighborhoods that have been decimated by foreclosures, according to Eric Halperin, of the Center for Responsible Lending.

Zooming out a bit, Kate Bowler found that most new prosperity-gospel churches were built along the Sun Belt, particularly in California, Florida, and Arizona—all areas that were hard-hit by the mortgage crisis. Bowler, who, like Walton, was researching a book, spent a lot of time attending the “financial empowerment” seminars that are common at prosperity churches. Advisers would pay lip service to “sound financial practices,” she recalls, but overall they would send the opposite message: posters advertising the seminars featured big houses in the background, and the parking spots closest to the church were reserved for luxury cars.

Nationally, the prosperity gospel has spread exponentially among African American and Latino congregations. This is also the other distinct pattern of foreclosures. “Hyper-segregated” urban communities were the worst off, says Halperin. Reliable data on foreclosures by race are not publicly available, but mortgages are tracked by both race and loan type, and subprime loans have tended to correspond to foreclosures. During the boom, roughly 40 percent of all loans going to Latinos nationwide were subprime loans; Latinos and African Americans were 28 percent and 37 percent more likely, respectively, to receive a higher-rate subprime loan than whites.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled that state attorneys general had the authority to sue national banks for predatory lending. Even before that ruling, at least 17 lawsuits accusing various banks of treating racial minorities unfairly were already under way. (Bank of America’s Countrywide division—one of the companies Garay worked for—had earlier agreed to pay $8.4 billion in a multistate settlement.) One theme emerging in these suits is how banks teamed up with pastors to win over new customers for subprime loans.

Beth Jacobson is a star witness for the City of Baltimore’s recent suit against Wells Fargo. Jacobson was a top loan officer in the bank’s subprime division for nine years, closing as much as $55 million worth of loans a year. Like many subprime-loan officers, Jacobson had no bank experience before working for Wells Fargo. The subprime officers were drawn from “an utterly different background” than the professional bankers, she told me. She had been running a small paralegal business; her co-workers had been car salespeople, or had worked in telemarketing. They were prized for their ability to hustle on the ground and “look you in the eye when they shook your hand,” she surmised. As a reward for good performance, the bank would sometimes send a Hummer limo to pick up Jacobson for a celebration, she said. She’d arrive at a bar and find all her co-workers drunk and her boss “doing body shots off a waitress.”

The idea of reaching out to churches took off quickly, Jacobson recalls. The branch managers figured pastors had a lot of influence with their parishioners and could give the loan officers credibility and new customers. Jacobson remembers a conference call where sales managers discussed the new strategy. The plan was to send officers to guest-speak at church-sponsored “wealth-building seminars” like the ones Bowler attended, and dazzle the participants with the possibility of a new house. They would tell pastors that for every person who took out a mortgage, $350 would be donated to the church, or to a charity of the parishioner’s choice. “They wouldn’t say, ‘Hey, Mr. Minister. We want to give your people a bunch of subprime loans,” Jacobson told me. “They would say, ‘Your congregants will be homeowners! They will be able to live the American dream!’”

Garay often tells his life story from the pulpit, as an inspiration to the many immigrants in his church, some legal, some not. He grew up an outsider—a citizen by birth, but living a marginal existence in a diverse, working-class neighborhood in Flushing, Queens. His mother left when he was 8, and he was raised mostly by two older brothers; he spent most of his time on the street. “I ate jars of peanut butter for dinner,” he says. The story of how he became a Christian begins in 1989, when he was 28 years old, and involves a large sum of money. He’d been selling drugs in Miami, then started using, and owed some dealers $30,000 that he didn’t have, and they were going to kill him. He was on his mattress one night, in despair, when a picture of Jesus up on his wall “winked at me.” Soon after, he became a born-again Christian, and he told everyone about it. The dealers, he says, then went away. He doesn’t offer much explanation; he just says, “They were after me. They were going to kill me. And then they just backed off.” He credits Jesus.

Garay tried many churches, but they all felt alien and “dead” to him. “That’s not me, sitting quietly and saying ‘Thank you, God.’” Finally he came upon a Pentecostal prosperity church, much like the one he leads now. The church was full of miracles and real emotion, which drew him in, but it also offered practical benefits. The pastor pointed out Bible passages that referred to finances in specific terms, giving him images of wealth he could almost reach out and touch: “Give, and it shall be given to you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over”—a passage that’s now often read at Garay’s church during tithing time.

“Then it started happening. It started happening!” He enrolled in a community college and began selling roses from buckets in the backseat of his Honda (“no AC, no radio”). In no time, as he tells it, he had worked himself up to roses in plastic straws, laid neatly across the backseat of his Cadillac, with no water sloshing on the white leather. With this story, Garay hopes to convince his followers that God has a bounty for them, but that to get it they have to take the first step of faith. One analogy he likes to use is a box of gifts in heaven; if you never reach up to get it, then it won’t come down to you. It’s a curious mix of active (a step of faith) and passive (“It started happening!”).

In Garay’s testimony, his life proceeds that way: part hard work, part miracle. He applied himself, eventually got married, and had children. One day, for no reason, he quit his job as a social worker counseling addicted juvenile delinquents. “I almost hit him with a frying pan,” Hazael, his wife, jokes. But the very same day, his mother-in-law walked into the house and said the bank was looking for a bilingual loan officer. He had no experience and had never used a computer. Yet he got the job and within a year was earning six figures. How did that happen? How did it all come together so neatly, one door opening the moment another had closed? When I asked him that, he smiled and pointed up at the sky.

Garay is like a father figure to his parishioners; I met a few who had named their children after him or his wife. Parishioners told me stories about his coming with them to their court hearings, showing them how to buy a phone card or find a good school for their children or, for the more entrepreneurial, invest in a small business. Oral Roberts’s seed-faith concept is the source of much suspicion about prosperity churches; pastors, including Garay, ask their parishioners to give 10 percent of their income to the church. But to Garay, seed faith is the church’s central tenet. The tithe, he says, is tangible proof that a believer has taken the first step toward God. It is the spiritual equivalent of spending three years selling flowers door-to-door. He often tells what’s known as Jesus’ parable of the three servants, from Matthew. A lord gives three of his servants money. Two invest the money and double their profit, and a third hides his in the ground. When the master returns, he declares the third “wicked and lazy” and a “worthless slave,” and casts him into the “outer darkness.” “To receive God’s bounty, you cannot hide your head in the sand,” Garay preaches. “You have to take a leap of faith.”

I asked Garay why his parishioner Billy Gonzales, who earns barely $25,000 and has no money to fix his car, should donate 10 percent of his income. “Because it gives him a new mentality. It teaches him that money can breed more money, that you can have money in your pocket on Saturday morning even though you got paid Friday night. People who support the church week after week have a dedication. Those who just give $5 or $10 here and there, you’ll hear them have the same problems week after week.” Jackson Lears would add another explanation: tithing is like the moment the gambler lays his money down on the table—it “promises at least a fleeting opportunity to contact a realm where hope is alive,” he writes. Without it, there’s only the dull regularity of $2,000 a month and a dead car.

During the boom years, Apostle Garay, as he is known in church, was brasher than he is now. He spoke in very specific terms during church services, promising that a $100 offering would yield a $10,000 return: “This is not my promise. It is God’s promise, and he will make it happen!” he would say.

While it sounds absurd, this kind of message can have a positive influence, according to Tony Tian-Ren Lin, a researcher at the University of Virginia who has made a close study of Latino prosperity gospel congregations over the years. These churches typically take in people who had “been basically dropped into the world from pretty primitive settings”—small towns in Latin America with no electricity or running water and very little educational opportunity. In their new congregation, their pastor slowly walks them through life in the U.S., both inside and outside of church, until they become more confident. “In Mexico, nobody ever told them they could do anything,” says Lin, who was himself raised in Argentina. He finds the message at prosperity churches to be quintessentially American. “They are taught they can do absolutely anything, and it’s God’s will. They become part of the elect, the chosen. They get swept up in the manifest destiny, this idea that God has lifted Americans above everyone else.”

At Casa del Padre, the celebration of consumer culture is quite visible, along with a sense of boundless opportunity. The people in the church, for instance, tend to have very expensive cell phones—never the free ones that come with a calling plan, nor the sort that can be bought cheaply at a convenience store. “They start wanting what’s considered the best and the most technologically advanced in this country,” Lin says. Garay’s church, it seems to me, teaches them that they deserve these things, so they go about getting them, with few resources and infinite adaptability. Before the crash, one group of young men got a $12,000 loan to start a landscaping company; another man bought a $270,000 house. One of the church’s Bible-study leaders, who’d grown up in a remote village in Mexico with an abusive, alcoholic father, had become a very successful contractor by the height of the boom, managing 30 men on multiple jobs and winning contracts to paint luxury subdivisions in the exurbs.

The tenets of the prosperity gospel, and the practical advice that pastors often give their parishioners, help immigrants learn “not just how to survive but how to thrive; not just live paycheck to paycheck but handle money—manage complicated payrolls, invest in equipment,” Lin told me. Along the way, they become assimilated. “While they’re trying to be closer to God, instead they become American,” he says, from their optimism and entrepreneurialism to the very nature of their dreams.

These days, Garay’s message is more subdued than it was at the height of the boom, but not substantially different. In a sermon on Father’s Day, he did not make specific claims of financial returns on investments but instead spoke vaguely about how his congregation’s prospects were “good and going to get better.” After church, I asked Garay about how the gospel was holding up in the recession. It was a hot summer day, and although he had just finished one of his feverish two-hour sermons, he seemed energized rather than drained. “Look,” he said, and rounded his hands as if to indicate a protective shield. “The recession has not hit my church.” He reminded me that when he had asked how many people were out of work, only four people out of about 100 there had raised their hands. But in a church where failure is seen as a kind of sin, it seems credulous at best to expect an honest response to that question. I later met at least one person—Billy Gonzales’s younger brother—who didn’t have a job but hadn’t raised his hand, because he thought he’d “have one lined up soon.”

Garay describes the recession as God’s judgment—for abortion, taking prayer out of school, bikinis on television, “Desperate Housewives, whatever.” But God is also giving us a two-year window to repent, he says. He calculates that we’ve had five years of extreme plenty and now the clock is running out, based on the biblical story of Joseph and the great famine—seven years of plenty followed by seven years of a failed harvest. If we don’t repent, we will experience “misery like we have never known it.” These days, if any parishioners or fellow pastors ask Garay for investment advice, he tells them to wait two years before making a move.

Like much of Garay’s advice, this recommendation is partly grounded in economic reality, and partly drawn from mystical notions about a biblical calendar. “I’m very real,” he once told me. “If you want to eat at Red Lobster, you better have a Red Lobster paycheck, and enough left over to pay your electric bill. But I’ve also seen miracles of God.” Later, during one of our talks over coffee, his wife echoed the sentiment. “If you can’t afford a house, you shouldn’t buy it,” Hazael said, when I asked whether the prosperity gospel might push people to take irresponsible risks. “But if the Lord is telling you to ‘take that first step and I will provide,’ then you have to believe.”

I asked Garay many times about a connection between the mortgage crisis and the gospel, but he does not really see one. From everything he says about his time as a loan officer, it seems he was involved in the kinds of subprime loans that led to so many foreclosures. He was hired in Countrywide’s emerging-markets division, which meant he was expected to target the growing Latino community in the area. Like Beth Jacobson, he had no previous experience, but was valued for his connections and hustle. He makes astute criticisms of the risky loans but, like many former loan officers, he does so with a curious sense of distance, as if he had been just a cog in the machine. Loans got “too easy,” he says. “Mortgages would be $1,500 a month, and that was all [the loan applicants] made in a month,” he recalls, “but they figured they would rent the basement.” He says sometimes he told people the loans were going to kill them, but they would plead, “Please help me, please. I want a house.” Because he was becoming an increasingly prominent pastor at the time, many people who came to see him assumed he was the president of the bank and could protect them, he recalls.

Garay says as far as he knows no one in his church defaulted. But at a bare minimum, some of his parishioners have run into intense financial difficulties, sometimes defaulting soon after leaving the congregation. The man who’d bought the $270,000 house threw a huge housewarming party and invited everyone from church. He gave a weepy testimony about the house God had given him, passing around the title for all to see. At the time, he was working as a handyman, putting up drywall, painting, roofing, and doing other odd jobs. Within three months he had three families living in the three-bedroom house, and he still could not keep up with the payments. After five months, he went into foreclosure and ducked out of the country. Tony Lin is careful—and of course correct—to say that neither immigrants nor Latinos caused the crash; adherents of every stripe exhibited the same sort of magical thinking about finances, as did millions of nonbelievers. Still, he recalls, “I wasn’t very surprised when the whole subprime-mortgage thing blew up. I’m sure a loan officer never said, ‘God wants you to have a house.’ But you’ve already been taught that. Now here comes the loan officer saying, ‘Sign here, and this house will be yours.’ It feels like a gift from God. It’s the perfect fuel for the crisis.”

The guys who’d started the landscaping company also fared badly. They had a pretty good spring and summer in 2007, their first year of operation, and then business started to fall off. In church they kept giving positive testimonies, bragging about their success. But by October, they’d begun selling off their equipment; eventually they lost the business and had to go into hiding. The most interesting part of the story is the epilogue. One of the partners in the group, whom I’ll call Luis, eventually moved to Richmond, and an acquaintance from Casa del Padre told me that he’d recently run into him there. Luis hadn’t been embittered by the experience; he blamed the disaster on the fact that he’d started working on Sundays instead of going to church. Luis asked the man to come visit with some of the parishioners of his new church, to confirm that he had once been a great success. As they talked, he seemed happy and positive. “He wasn’t angry that things didn’t work out. He wasn’t angry at God. He looked back at those days and thought, ‘I can still have everything. Look what God gave me. That was a time when I had it all.’”

By many measures, Billy Gonzales does not have it all. He lives with his wife and three children in a tiny apartment on the back side of a development at the edge of town, where people hang out on the stoop until all hours. He works 45 minutes away and his car has been broken down for three months, and he does not have any money to fix it. Every day at work he is faced with a vision of what he does not have. He works for a man who just built a $4 million house—one of four the man owns. Gonzales’s job is to make sure every wine glass, garden statue, and book is dusted and in its proper place. Yet when I talked to Gonzales he was like a child hearing the ice-cream truck, or a man newly in love. “I’m crazy! Just crazy,” he said, meaning crazy for the Lord, and giving little jumps out of his chair.

I visited Gonzales one evening after he’d had a long day at work; his brother had given him a ride home. Gonzales has a wide, earnest face that can look like a child’s or, if he is tired, like an old man’s. He sat in his favorite squeaky leather chair with his Bible in one hand and a soccer ball at his feet. The sofas in the tiny living room are actually backseats ripped out of cars, with cushions thrown on them. He got the cushions from a man he once shared a trailer with, and they turned out to be infested with cockroaches. As we talked, the roaches crawled across the floor or on the sofas. Gonzales apologized but did not pay them much attention.

He told me he feels pity for his employer. He assumes the man must have been close to God at one point, or at least his family must have been, “because the rich are closer to God.” But now the man has lost his way. He laughs when Gonzales talks to him about Jesus, and he wastes his money, buying $500 birdhouses and hiring Gonzales to clean them.

Gonzales was once lost too. He came from a big family in Guatemala so poor “that the poor people would call us poor.” For a while after he came to the U.S., he sent money home, but then like many of his friends he lost the rhythm of work. Instead, he was snorting cocaine and getting drunk four nights a week. “I hated Americans. I hated them,” he said, and I had trouble believing him, given his now-innocent, open demeanor. He says that back then, he spent most of his days fantasizing about killing his brother-in-law, whom he hated for no reason he can remember. His conversion came two years ago, in the form of a sudden vision like Garay’s. One night, in a drugged-out haze, he saw a polished, shimmery stone. He later realized it was a jewel, one of the many treasures in God’s vast storehouse, destined for him. Eventually he made his way to Garay, whom he now calls his father.

When I mentioned Gonzales to Garay, the pastor praised him as a model congregant. Indeed, by any standard Gonzales is an admirable man. He is 24, married, works hard, and limits his extracurricular activities to Bible study and soccer. It took me a few visits to realize that two of the three small children in the house are not his. He married a woman with two sons and takes care of them. They call him Papa and he reads to them at night and speaks to them gently, exactly the way he speaks to his own baby son. He has every reason to be frustrated with his circumstances, but I never once saw him express anything but delight. The gospel obviously grounds Gonzales in a very concrete way. But I can also see how, one day, it might send him floating into the air.

“I want to buy a house,” he confessed to me one evening this summer. It turned out his lease was almost up, and he needed to move in the fall. “Not a small one but a really huge one, a nice one. With six bedrooms and a kitchen and living room. I know, it’s crazy! But nothing is impossible! God, you saved my life,” he said, no longer speaking to me. “You saved my life, and now you will give me a gift. Now I’m crazy!” Last I heard, he and Garay were house-hunting together.

A year or so after the crash, there are signs of a new sobriety—higher savings rates, for example, and a reduction in conspicuous spending. But it’s hard to imagine Americans reverting to frugality the way, say, the Japanese did during the “lost decade” after their economy crashed. If by stereotype the Japanese are savers, then Americans are consumers, and ever hopeful. Already, countless “entrepreneurs” are finding a silver lining in the mortgage crisis, buying up foreclosed lots—often sight unseen, based on Web listings alone—in desolate parts of Cleveland and Phoenix and other places where abandoned houses can sometimes be had for a few thousand dollars or less. The buyers pay these bargain-basement prices eagerly, in the belief that the houses must be great deals, when they are just as likely to be overtaken by mold, or have every one of their doors and windows missing and the roof caving in. In America there is always a next play, another opportunity, an “unearned blessing” that can make up for a lifetime of disappointment.

It is not all that surprising that the prosperity gospel persists despite its obvious failure to pay off. Much of popular religion these days is characterized by a vast gap between aspirations and reality. Few of Sarah Palin’s religious compatriots were shocked by her messy family life, because they’ve grown used to the paradoxes; some of the most socially conservative evangelical churches also have extremely high rates of teenage pregnancies, out-of-wedlock births, and divorce. As Garay likes to say, “What you have is nothing compared to what you will have.” The unpleasant reality—an inadequate paycheck, a pregnant daughter, a recession—is invisible. It’s your ability to see beyond such things, your willing blindness to even the most hopeless-seeming circumstances, that makes you a certain kind of modern Christian, and a 21st-century American.

There is the kind of hope that President Obama talks about, and that Clinton did before him—steady, uplifting, assured. And there is Garay’s kind of hope, which perhaps for many people better reflects the reality of their lives. Garay’s is a faith that, for all its seeming confidence, hints at desperation, at circumstances gone so far wrong that they can only be made right by a sudden, unexpected jackpot.

Once, I asked Garay how you would know for certain if God had told you to buy a house, and he answered like a roulette dealer. “Ten Christians will say that God told them to buy a house. In nine of the cases, it will go bad. The 10th one is the real Christian.” And the other nine? “For them, there’s always another house.” 

Hanna Rosin, The Atlantic

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Full article and photo: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/rosin-prosperity-gospel

Doherty Über Alles

Pete Doherty on stage at his concert in Munich Sunday following his gaffe on a live radio broadcast on Saturday.

British musician Pete Doherty was booed heavily in Germany after singing the first verse of the German national anthem. The lyrics are taboo in Germany because of their Nazi associations.

The World from Berlin

The Mahmud Mosque in Zurich has one of only four minarets in Switzerland. No more will be built following Sunday’s referendum.

Switzerland’s vote to ban minarets is a disaster for its image, write German commentators. The vote doesn’t just reflect a fear of “Islamization” but also shows that setbacks in recent years have shaken its national self-confidence. But Germans would probably vote the same way, warn some observers.

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,664231,00.html

Britain’s Got Talent star makes UK chart history with highest ever first-week sales for a debut album

Susan Boyle … Britain’s Got Talent star soars to No 1.

A 48-year-old Scottish church volunteer has trumped Arctic Monkeys and Leona Lewis – not to mention U2 and Michael Jackson – with record-breaking sales of her first LP. Susan Boyle’s I Dreamed a Dream topped the charts with the biggest first-week sales for a debut album in UK history.

I Dreamed a Dream, which is mostly a collection of covers, sold more than 410,000 copies in the UK, according to the Official Charts Company. This beats the two most recent record-holders for the fastest-selling debut album: Leona Lewis’s 2007 release, Spirit, which sold about 376,000 copies; and Arctic Monkeys’ 2006 record, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, which sold about 363,000.

Boyle’s first-week sales are the highest of any album this year, and the fourth-best of all time, behind Oasis’ Be Here Now, Coldplay’s X&Y and Take That’s The Circus. I Dreamed a Dream is also expected to top the US charts this week and break Eminem’s record for best first-week sales in America for 2009.

It’s been a Cinderella story for Boyle, “a slightly frumpy singleton grieving for the loss of her mother”, who first appeared on Britain’s Got Talent and stunned the judges silly. Though Boyle eventually lost the reality TV contest, she became a viral internet sensation. And in this era of illegal downloads over legal purchases, YouTube hits of her performance have somehow translated into album sales. Months before its release, I Dreamed a Dream had already broken Amazon.com’s pre-order sales records.

Boyle’s debut includes show tunes, spirituals, as well as covers of Madonna, Skeeter Davis and the Monkees. Her take on the Rolling Stones’ Wild Horses reached No 9 in this week’s singles charts.

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Full article and photo:

Ever since its creation in 1913, the Federal Reserve has grappled with a daunting political contradiction. The Fed is charged with preventing the collapse of the banking and financial system, whose health is essential for the “real economy” of production and jobs. But financial bailouts usually occur when mistakes or misdeeds by bankers and investment professionals make them public pariahs. To do its job, then, the Fed protects — or seems to protect — an unpopular, disgraced and undeserving group. We are now witnessing this contradiction in full bloom.

The Fed has become a congressional scapegoat for assorted economic frustrations: 10.2 percent unemployment; expensive rescues of fragile financial institutions (AIG, Bear Stearns, Citigroup); outsize Wall Street bonuses; and the crisis itself. The denunciations transcend rhetorical outbursts. The House Financial Services Committee recently voted to require the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to “audit” the Fed’s monetary policy — its efforts to influence interest rates and credit conditions. In the Senate, Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Banking Committee, has proposed stripping the Fed of all powers to regulate financial institutions — its actions to police lending and management practices. These powers would go to a new agency.

The Fed backlash is bipartisan. Rep. Ron Paul, a Republican and libertarian, proposed the GAO audit, which he sees as a first step toward abolishing the Fed (“End the Fed” is his latest book). Paul favors resurrecting the gold standard and combining it with private money; Wal-Mart could issue currency. His views are long-standing, principled — and wholly impractical. Dodd, of course, is a Democrat. Much Fed-bashing simply indulges Congress’s impulse to blame someone else for anything unpleasant.

Lost in this politically charged climate is the reality that the Fed, more than any other government agency, arguably stopped last fall’s financial panic from becoming a global depression. The Fed pumped out more than $1 trillion in new credit, created special lending programs to support faltering segments of the credit markets (commercial paper, money market funds) and rescued financial institutions, notably AIG, whose bankruptcy might have triggered a chain reaction of failures. These were seat-of-the-pants responses, taken in the midst of crisis and pervasive uncertainty. We will never know what might have happened without them. The second-guessing is occurring now when there’s less fear and more information.

What’s also overlooked is that the Fed isn’t the super-secretive, unaccountable agency of political stereotype. In 2009, Fed officials from Chairman Ben Bernanke on down have testified 32 times before congressional committees. The Fed makes detailed disclosures about its policies. After every meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the key decision-making body on monetary policy, issues a statement explaining why it has — or hasn’t — changed its interest-rate target. Until 1994, there were no announcements after FOMC meetings. Economists and investors had to guess.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Fed’s activities are already widely audited. Deloitte & Touche examines the Fed’s financial statements, which are published. The GAO can audit many Fed activities, including its banking regulation and supervision of the payments system. What it’s barred from auditing is the conduct of monetary policy, including relations with foreign central banks such as the European Central Bank.

Congress has so far sensibly put this off limits. “Audit” has a different meaning in the context of the GAO than in everyday usage. It means examine, investigate, evaluate and, often, criticize. It’s not just crunching numbers. The GAO usually undertakes studies at the request of someone in Congress. This suggests that the GAO could be used to influence or intimidate the Fed through selective investigations, which would involve access to internal Fed documents and interviews with policymakers. The Fed might be pressured to finance government deficits or to adopt an “undue focus on the short term,” Vice Chairman Donald Kohn testified before Congress on July 9. Historically, similar pressures have caused other central banks to unleash inflationary torrents of money, Kohn said.

This is not inevitable, but even the impression that the Fed’s “independence” is compromised could perversely undermine confidence in the dollar, leading to higher market interest rates or a rapid fall in the dollar’s foreign exchange value. Massive projected government budget deficits compound the psychological damage. Similar objections apply to Dodd’s proposal to end the Fed’s power to examine and regulate financial institutions. If this crisis teaches anything, it is that the Fed needs to know more — not less — about large financial institutions.

The Fed isn’t infallible. Its mistakes contributed to the crisis. Its present low-interest-rate policy poses dangers of fostering inflation or new “asset bubbles.” But the congressional Fed-bashing poses greater dangers. Ironically, the destructive remedies being peddled are part of “financial reform” legislation. If this is “reform,” we’re better off without it.

Robert J. Samuelson, Washington Post

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/29/AR2009112902012.html

It’s been nearly six months since Barack Obama stirred hearts and raised hopes across much of the Arab world with his much-promoted Cairo address. Many came away from it expecting a new and more vigorous U.S. attempt to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Others hoped for more American sympathy and support for liberal reform in countries where free expression, women’s rights and democratic elections are blocked by entrenched autocracies.

The peace-process bubble burst two months ago at the United Nations, when Obama’s poorly executed attempt to launch final-settlement talks between Israelis and Palestinians collapsed. Arabs who were led by Obama’s rhetoric to believe that the United States would force Israel to make unprecedented unilateral concessions — like a complete end to all construction in Jerusalem — were bitterly disappointed.

But they are not the only victims of post-Cairo letdown. Arab reformers, who for most of this decade have been trying to break down the barriers to social and political modernization in the Middle East, have also begun to conclude that the Obama administration is more likely to harm than to help them.

“All Arab countries are craving change — and many of us believed Obama was a tool for change,” says Aseel al- Awadhi, a Kuwaiti member of parliament. “Now we are losing that hope.”

Awadhi, one of four women elected to Kuwait’s parliament this year, is part of a movement that the Bush administration loudly promoted and sporadically attempted to help — though the effort steadily waned during George W. Bush’s second term. The Obama administration, in contrast, often speaks as if it does not recognize the existence of an Arab reform movement. Bush’s frequently articulated argument that political and social liberalization offer the best antidote to Islamic extremism appears absent from this administration’s thinking.

“People in Jordan are beginning to understand that the United States will not play the same role as under the old administration on democracy,” said Musa Maaytah, Jordan’s minister of political development — who, like Awadhi, visited Washington recently for a conference sponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy. “People think that the U.S. has many issues that for it are a priority, and they prefer to have stability in these countries more than democracy.”

For the reformers, a big signal came this month in a speech Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered in Marrakech, Morocco. Clinton was attending a session of the Forum for the Future, a body the Bush administration established at the height of its pro-reform campaign. The idea was to foster a dialogue between Western and Arab countries about political and social reform that would resemble the Helsinki process between the West and the Soviet bloc during the 1970s.

Clinton began her speech by referring to Obama’s call in Cairo for “a new beginning between the United States and Muslim communities around the world.” She then said that after consulting with “local communities” the administration had “focused on three broad areas where we believe U.S. support can make a difference.”

These turned out to be “entrepreneurship,” “advancing science and technology” and education. As if citing the also-rans, Clinton added that “women’s empowerment” was “a related priority” and that “the United States is committed to a comprehensive peace in the Middle East.” The word “democracy” appeared nowhere in the speech, and there was no reference at all to the Arabs who are fighting to create independent newspapers, political parties or human rights organizations.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian who is one of the best-known Arab reformers, was part of a group who met Clinton after the speech. He told me that he tried to point out to her that “the next two years are crucial” for determining the political direction of the Middle East, in part because Egypt is approaching a major transition. Parliamentary elections are scheduled in 10 months, and their results will determine whether a presidential election scheduled for 2011 will be genuinely democratic. Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s 82-year-old ruler, is under pressure to retire; if he allows it, a truly competitive race to succeed him could pit his son Gamal against diplomatic heavyweights such as former foreign minister Amr Moussa and Mohamed ElBaradei, the outgoing head of the International Atomic Energy Agency — not to mention Ayman Nour, who was imprisoned for three years after challenging Mubarak in 2005.

Clinton, said Ibrahim, replied that democracy promotion had always been a centerpiece of U.S. diplomacy and that the Obama administration would not give it up — “but that they have a lot of other things on their plate.” For Arab liberals, the translation is easy, if painful: Regardless of what the president may have said in Cairo, Obama’s vision for the Middle East doesn’t include “a new beginning” in the old political order.

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Full article:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/29/AR2009112902011.html

White House gate-crashers in a long tradition

President Obama shakes hands with Michaele Salahi at Tuesday’s state dinner as her husband, Tareq Salahi, looks on.

Social climbing is an ancient art, one as old as society itself. The character of the high-society impostor — the fake aristocrat, the soi-disant marquis, the “professor” with no degree — has been known in every era, too. Both social climbers and charlatans have been described over and over in fiction. Think of the “King” and the “Duke” who swindle Huckleberry Finn, or of Madame Verdurin, who claws her way upward throughout the course of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Lost Time” — or of the Melanie Griffith character in “Working Girl.”

Over the centuries, some societies have been more susceptible to these sorts of swindles than others. Catherine the Great’s Russia, for example, was positively swarming with phony English duchesses and Italian princes: Imperial St. Petersburg was aspirational enough to want the company of “real” European aristocrats but far away enough from London or Naples to make it difficult to check their pedigrees. One also thinks of Edith Wharton’s New York, for similar reasons: Her characters are precisely the sort who would fall into a mésalliance with a dodgy Polish aristocrat, just off the boat, who invariably turns out not to be what he seems.

To that notable group of societies we can now add 21st-century Washington. Like 18th-century Russia, it is a world of neophytes, a society whose members have only recently “made it” into an elite magic circle and who don’t necessarily know the other members all that well. Like 19th-century New York, it is also a world where appearances matter: You get invited to the event — whether the White House Hanukkah party or the state dinner — not just because of who you are but because of what you represent, which costume you wear, which ethnic group you come from.

Above all, it is a world that seems to offer wealth and fame to those outsiders who manage to enter it. And it was in pursuit of both that Tareq and Michaele Salahi bamboozled their way into last week’s White House dinner for the Indian prime minister. Just like all charlatans and swindlers over the centuries, they managed it by looking and acting the part. He appears as if he could be South Asian, which seemed right; he also wore black tie and what looks, in the photographs, like a state decoration or medal. She is a striking, professionally coiffed blonde and wore a sari — a glamorous, red, expensive sari. Having managed to get previous meetings with Prince Charles and Oprah Winfrey (Michaele even finagled her way into Redskinettes alumni parties), they knew how to behave around the contemporary aristocracy: Simply act as if you belong, don’t stare too hard at the celebrities, don’t eat or drink too much, and do engage your neighbors in light chit-chat about the Kashmir conflict and the Indian gross domestic product. Since hardly anyone knows anyone else at this kind of party, you can get away with it.

But there are differences between the Salahis and, say, Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, a self-described “Spanish aristocrat” who set himself up as a glamorous “faith healer” in 1770s St. Petersburg, made his living by borrowing money from gullible courtiers (and possibly by renting out his wife, the “Princess di Santa Croce,” to Prince Potemkin).

The Salahis are hoping to cash in faster — a lot faster. It has been less than a week since they crashed the president’s party, and already they are demanding six figures for the exclusive television appearance in which they will either declare themselves to be be offended, on the grounds that they “thought” they were invited to the White House — or else will boast of having pulled off the social-climbing coup of the century.

They also have a lot more help than did the swindlers of yesteryear. Michaele had a television crew film her preparations for the party at a Georgetown beauty salon, so there is footage ready for whoever has the money to pay. A publicist has been booked and is prepared to negotiate. Plenty of “legitimate” news outlets are ready to play: According to The Post, a CBS reporter has already slipped a note under their door, offering an interview with Katie Couric. Next will come the book contract, the movie rights and — who knows? — maybe the television talk show. I can just see it: “Famous for Being Famous: At Home With the Salahis.”

Unless, of course, they meet the same fate as their many predecessors. The Spanish Count Cagliostro was eventually expelled from St. Petersburg, after the empress learned that he was neither Spanish nor a count. The “King” and “Duke” in “Huckleberry Finn” were tarred, feathered and ridden out of town on a rail.

A century ago, the Salahis, too, would be shamed, embarrassed and finally banished from the elite world that they had contrived to enter. Even now, they ought to expect to be under arrest, for lying to the Secret Service, if nothing else — unless the rules of polite society have changed so much that there are no longer any rules at all.

Anne Applebaum, Washington Post

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Full article and photo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/29/AR2009112902013.html

Washington’s latest benefit for the not-so-poor

CREATED DURING the depths of the Great Depression, the Federal Housing Administration has a long history of supporting homeownership in the United States. In recent decades, its mission has been to enable lower-income Americans to tap otherwise inaccessible mortgage credit. Purchasers who meet certain qualifications can get a house with a lower-than-usual down payment — as little as 3.5 percent, currently — and the FHA compensates the lenders for the added risk by agreeing to pay off defaulted loans. The money comes from buyers’ insurance premiums, not tax revenue, but these deals are possible only because, in the final analysis, they’re backed by the U.S. government.

One may debate the costs and benefits of the FHA’s historical role. At relatively low upfront taxpayer cost, it has helped expand homeownership, even though many loans went sour over the years. But what must be debated, and indeed challenged, is the stepped-up use of the FHA to boost demand for, and hence the price of, houses in the current crisis. This is true not only because of the fiscal implications; the FHA’s reserves are currently below the statutory minimum, raising the specter of an eventual taxpayer rescue. It is true also because of the regressive distributional implications; the FHA is increasingly helping people who are decidedly not poor to buy houses that are anything but modest.

Legislation last year nearly doubled the maximum mortgage the FHA could insure, to $729,750 for single-unit properties and almost $1 million for multi-unit ones. As a result, the FHA is moving into expensive markets, especially on the West Coast, in which it previously had little or no role. Even some fairly fancy condo buildings are now trumpeting FHA financing. As the New York Times reported recently, among those buying property with little or no money down, thanks to FHA, are investors and well-off people who could have come up with more equity. Larger loans represent a greater burden on the agency if they ultimately default. On the other hand, it’s also possible that bigger loans are less likely to default, since richer people tend to take them out in the first place. Our point here is that, whatever the additional risk may be, the federal government is assuming it in a way that facilitates the upward transfer of wealth.

When adopted last year, the higher FHA loan limits were billed as a temporary fillip to the housing market. But temporary subsidies have a way of enduring. Congress has already extended the higher limits once, and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) has spoken of making both ceilings $100,000 larger and permanent.

This might help build a floor under the still-shaky housing market, as intended. But it would also complete the mission creep of the agency from one dedicated to upward mobility to one that also produces middle- and upper-middle-class enrichment. Since when is that a job for the federal government?

Editorial, Washington Post

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/29/AR2009112902053.html

TWENTY years ago, dictatorships across Central and Eastern Europe toppled. During this season of remembering, the focus has rightly been on celebration of the new freedoms gained by the inhabitants of those countries: to speak freely, to travel, to vote and to choose their own national futures and alliances. Yet the legacy of 1989 has difficult aspects as well, mostly centering on the origins and legitimacy of later NATO expansion to former East German and Warsaw Pact territory; acknowledgment of them by the United States could greatly improve American and Russian relations.

Moscow has long asserted that the Soviet Union allowed Germany to unify only in return for a pledge from Washington never to expand the Atlantic alliance. Former advisers to Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have transcended partisan differences in dismissing the Russian claim. An internal State Department review during the Clinton era concluded that no legally binding prohibition on NATO enlargement emerged from the era of German unification.

Since then, however, it has become possible to reconstruct what happened from first-hand evidence. Former Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany released the papers of his office, which inspired the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to publish many of his own. A number of other leaders and institutions also opened files in advance of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall: the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, Secretary of State James Baker, the German Foreign Ministry and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office among them.

There are many twists and turns, but the story as we now understand it is as follows: The crucial month was February 1990. It had become apparent that the cold war order in Europe had collapsed. Some kind of new order needed to be established quickly. Bonn and Washington had agreed that it should center on the rapid unification of Germany.

Both countries also wanted to head off alternative visions to NATO’s continued primacy that were proposed by Mr. Gorbachev, who sought new European institutions from the Atlantic to the Urals, and by former Warsaw Pact dissidents-turned-rulers, who wanted a demilitarized Central and Eastern Europe to serve as a neutral bridge between East and West. Those plans would have diminished the leading role of the United States in Europe, whereas perpetuating the Atlantic alliance would maintain it.

The biggest obstacle was, of course, the Soviet Union. Despite economic hardship at home, the Soviets maintained 380,000 troops in East Germany and still held legal rights of occupation emanating from the unconditional German surrender in 1945. Bonn and Washington thus wanted Moscow to remove its troops and to renounce its claims, without forcing NATO troops out as part of the bargain.

What would Mr. Gorbachev demand in return? To learn the answer, Mr. Baker and Mr. Kohl journeyed to Moscow within a day of each other. On Feb. 9, 1990, Mr. Baker asked Mr. Gorbachev, “Would you prefer to see a unified Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no U.S. forces or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position?” Mr. Gorbachev, according to Mr. Baker, answered that “any extension of the zone of NATO would be unacceptable.” Their meeting ended without any final deals made. Mr. Baker left behind a secret letter, detailing what he had said, for Mr. Kohl in Moscow.

While Mr. Baker was in Moscow, though, members of the National Security Council back in Washington were worrying about his comment that NATO would not move eastward. To undo the damage they felt Mr. Baker had caused, they drafted a letter that President Bush sent to Mr. Kohl later that day.

The presidential letter included language that differed in a subtle but significant way from the language offered by the secretary of state. Instead of a pledge about NATO’s borders, Mr. Bush suggested that East German territory be given a “special military status” within NATO. What that status would consist of was to be negotiated later, but the core assumption was clear. NATO would grow and former East German areas would have a special status within the alliance as it did so.

A foreign leader can see daylight between a president and his secretary of state from the other side of the world, and Mr. Kohl did not have to look that far. He just had to read the differing phrasings used by Mr. Bush and Mr. Baker to notice it. So whose language did Mr. Kohl echo in his own talks with Mr. Gorbachev the next day, Feb. 10 — the president’s or the secretary’s?

Mr. Kohl chose to echo Mr. Baker, not Mr. Bush. The chancellor assured Mr. Gorbachev, as Mr. Baker had done, that “naturally NATO could not expand its territory” into East Germany. The documents available do not record Mr. Kohl using the presidential phrase — “special military status” — that the National Security Council had rushed over to him. Mr. Kohl’s foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, visiting the Kremlin as well, assured his Soviet counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze, that “for us, it stands firm: NATO will not expand itself to the East.”

Crucially, the Gorbachev-Kohl meeting ended with a deal, as opposed to the Gorbachev-Baker session the previous day. After listening to Mr. Kohl, Mr. Gorbachev agreed that Germany could unify internally. Mr. Kohl and his aides publicized this major concession immediately at a press conference. Then they returned home to begin merging the two Germanys under one currency and economic system.

In essentially settling for a gentleman’s agreement, Mr. Gorbachev missed some important pitfalls and then failed to do anything about them. First, Mr. Kohl spoke for West Germany, not for the United States or for NATO as a whole. Second, the Soviet leader got nothing about the trans-Atlantic alliance in writing. Third, Mr. Gorbachev did not criticize Mr. Kohl publicly when he and Mr. Bush later agreed to offer only a special military status to the former East Germany instead of a pledge that NATO wouldn’t expand. Finally, he did not catch subtle signals that, by early 1990, speculative discussion in the West about NATO’s future involved the inclusion of Eastern Europe as well. Mr. Gorbachev later complained to Mr. Kohl that he felt he had fallen into a trap.

Did the United States betray Russia at the dawn of the post-cold war era? The short answer is no. Nothing legally binding emerged from the negotiations over German unification. In fact, in September 1990, an embattled Mr. Gorbachev signed the accords that allowed NATO to extend itself over the former East Germany in exchange for financial assistance from Bonn to Moscow. A longer answer, however, shows that there were mixed messages and diplomatic ambiguities.

By acknowledging that there might be some substance to Russian grievances, the Obama administration would strengthen our relations with Moscow. Given that NATO enlargement has already taken place (and efforts for further expansion are stalled), little would be lost with such an acknowledgment but much could be gained. Certainly, Western attempts to manage everything from Iran’s nuclear program to European energy supplies during the coming winter would be a great deal easier with Russia’s cooperation. A commemoration of the events of 20 years ago that included both celebration and candor would increase the likelihood of such cooperation.

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/opinion/30sarotte.html

Do downturns create Democrats? The Great Depression certainly did: The generation that came of age in the 1930s has cleaved to the Democratic Party like no population before or since. And it makes intuitive sense that experiencing a recession at a formative age could inspire lifelong sympathy for the party of the welfare state and lifelong suspicion toward the party of free markets.

In a recent paper, “Growing Up In a Recession,” Paola Giuliano, an assistant professor of economics at U.C.L.A., and Antonio Spilimbergo, an economist at the International Monetary Fund, offer statistics to back this intuition up. Looking at over 40 years of survey data, the authors report that Americans who experienced “macroeconomic shocks” between the ages of 18 and 25 were more worried about poverty and inequality across their voting lives, and more skeptical about the wisdom of the market.

These findings track with the results of the 2008 election, when a cratering economy helped Barack Obama win an extraordinary landslide among young and first-time voters. And they provide grist for the liberal hope that the rising generation will prove as enduringly Democratic as that of their Depression-era grandparents, with George W. Bush playing Herbert Hoover to Obama’s F.D.R.

But the study shouldn’t make liberals too cocky. The authors find that growing up in a recession can encourage conservative instincts as well. Downturns make young voters distrustful of unfettered capitalism, yes. But they also make them less confident in the federal government.

This finding may explain why recent recessions have actually ended up pushing America rightward. The stagflation of the 1970s, for instance, and the hapless liberal response, helped usher in Ronald Reagan’s revolution. (The cohort that grew up with Reagan is the most staunchly Republican in modern history.) The slump of the early 1990s bolstered Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign — but it also gave a boost to the fiscally conservative populism of Ross Perot, and then to the Republican wave of 1994.

Recessions, it seems, only benefit liberals when an activist government is perceived to have answers to the crisis. When liberal interventions seem to be effective, a downturn can help midwife an enduring Democratic majority. But if they don’t seem to be working — or worse, if they seem to be working for insiders and favored constituencies, rather than for the common man — then suspicion of state power can trump disillusionment with free markets.

Among voters at large, that’s what seems to be happening at the moment. Nothing the government has done across the last 12 months has inspired much public confidence. Of the billions poured out in bailouts and stimulus, a substantial share has gone to privileged insiders and liberal interest groups — Wall Street bankers, auto unions, public-sector employees. Beltway Democrats have spent months laboring on an enormous health care bill that feels irrelevant, at best, to the continuing unemployment crisis. And Obama and his advisers overpromised on the stimulus package, whose economic boost, while real, remains imperceptible to a nation coping with a double-digit jobless rate.

Meanwhile, the regions hardest hit by the current downturn are places where liberals have dominated for generations, and where government is overextended already. (Of the 10 “States in Fiscal Peril” featured in a recent Pew report, nine went for Barack Obama in 2008.) Even if the residents of California or New Jersey or Illinois wanted further expansions of government, there isn’t any revenue to finance them.

So voters are turning rightward instead. In New Jersey, a recent Quinnipiac poll found that 61 percent of voters favored laying off state workers to reduce the current budget shortfall; only 23 percent favored raising taxes instead. Nationally, the percentage of Americans who say that government is doing “too much” hit a 10-year peak this fall. In 2007, 69 percent of the public said that government should guarantee universal health care; now that number is down to 47 percent.

The silver lining for liberals, though, is that this rightward turn hasn’t touched younger voters yet. With 18- to 29-year-olds, Democratic identification remains high, and Obama’s approval ratings are still up over 60 percent.

This suggests that a Depression-style realignment, in which today’s youthful “Obama Democrats” are still voting for hope and change (and grumbling about George W. Bush) in 2050 and beyond, remains within the Democratic Party’s grasp.

But even the young will need to see results eventually. And the more that Democrats flail in the present, the more likely it becomes that the Great Recession will be remembered as the time when liberalism let the future slip away.

Ross Douthat, New York Times

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/opinion/30douthat.html

If you’re looking for a job right now, your prospects are terrible. There are six times as many Americans seeking work as there are job openings, and the average duration of unemployment — the time the average job-seeker has spent looking for work — is more than six months, the highest level since the 1930s.

You might think, then, that doing something about the employment situation would be a top policy priority. But now that total financial collapse has been averted, all the urgency seems to have vanished from policy discussion, replaced by a strange passivity. There’s a pervasive sense in Washington that nothing more can or should be done, that we should just wait for the economic recovery to trickle down to workers.

This is wrong and unacceptable.

Yes, the recession is probably over in a technical sense, but that doesn’t mean that full employment is just around the corner. Historically, financial crises have typically been followed not just by severe recessions but by anemic recoveries; it’s usually years before unemployment declines to anything like normal levels. And all indications are that the aftermath of the latest financial crisis is following the usual script. The Federal Reserve, for example, expects unemployment, currently 10.2 percent, to stay above 8 percent — a number that would have been considered disastrous not long ago — until sometime in 2012.

And the damage from sustained high unemployment will last much longer. The long-term unemployed can lose their skills, and even when the economy recovers they tend to have difficulty finding a job, because they’re regarded as poor risks by potential employers. Meanwhile, students who graduate into a poor labor market start their careers at a huge disadvantage — and pay a price in lower earnings for their whole working lives. Failure to act on unemployment isn’t just cruel, it’s short-sighted.

So it’s time for an emergency jobs program.

How is a jobs program different from a second stimulus? It’s a matter of priorities. The 2009 Obama stimulus bill was focused on restoring economic growth. It was, in effect, based on the belief that if you build G.D.P., the jobs will come. That strategy might have worked if the stimulus had been big enough — but it wasn’t. And as a matter of political reality, it’s hard to see how the administration could pass a second stimulus big enough to make up for the original shortfall.

So our best hope now is for a somewhat cheaper program that generates more jobs for the buck. Such a program should shy away from measures, like general tax cuts, that at best lead only indirectly to job creation, with many possible disconnects along the way. Instead, it should consist of measures that more or less directly save or add jobs.

One such measure would be another round of aid to beleaguered state and local governments, which have seen their tax receipts plunge and which, unlike the federal government, can’t borrow to cover a temporary shortfall. More aid would help avoid both a drastic worsening of public services (especially education) and the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Meanwhile, the federal government could provide jobs by … providing jobs. It’s time for at least a small-scale version of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, one that would offer relatively low-paying (but much better than nothing) public-service employment. There would be accusations that the government was creating make-work jobs, but the W.P.A. left many solid achievements in its wake. And the key point is that direct public employment can create a lot of jobs at relatively low cost. In a proposal to be released today, the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, argues that spending $40 billion a year for three years on public-service employment would create a million jobs, which sounds about right.

Finally, we can offer businesses direct incentives for employment. It’s probably too late for a job-conserving program, like the highly successful subsidy Germany offered to employers who maintained their work forces. But employers could be encouraged to add workers as the economy expands. The Economic Policy Institute proposes a tax credit for employers who increase their payrolls, which is certainly worth trying.

All of this would cost money, probably several hundred billion dollars, and raise the budget deficit in the short run. But this has to be weighed against the high cost of inaction in the face of a social and economic emergency.

Later this week, President Obama will hold a “jobs summit.” Most of the people I talk to are cynical about the event, and expect the administration to offer no more than symbolic gestures. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Yes, we can create more jobs — and yes, we should.

Paul Krugman, New York Times

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/opinion/30krugman.html

Today is Sunday, Nov. 29, the 333rd day of 2009. There are 32 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History

On Nov. 29, 1961, Enos the chimp was launched from Cape Canaveral aboard the Mercury-Atlas 5 spacecraft, which orbited earth twice before returning.

On this date

In 1530, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, one-time adviser to England’s King Henry VIII, died.

In 1830, a Polish secret society of infantry cadets staged an uprising in Warsaw, beginning the November Insurrection.

In 1832, Louisa May Alcott, the American author of the classic “Little Women”, was born.

In 1864, Colonel John M. Chivington led a controversial surprise attack, known as the Sand Creek Massacre, on a surrendered, partially disarmed Cheyenne Indian camp in southeastern Colorado Territory.

In 1890, the first Army-Navy football game was played, with Navy winning 24-0 at West Point, N.Y.

In 1924, Italian composer Giacomo Puccini died in Brussels before he could complete his opera “Turandot.” (It was finished by Franco Alfano.)

In 1929, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Richard E. Byrd, pilot Bernt Balchen, radio operator Harold June and photographer Ashley McKinney made the first airplane flight over the South Pole.

In 1947, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the partitioning of Palestine between Arabs and Jews.

In 1952, the first Army-Navy football game was played, with Navy winning 24-0 at West Point, N.Y.

In 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson named a commission headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

In 1963, more than 100 people are killed when a Canadian jet crashes into a field minutes after take-off.

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Full article: http://wvgazette.com/ap/ApPolitics/200911230243

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/20091129.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/29/default.stm

http://www.britannica.com/eb/dailycontent/rss

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574565964075852856.html

Experts guided policy, then turned against it.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union is today regarded by most of the world as an unalloyed good: the overdue collapse of a system that was incubated in terror and maintained by a vast police-state apparatus. The Soviet Union deprived ordinary people of their liberties, subjected entire nations to colonial rule, and ruined its own economy and that of its neighbors. Even those who objected to America’s policies during the period of superpower rivalry do not dispute that the Soviet “experiment” proved an abject failure, with terrifying human cost.

But as David C. Engerman reminds us in “Know Your Enemy,” his engrossing history of “the rise and fall of America’s Soviet experts,” the center of the scholarly universe had a more benign appraisal of Soviet reality through much of the Cold War. Winston Churchill may have seen Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” but to many scholars the postwar Soviet system fit the model of a modern industrial society not too different from our own.

As early as the mid-1950s, the eminent sociologist Talcott Parsons wrote: “It seems likely that East and West . . . are more likely to converge than to continue to diverge.” Others were more cautious. But at a time when America’s political leaders were issuing blustery pronouncements about liberating the Soviets’ captive nations, academic specialists, as Mr. Engerman notes, were stressing the system’s stability and the absence of discontent among the Russian people.

It is true that some scholars dissented from the thesis that the Soviets were on a trajectory to become “more like us,” and during the early years of the Cold War such differences were dealt with collegially. More important, there was a consensus at the time—even when experts disagreed about the nature of Soviet society—that the Soviet Union, in its foreign policy, was a dangerous adversary with expansionist designs. Mr. Engerman quotes a government official who worked with Russian scholars at Harvard saying that “if our utilization of the social sciences in combating Communism is not immediate and at once,” a nuclear Armageddon might ensue.

It was America’s concern about Soviet global ambitions that led to the creation of the Soviet-studies field. The U.S. could claim few Russia specialists before World War II, and those who studied the Soviet system were often sympathetic to the effort to build a socialist society. With the postwar takeover of Eastern Europe and Stalin’s retreat behind the Iron Curtain, Washington launched a crash project to develop a cadre of experts who could provide accurate interpretations of Soviet realities.

Funds flowed freely from the federal government to Columbia, Harvard and other elite universities. In return, new Russia studies’ institutes undertook projects designed to guide U.S. diplomats and security officials. A few initiatives were aimed at “political warfare,” such as Operation Troy, a scholarly undertaking intended to “induce the dissipation of the Soviet Union” through psychological warfare. More relevant was a project based on interviews with 700 displaced Soviet citizens in Europe. Among the conclusions: An individual’s social standing in the Soviet Union was seldom ascribed to nationality. That conclusion, Mr. Engerman says, though ultimately proved wrong, was “to hold sway for decades.”

In the early years, the relationship between the U.S. government and the scholarly community was one of happy co-existence. Government funds allowed scholars to conduct pioneering research, which in turn helped the policy community. University officials “could not imagine government work as presenting any challenge to academic autonomy,” Mr. Engerman notes. By the 1970s, however, the relationship had changed. The radical currents that swept through the universities in the 1960s stirred a hostility to cooperating with officialdom.

At the same time, a new generation of specialists emerged: They were determined to assess the Soviet experience—present and past—in a more optimistic light. Social scientists churned out study after study seeking to demonstrate that Soviet institutions functioned much like their counterparts in the U.S. and ridiculing the use of the word “totalitarian” to describe the Soviet system. Likewise, revisionist historians like Sheila Fitzpatrick wrote accounts of the Stalin period that dealt primly with the Terror and upbraided traditionalist historians for being, as she put it, “preoccupied with questions of moral judgment.”

In the end, it was the traditionalists—scholars who recognized the absurdity of the system and understood that the roots of Soviet totalitarianism could be found not in Stalin but in the original Leninist project—who were vindicated when the Soviet edifice fell apart. And it was traditionalist scholars—e.g., Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Pipes, Robert Conquest—who understood that the Soviet Union and Russia were not synonymous and that in the discontent of the non-Russian nationalities lay a critical vulnerability.

In their analytical astuteness and influence over policy the traditionalists stood as a rebuke to the acolytes of revisionism. Similarly, the traditionalists’ animus toward Soviet ideology and conduct was a rebuke to scholars who insisted on quietism or neutrality.

When Mr. Pipes was traveling in Russia during the early 1960s, Mr. Engerman tells us, he found that reading material from a Soviet source “evokes a kind of low burning but steady anger.” He went on to argue that, when confronted with a system based on lies and distortions, the historian “must assume some kind of philosophical and moral position.” Of course, he was right. The idea that a historian must check his moral outrage at the door was no more relevant to the study of communism than to the study of Hitlerism. That many, perhaps most, Soviet specialists did not understand this obvious truth at the end of the Cold War ranks among the great intellectual scandals of our time.

Mr. Puddington, director of research at Freedom House, is the author of “Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.”

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704204304574545794185926888.html

The world cannot trust scientists who abuse their power.

For anyone who doubts the power of the Internet to shine light on darkness, the news of the month is how digital technology helped uncover a secretive group of scientists who suppressed data, froze others out of the debate, and flouted freedom-of-information laws. Their behavior was brought to light when more than 1,000 emails,and some 3,500 additional files were published online, many of which boasted about how they suppressed hard questions about their data.

The emails, released by an apparent whistle-blower who used the name “FOI,” were written by scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England. Its scientists are high-profile campaigners for the theory of global warming.

The findings from East Anglia have been at the core of policy reports by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC does not do its own research but compiles information relating to climate change. It has declared the evidence that the globe is warming to be “unequivocal,” a claim routinely cited by lawmakers in the U.S. and elsewhere as authoritative.

The IPCC stresses honest science. According to its Web site, its goal is to “assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.”

The panel, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, now faces the inconvenient truth that it relied on scientists who violated scientific process. In one email, the Climate Research Unit’s director, Phil Jones, wrote Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, promising to spike studies that cast doubt on the relationship between human activity and global warming. “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report,” he said. He pledged to “keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

In another email exhange, Mr. Mann wrote to Mr. Jones: “This was the danger of always criticizing the skeptics for not publishing in the ‘peer-reviewed literature.’ Obviously, they found a solution to that—take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering ‘Climate Research’ as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.”

Other emails include one in which Keith Briffa of the Climate Research Unit told Mr. Mann that “I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same,” and in which Mr. Jones said he had employed Mr. Mann’s “trick” to “hide the decline” in temperatures. A May 2008 email from Mr. Jones with the subject line “IPCC & FOI” asked recipients to “delete any emails you may have had” about data submitted for an IPCC report. The British Freedom of Information Act makes it a crime to delete material subject to an FOI request; such a request had been made earlier that month.

Over the weekend, East Anglia officials disclosed they had disposed years ago of the historic weather data underlying their analysis. This may be one reason they’ve fought information requests. They say they’ll release the data they still have some time next year.

The emails showed how the global-warming group stifled dissent. They controlled the peer-review process, keeping opposing views unpublished, then cited “peer review” as evidence of their “consensus.” One of the dissident scientists, Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado, wrote on his blog that the emails show the “collusion to suppress other scientifically supported views of the climate system, and the human role within it, is a systemic problem with the climate assessment process.”

These disclosures have led to some soul-searching. “Opaqueness and secrecy are the enemies of science,” wrote George Monbriot, a leading British environmentalist. “There is a word for the apparent repeated attempts to prevent disclosure revealed in these emails: unscientific.” Demetris Koutsoyiannis, a hydraulic engineer who has written on climate change, wrote that scientists who suppressed others “must have felt that this secrecy was their best weapon: to censor differing opinions, to develop ‘trick’ procedures, to ‘balance’ the needs of the IPCC, and even to ‘redefine’ peer review.”

This unseemly business reveals another flaw. Why are scholars who review papers allowed to remain anonymous? Reforming scientists and lawmakers might put the question more concretely: How many of the anonymous reviewers who spiked skeptical scientific papers over the years are the people who wrote these emails detailing how they abused peer review to block contrary evidence?

Science was one of the first disciplines to insist on transparency in order to foster competition in data and ideas. In the case of global warming, transparency is better late than never, as policy makers now have the chance to review the facts. Facing up to high-profile flaws is hard for any profession, but honest scientists will cheer how in our digital era eventually the truth will out, and will accept that no scientific hypothesis can be viewed as sacred or can be proved in secret.

Gordon L. Crovitz, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499404574564291187747578.html

Nepal’s poor have more pressing problems.

Global warming has captured the attention of politicians around the world. The following article is part of a series leading up to the December United Nations conference in Copenhagen on how ordinary people in different countries view the issue:

Nine years ago, Maya Bishwokarma moved with her family to Kathmandu from Trisuli, a remote village in the hilly Nepal countryside. Their search for a better life has proved elusive. She and her husband and two sons live in a small, two-room house with her brother-in-law’s family, near the bank of a small stream that has been converted into an open sewer.

“The life of the poor is more miserable here [than in the countryside],” Mrs. Bishwokarma told a Copenhagen Consensus researcher in June. “Our kids are suffering.” The family cannot afford to send their children to a good school.

One of the visible signs of this family’s hardship is the lack of basic amenities. Their hut has electricity, but rolling blackouts mean there is no power for as much as 16 hours a day. Even during the wet season, Mrs. Bishwokarma must line up with other local residents to collect water handed out every six days by government officials. Due to a long drought, the price of vegetables and food has soared.

The lack of water in the shadow of the Himalayas may seem like a strong argument for drastic, short-term reductions in carbon emissions. Indeed, the plight of people like the Bishwokarmas has been used by Al Gore and other campaigners to argue for just such cuts. Climate activists argue that there is a link between melting glaciers in the Himalayas and water shortages elsewhere.

On the surface, this makes sense. But when we dig deeper, we find that the Himalaya glaciers are difficult even for scientists to understand. Most suggestions of rapid melting are based on observations of a small handful of India’s 10,000 or so Himalayan glaciers. A comprehensive report in November by senior glaciologist Vijay Kumar Raina, released by the Indian government, looked more broadly and found that many of these glaciers are stable or have even advanced, and that the rate of retreat for many others has slowed recently.

Jeffrey S. Kargel, a glaciologist at the University of Arizona, declared in the Nov. 13 issue of Science that these “extremely provocative” findings were “consistent with what I have learned independently,” while in the same issue of the magazine Kenneth Hewitt, a glaciologist at Wilfrid Laurier University, agreed that “there is no evidence” to support the suggestion that the glaciers are disappearing quickly.

When glaciers thicken and expand, the summer runoff into rivers decreases. In other words, when climate change does increase glacial melting, the flow of water to poor people like the Bishwokarmas will increase for several decades.

This does not mean that we should cheer on climate change, which will affect the planet in a myriad of complex and challenging ways. It does cast new light on one argument for drastic, short-term carbon cuts. It is important, after all, that we base our response to global warming on the most solid scientific expectations.

What did Mrs. Bishwokarma have to say about such questions? Several times, she asked the Copenhagen Consensus researcher to explain what “climate change” was. When it was explained, she agreed that it was a concern.

But she added that the government of Nepal and others should spend money “first on our everyday problems, then on global warming.” To her, with the perspective of living in a slum and unable to send her children to good schools, that prescription makes a lot of sense.

Mr. Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a think tank, and author of “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming” (Knopf, 2007).

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499404574562123968802420.html

The panic over its debt problem tells us more about investors than it does about the emirate.

Global markets sank sharply at the end of last week on fears that Dubai World, a subsidiary of the government of Dubai, was on the verge of defaulting on approximately $60 billion of the emirate’s $80 billion in total debt held by creditors world-wide. The rush of news stories added to the wildfire of panicky speculation, with headlines ranging from “Dubai Default Risk May be Big US Bank Problem,” to “Dubai Shows Limits of Government Rescues.”

The mini-panic, however, has little to do with Dubai and everything to do with the tenuous psychology of global investors still skittish after the financial crisis that hit in the fall of 2008.

The challenges that Dubai faces are both well-known and at least a year old. In the wake of the global financial crisis, Dubai’s debt was seen as one of many international soft spots, especially since most of the debt was tied to the assumptions that oil would stay above $145 a barrel, and that Dubai would continue to make the fantastic real-estate gains that had characterized the previous years.

The much-lauded and debated Dubai development model depended in part on a well of capital secured by oil and buoyed by the confidence of the emerging world. That confidence led to the creation of man-made islands, ski slopes in the desert, and some of the world’s tallest buildings. It also led to aggressive foreign investments in a portfolio that included luxury stores such as Barney’s and frivolities such as Madame Tussaud’s wax museums.

What led to Dubai’s rise was a vision of Arab entrepreneurialism, easy credit, and anything-is-possible attitude that epitomized the “if you build it they will come” philosophy. It was and is a dynamic materialistic outpost in a corner of the world more identified with religious and ethnic strife, and for a time it seemed to break free of the mooring of history. If nothing else, Dubai is the shopping mall and nightclub for much of the region.

Its obituary was written in the aftermath of the financial crisis as yet another icon of hubris. But Dubai is part of a United Arab Emirates confederation that includes Abu Dhabi and Sharjah, which have oil wealth that Dubai lacks.

As Dubai’s ruling family preened, the neighboring emirs sulked, and when Dubai’s debts came due prematurely, they swooped in, replete with the scolding I-told-you-so’s and armed with billions in oil dollars. Unique model aside, Dubai was always a story of wealth expatriated from Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and, more opaquely, Iran. If there was ever an example of too big to fail, Dubai was it.

Dubai will not default on its debts—its neighbors simply will not allow it and as of yesterday they have pledged not to. They can well afford to bail out their cousin, though not without extracting a price for the infusion of funds. At one point early this year, with oil heading to $30 a barrel, it was possible the money wouldn’t be there. But with oil near $80, the sovereign wealth funds of Abu Dhabi that have been conspicuously silent of late have their hundreds of billions.

Dubai is central to the fate of those who will bail it out. Rich-as-Croesus neighbors, whose conservative culture precludes the carefree amoral opportunities offered by Dubai, use the country as an escape valve. More important, Dubai remains a vital hub of banking, financial markets, deal-making and real estate development that is not about to pass quietly into that good night.

The panic in global markets, as absurd as it was, indicates a fragile state of mind that can do damage. If Dubai had defaulted, it’s not as if all $80 billion owed would be written-off like some foreclosed subdivision in central Florida. There is still cash-flow, and no sane bank would willingly forgo that and refuse to renegotiate the loans.

Even a doomsday scenario for Dubai—complete default—wouldn’t be a global disaster. While $80 billion is a lot of money, it is still $100 billion shy of what the U.S. government paid to keep American International Group afloat, and it is a pittance in the pool of tens of trillions in bonds world-wide.

So why did markets react as they did? Panic is the easy answer, and global investors do at regular intervals overreact. More disturbing is the possibility that investors in the traditional financial capitals of Europe, the United States and Asia have no better understanding of the world now than they did before last year’s crisis.

The old centers—New York, London, Frankfurt, Tokyo—fear risk in parts of the world they deem emerging and underplay the risks in the offices next to them. They view the Dubais, the Shanghais and the Rios with suspicion and with errant conviction that their models are built on foundations of sand, ready to collapse, when it was their own foundations that have proved to be weak. Judging from the misguided reaction to Dubai’s challenges, the past year hasn’t changed those attitudes. That should make us worried, very worried, but not about Dubai.

Mr. Karabell is president of River Twice and author most recently of “Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy” (Simon & Schuster, 2009).

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499404574564420658960540.html

Sunday’s vote keeps European heads in the sand about Muslim immigrants.

Nearly 58% of Swiss voters Sunday cast their ballots in favor of banning the construction of new minarets in the Alpine republic, a surprise result that led at least one Swiss member of parliament to declare that “the foundations of Switzerland’s direct democracy have failed.”

That is clearly wrong. Swiss direct democracy shows its mettle when Swiss voters use it to stand up to their political elites, as happened here. Having said that, Sunday’s vote, for all the hand-wringing leading up to it, was a decidedly mild-mannered sort of protest. The construction of new minarets is banned, but the building of mosques is unaffected, and the vote does not affect the four existing minarets in the country. Nobody’s freedom of worship is threatened, but a symbolic message has been sent.

But what message, exactly? The vote betrays an undercurrent of fear among the Swiss—a fear that is not without cause. There is no denying the connection between radical imams and terrorist acts. Nor should anyone look away from the fact that too many European Muslims flatly reject the norms of their host countries, sometimes in ways that are criminal: honor killings, child brides and the like.

Yet banning minarets does nothing to address that fear. It merely makes it less likely that the average Swiss will be confronted by a visible symbol of Islam upon his skyline. Thus, even as a symbolic gesture, it seems to encourage a head-in-the-sand approach toward the 5% of Swiss who are Muslim. In much of Europe, this is the norm anyway, the result of political correctness and cowardice.

Rather than being a blow against that attitude, Sunday’s vote seems only to reinforce it. Banning minarets won’t do anything to assimilate Switzerland’s or Europe’s Muslims, or to ensure that economic opportunity is available to everyone of whatever creed, or to deal with Western Europe’s demographic problem of too few newborns.

The ban, in other words, does too much and too little at once. Too much because it becomes a very visible and easily exploited symbol of supposed European intolerance. But it accomplishes too little because it seeks merely to hide from view the problems that gave rise to the fear of the minaret in the first place.

Editorial, Wall Street Journal

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A foreign policy of penance has won America no friends.

‘He talks too much,” a Saudi academic in Jeddah, who had once been smitten with Barack Obama, recently observed to me of America’s 44th president. He has wearied of Mr. Obama and now does not bother with the Obama oratory.

He is hardly alone, this academic. In the endless chatter of this region, and in the commentaries offered by the press, the theme is one of disappointment. In the Arab-Islamic world, Barack Obama has come down to earth.

He has not made the world anew, history did not bend to his will, the Indians and Pakistanis have been told that the matter of Kashmir is theirs to resolve, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the same intractable clash of two irreconcilable nationalisms, and the theocrats in Iran have not “unclenched their fist,” nor have they abandoned their nuclear quest.

There is little Mr. Obama can do about this disenchantment. He can’t journey to Turkey to tell its Islamist leaders and political class that a decade of anti-American scapegoating is all forgiven and was the product of American policies—he has already done that. He can’t journey to Cairo to tell the fabled “Arab street” that the Iraq war was a wasted war of choice, and that America earned the malice that came its way from Arab lands—he has already done that as well. He can’t tell Muslims that America is not at war with Islam—he, like his predecessor, has said that time and again.

It was the norm for American liberalism during the Bush years to brandish the Pew Global Attitudes survey that told of America’s decline in the eyes of foreign nations. Foreigners were saying what the liberals wanted said.

Now those surveys of 2009 bring findings from the world of Islam that confirm that the animus toward America has not been radically changed by the ascendancy of Mr. Obama. In the Palestinian territories, 15% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 82% have an unfavorable view. The Obama speech in Ankara didn’t seem to help in Turkey, where the favorables are 14% and those unreconciled, 69%. In Egypt, a country that’s reaped nearly 40 years of American aid, things stayed roughly the same: 27% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 70% do not. In Pakistan, a place of great consequence for American power, our standing has deteriorated: The unfavorables rose from 63% in 2008 to 68% this year.

Mr. Obama’s election has not drained the swamps of anti-Americanism. That anti-Americanism is endemic to this region, an alibi and a scapegoat for nations, and their rulers, unwilling to break out of the grip of political autocracy and economic failure. It predated the presidency of George W. Bush and rages on during the Obama presidency.

We had once taken to the foreign world that quintessential American difference—the belief in liberty, a needed innocence to play off against the settled and complacent ways of older nations. The Obama approach is different.

Steeped in an overarching idea of American guilt, Mr. Obama and his lieutenants offered nothing less than a doctrine, and a policy, of American penance. No one told Mr. Obama that the Islamic world, where American power is engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one’s own tribe when in the midst, and in the lands, of others.

The crowd may have applauded the cavalier way the new steward of American power referred to his predecessor, but in the privacy of their own language they doubtless wondered about his character and his fidelity. “My brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the stranger,” goes one of the Arab world’s most honored maxims. The stranger who came into their midst and spoke badly of his own was destined to become an object of suspicion.

Mr. Obama could not make up his mind: He was at one with “the people” and with the rulers who held them in subjugation. The people of Iran who took to the streets this past summer were betrayed by this hapless diplomacy—Mr. Obama was out to “engage” the terrible rulers that millions of Iranians were determined to be rid of.

On Nov. 4, on the 30th anniversary of the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran, the embattled reformers, again in the streets, posed an embarrassing dilemma for American diplomacy: “Obama, Obama, you are either with us or with them,” they chanted. By not responding to these cries and continuing to “engage” Tehran’s murderous regime, his choice was made clear. It wasn’t one of American diplomacy’s finest moments.

Mr. Obama has himself to blame for the disarray of his foreign policy. American arms had won a decent outcome in Iraq, but Mr. Obama would not claim it—it was his predecessor’s war. Vigilance had kept the American homeland safe from terrorist attacks for seven long years under his predecessors, but he could never grant Bush policies the honor and credit they deserved. He had declared Afghanistan a war of necessity, but he seems to have his eye on the road out even as he is set to announce a troop increase in an address to be delivered tomorrow.

He was quick to assert, in the course of his exuberant campaign for president last year, that his diplomacy in South Asia would start with the standoff in Kashmir. In truth India had no interest in an international adjudication of Kashmir. What was settled during the partition in 1947 was there to stay. In recent days, Mr. Obama walked away from earlier ambitions. “Obviously, there are historic conflicts between India and Pakistan,” he said. “It’s not the place of the United States to try to, from the outside, resolve those conflicts.”

Nor was he swayed by the fate of so many “peace plans” that have been floated over so many decades to resolve the fight between Arab and Jew over the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. Where George W. Bush offered the Palestinians the gift of clarity—statehood but only after the renunciation of terror and the break with maximalism—Mr. Obama signaled a return to the dead ways of the past: a peace process where America itself is broker and arbiter.

The Obama diplomacy had made a settlement freeze its starting point, when this was precisely the wrong place to begin. Israel has given up settlements before at the altar of peace—recall the historical accommodation with Egypt a quarter century ago. The right course would have set the question of settlements aside as it took up the broader challenge of radicalism in the region—the menace and swagger of Iran, the arsenal of Hamas and Hezbollah, the refusal of the Arab order of power to embrace in broad daylight the cause of peace with Israel.

The laws of gravity, the weight of history and of precedent, have caught up with the Obama presidency. We are beyond stirring speeches. The novelty of the Obama approach, and the Obama persona, has worn off. There is a whole American diplomatic tradition to draw upon—engagements made, wisdom acquired in the course of decades, and, yes, accounts to be settled with rogues and tyrannies. They might yet help this administration find its way out of a labyrinth of its own making.

Mr. Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is the author of “The Foreigner’s Gift” (Free Press, 2007).

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Tehran ups the ante again as diplomacy goes nowhere.

Mohamed ElBaradei caps his contentious and ultimately failed 12-year stint as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency today, having spent many years enabling Iran’s nuclear bids only to condemn them in his final days in office. Mr. ElBaradei combined his rebuke of Iran with his familiar calls for more negotiation, but we’ll take his belated realism about Iran as his tacit admission that Dick Cheney and John Bolton have been right all along. Let’s hope the education of the Obama Administration doesn’t take as long.

As if to underscore the point, yesterday the Iranian government ordered up 10 additional uranium enrichment plants on the scale of its already operational facility in Natanz, which has a planned capacity of 54,000 centrifuges. That could mean an eventual total of more than 500,000 centrifuges, or enough to enrich about 160 bombs worth of uranium each year. Whether it can ever do that is an open question, but it does give a sense of the scale of the regime’s ambitions.

The decision is also a reminder of how unchastened Iran has been by President Obama’s revelation in September that Iran had been building a secret 3,000 centrifuge facility near the city of Qom. The IAEA’s governing board finally got around on Friday to rebuking Iran for that deception, a vote the Administration trumpeted because both Russia and China voted with the United States. But perhaps only within the Obama Administration can a symbolic gesture by the IAEA be considered a diplomatic triumph.

Mohamad ElBaradei

“Time is running out for Iran to address the international community’s growing concerns about its nuclear program,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said yesterday, but the West has said this many times before. Earlier this year, Mr. Obama said Iran had a deadline of September.

The regime scoffed at Mr. Obama after he delivered a conciliating message for the Persian New Year in March, scoffed again after he mildly criticized its post-election crackdown and killing spree in June (following days of silence), and scoffed a third time by rejecting the West’s offer last month to enrich Iran’s uranium for it. Yet the Administration insists the enrichment deal is still Iran’s for the taking. “A few years ago [the West] said we had to completely stop all our nuclear activities,” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last month. “Now look where we are today.”

Those are the words of a man who believes he has Mr. Obama’s number. And until the President, his advisers and the Europeans realize that only punitive sanctions or military strikes will force it to reconsider its nuclear ambitions, an emboldened Islamic Republic will continue to march confidently toward a bomb over the wreckage of Mohamed ElBaradei’s—and Barack Obama’s—best intentions.

Editorial, Wall Street Journal

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574565802447685802.html

The tiny country beats back the colonial aspirations of its neighbors.

Unless something monumental happens in the Western Hemisphere in the next 31 days, the big regional story for 2009 will be how tiny Honduras managed to beat back the colonial aspirations of its most powerful neighbors and preserve its constitution.

Yesterday’s elections for president and Congress, held as scheduled and without incident, were the crowning achievement of that struggle.

National Party candidate Porfirio Lobo was the favorite to win in pre-election polls. Yet the name of the victor is almost beside the point. The completion of these elections is a national triumph in itself and a win for all people who yearn for liberty.

Casting a vote in Tegucigalpa, Nov. 29

The fact that the U.S. has said it will recognize their legitimacy shows that this reality eventually made its way to the White House. If not Hugo Chávez’s Waterloo, Honduras’s stand at least marks a major setback for the Venezuelan strongman’s expansionist agenda.

The losers in this drama also include Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Spain, which all did their level best to block the election. Egged on by their zeal, militants inside Honduras took to exploding small bombs around the country in the weeks leading to the vote. They hoped that terror might damp turnout and delegitimize the process. They failed. Yesterday’s civic participation appeared to be at least as good as it was in the last presidential election. Some polling stations reportedly even ran short, for a time, of the indelible ink used to mark voter pinkies.

Latin socialists tried to discredit Honduran democracy as part of their effort to force the reinstatement of deposed President Manuel Zelaya. Both sides knew that if that happened the electoral process would be in jeopardy.

Mr. Zelaya had already showed his hand when he organized a mob to try to carry out a June 28 popular referendum so that he could cancel the elections and remain in office. That was unlawful, and he was arrested by order of the Supreme Court and later removed from power by Congress for violating the constitution.

It is less well-known that as president, according to an electoral-council official I interviewed in Tegucigalpa two weeks ago, Mr. Zelaya had refused to transfer the budgeted funds—as required by law—to the council for its preparatory work. In other words, he didn’t want a free election.

Mr. Chávez didn’t want one either. During the Zelaya government the country had become a member of Mr. Chávez’s Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), which includes Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua. If power changed hands, Honduran membership would be at risk.

Last week a government official told me that Honduran intelligence has learned that Mr. Zelaya had made preparations to welcome all the ALBA presidents to the country the night of his planned June referendum. Food for a 10,000-strong blowout celebration, the official added, was on order.

ALBA has quite a bit of clout at the Organization of American States (OAS) these days, and it hasn’t been hard for Mr. Chávez to control Secretary General José Miguel Insulza. The Chilean socialist desperately wants to be re-elected to his OAS post in 2010. Only a month before Mr. Zelaya was deposed, Mr. Insulza led the effort to lift the OAS membership ban on Cuba. When Mr. Zelaya was deposed, Mr. Insulza dutifully took up his instructions sent from Caracas to quash Honduran sovereignty.

Unfortunately for him, the leftist claims that Honduras could not hold fair elections flew in the face of the facts. First, the candidates were chosen in November 2008 primaries with observers from the OAS, which judged the process to be “transparent and participative.” Second, all the presidential candidates—save one from a small party on the extreme left—wanted the elections to go forward. Third, though Mr. Insulza insisted on calling the removal of Mr. Zelaya a “military coup,” the military had never taken charge of the government. And finally, the independent electoral tribunal, chosen by congress before Mr. Zelaya was removed, was continuing with the steps required to fulfill its constitutional mandate to conduct the vote. In the aftermath of the elections Mr. Insulza, who insisted that the group would not recognize the results, presides over a discredited OAS.

At least the Obama administration figured out, after four months, that it had blundered. It deserves credit for realizing that elections were the best way forward, and for promising to recognize the outcome despite enormous pressure from Brazil and Venezuela. President Obama came to office intent on a foreign policy of multilateralism. Perhaps this experience will teach him that freedom does indeed have enemies.

Almost 400 foreign observers from Japan, Europe, Latin America and the U.S. traveled to Honduras for yesterday’s elections. Peru, Costa Rica, Panama, the German parliament and Japan will also recognize the vote. The outpouring of international support demonstrates that Hondurans were never as alone these past five months as they thought. A good part of the world backs their desire to save their democracy from chavismo and to live in liberty.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady, Wall Street Journal

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In the Ecuadorean Amazon basin our thirst for oil has triggered an eco-disaster: wholesale pollution and catastrophic cancer rates. And a bloody turf war has broken out. Ecuador is taking a survival plan to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. But will western governments listen?

Torrential rain has washed away the blood where the family fell under a hail of wooden spears. But memories of what happened this summer are still fresh in the minds of those who live and work here.

At first the security guard inside the perimeter fence of the oil drilling station is nervous and warns us to keep our distance as we approach. Darkness is falling and he is alone on duty. But he slowly opens up and describes how, on a morning in August, a 12-year-old girl, run through with two spears nearly 12ft in length, managed to stagger to the front gate of the drilling station to raise the alarm before she collapsed and died.

A short distance away, on a dirt track hidden from view by dense foliage, the bodies of her mother and 17-year-old brother were found by oil workers, pierced by more than a dozen similar spears. Her baby brother had been kidnapped. Before she died, the girl gave a description of their attackers: they were almost entirely naked.

From the shape of the spears and the coloured feathers on them, they have since been identified as almost certainly belonging to one of the world’s last known “uncontacted” tribes: the Taromenane.

In the whole of its history the tribe has never had any peaceful contact with the outside world, choosing to live totally isolated from civilisation in this area of breathtaking beauty at the headwaters of the Amazon. They are supposed to be a protected people, but they are fighting for their survival and that of their ancestral land. It is a struggle with surprising implications for all of us.

Sandra Zavala, her son Byron and daughter Damaris were easy targets, stragglers behind a group of men with machetes who were working to clear a path through the rainforest. Oil exploration in the forest has encouraged illegal logging and colonisation by poor Ecuadoreans from other parts of the country and led to clashes in which many innocent lives have been lost. Sandra, 35, and her children were just the latest victims in a vicious turf war triggered by our thirst for oil.

Close to Ecuador’s borders with Colombia and Peru, this swathe of territory — much of it now included in the Yasuni national park — is also at the forefront of another, global battle. Yasuni is home to a vast array of rare flora and fauna. It has the largest number of tree species per hectare in the world (more in just one hectare than the whole of North America), together with endangered monkeys, pumas and jaguars and 44% of the entire bird population of the Amazon basin stretching far beyond its borders. But beneath the surface is immense wealth of a different kind: more than a billion barrels of crude oil.

Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, is promoting a plan he describes as “not only simple, but audacious and revolutionary”. In the run-up to next month’s UN climate-change conference in Copenhagen, he and his team have been circling the globe to drum up support for a scheme that would leave 850m barrels of oil in the eastern section of the park untouched underground.

In return for not pumping this oil, they are asking other countries to pay Ecuador $350m a year for the next 10 years to compensate for lost income. Correa’s plan is designed to preserve what is left of Yasuni’s unique biosphere and the territory of its indigenous people and would also prevent carbon-dioxide emissions caused by extracting and burning this oil — an estimated total of 410m metric tons of CO2.

In Yasuni, meanwhile, the battle is raging for control of resources. Active drilling and oil production are taking place in several blocks of land, including one close to the heart of the park operated by the Spanish conglomerate Repsol and two in the northwest operated by the Chinese company Petro Oriental, which runs the drilling station where the Zavalas were killed. The family came from a small community of settlers, Los Reyes, that has sprung up close to the oil wells.

The Taromenane have killed settlers and illegal loggers before, in retaliation for attacks on their dwindling numbers. In 2003, 26 Taromenane women and children were ambushed and killed. Their attackers were never caught but are thought to have been Waorani, another, larger group of indigenous people, many of whom have been co-opted to work for the oil companies.

In an effort to protect the territory of these indigenous communities, the southern half of Yasuni and an area beyond was marked out two years ago as a so-called “untouchable zone” where they could continue their hunter-gatherer existence undisturbed. But the Taromenane have no way of knowing that such a zone exists, let alone its limits. They only know that their ancestral land is under threat. Those who attacked the Zavala family a few miles beyond the boundary of the zone did not keep the kidnapped baby. They stole back to the area two days later and left the infant propped in a hollow tree trunk close to where his mother had died. He was quickly found, dehydrated but otherwise well.

In line with official policy of not forcing contact with the Taromenane, no action was taken in the aftermath of the killing. (In the past, indigenous peoples have been decimated by diseases brought in through forced contact with the outside world.) “We don’t want to put these tribes in a crystal box and conserve them for eternity,” says a government spokesman, Eduardo Pichilingue. “We want to leave it up to them to decide how and when they change. They have that right.”

Instead of punishing the tribe, the government called for the Hormiguero Sur drilling station to be closed down. But as we stand talking to the guard there two months later, straining to make ourselves heard above the roar of a generator pumping oil, it is clear this order is being ignored. Attempts to challenge Petro Oriental executives at a nearby headquarters are met with indifference.

“We can’t comment,” said Luis Gomez, director of community relations. “All I can say is we get blamed for everything bad that goes on around here. It’s even our fault, they say, when a wife leaves her husband.” He laughs, before hastily ushering us out of the floodlit compound.

This brushoff is mild compared to the repeated stonewalling of the Spanish company Repsol, which has drilling operations close to the heart of Yasuni. In addition to triggering tensions of the kind that led to the deaths of the Zavala family, Repsol has recently been accused of causing some of the worst environmental destruction in this part of the Amazon rainforest, with a series of huge oil spills. According to the Spanish branch of Greenpeace, Repsol sent 14,000 barrels of crude oil gushing over the landscape in February. The spill caused such widespread pollution that environmental activists called for all concessions granted to Repsol throughout the Amazon region to be withdrawn. Repsol refuses to comment.

We were initially given permission by Repsol to visit a scientific research station run by Ecuador’s Catholic University within its concession area. From there we planned to travel to some of the indigenous communities said to have been affected by the spills.

But when we arrive by motor launch at Repsol’s first security outpost, we find a notice pinned on a perimeter fence warning employees: “It is your responsibility to maintain strict secrecy regarding your work.” As our photographer starts taking pictures, he is warned by security guards with submachineguns to put his cameras away.

At the scientific station: impasse. Repsol backtracks on its offer of co-operation and says it has nobody for us to liaise with locally. Fearing repercussions from the oil company, which controls all access roads to and from the university-run scientific station, academic staff there become anxious and reluctant to talk. They withdraw an offer of a truck to visit indigenous communities several hours’ drive away and seem keen for us to leave.

Stark evidence of the long-term destruction caused by oil companies in Ecuador’s Amazonian rainforest lies less than 100 miles northwest of Yasuni. In parts of the rainforest as yet untouched by the incessant search for oil, the song of rare birds and the screeching of monkeys fill the air. But close to the oil installations, the only signs of wildlife are the vultures circling on thermal currents above flare stacks burning off unwanted gas and emitting an acrid smell.

People in the sprawling area between the oil towns of Coca and Lago Agrio, which has been booming since the 1960s, have had a chilling foretaste of what others may face unless the drilling is contained. Here, in a region dubbed “the Rainforest Chernobyl”, decades of drilling by the American giant Texaco, taken over in 2001 by the Chevron Corporation, has led to toxic contamination over thousands of miles. Local communities are suffering catastrophic rates of cancer and other diseases, which has prompted a historic $27-billion court battle. If the 30,000 Ecuadorean plaintiffs are successful, legal history could be made, with the largest damages award ever handed down in an environmental case.

A few miles east of Coca lies the village of San Carlos. Most who live here came to the area in the 1970s to farm along routes cut through the rainforest as oil exploration began. There is little forest left now and little productive farming. Much of the land in this region that stretches north to the border with Colombia was long ago contaminated by millions of gallons of toxic waste, gas and crude oil released untreated into the environment. Most of the inhabitants have depended for decades on contaminated drinking water from polluted rivers and streams. Rates of cancer of all kinds are nearly four times higher than in areas where there is no oil drilling. The incidence of other illnesses such as skin and bone disease, respiratory and digestive problems and spontaneous abortions are also far higher. Most of the people living here have been dependent for decades on contaminated drinking water taken directly from polluted rivers and streams.

Beatrice Mainaguez cradles a photograph of her younger sister Maria, who died of uterine cancer three years ago aged 35. She talks of the “bitter pain” of watching her grow thinner and thinner before she died. Maria, a mother of five, had lived in San Carlos since she was an infant. Her family took their drinking water from a creek that ran close to one of the many oil wells Texaco sank in and around San Carlos in the 1970s and ’80s. It was not until four years ago that the family shack was connected to mains water, and eight months ago to electricity.

A short distance away, Orlando Molina hugs his daughters Sofia, 15, and Yuri, 17, who squirm with embarrassment as he asks them to roll up their trouser legs to show me the bone deformities both were born with.

Orlando says doctors told him the deformities were likely to have been caused by their mothers’ milk being leached of nutrients because she drank water that had drained through soil contaminated by spills from the Texaco wells. His extended family used to live on a coffee farm within a few hundred feet of a Texaco facility on the outskirts of San Carlos that was subsequently taken over by the state company Petroecuador. Both his parents died of stomach cancer, his sister of breast cancer and a brother of prostate cancer.

Orlando spent most of the $4,500 Petroecuador eventually gave him for gobbling up his small landholding on medical treatment to help straighten his daughter’s legs. With the $1,200 left over he bought a two-room wooden shack where his family of six now live.

“Sixty-five per cent of the population around here are suffering from respiratory and gastric problems, skin disease and other illnesses,” says Rosa Moreno, a nurse who has been in the San Carlos area for 25 years. “We don’t have any specialist doctors to diagnose them properly or analyse the causes. But to anyone who lives round here it’s obvious that the problems are related to pollution caused by the oil companies.”

Walk anywhere near these waste pits and you still sink ankle-deep in tar. Other stretches of land that appear green move unnervingly underfoot; poke a stick through the grass and you simply find lakes of black sludge.

Last year a team of engineers, doctors and biologists submitted a court-ordered report, which concluded that Texaco had polluted streams and drinking water across an area of nearly 2,000 square miles, and caused 2,091 cases of cancer, leading to 1,401 deaths between 1985 and 1998. Chevron’s lawyers say the area’s health problems are caused only by poverty and poor sanitation.

Faced with the possibility of losing the legal battle and having to pay staggering levels of compensation, the company has now made moves to argue before an international court of arbitration in the Hague that the case against the oil companies in Ecuador has been unfair. The outcome is still uncertain: the judge in Ecuador is not due to hand down his judgment until next year.

So far only Germany has made a concrete effort to support Correa’s plan, offering to donate $50m a year for the next decade — on condition that an international trust fund be set up into which donor countries would pay money. All donors would receive “Yasuni bonds” guaranteeing that their contributions would be returned, with interest, if Ecuador were ever to tap the protected oil reserves. Spain, France and Italy have also expressed interest by cancelling debts owed by Ecuador. The British government has not yet been formally approached, but when Correa’s advisers were due to meet MPs earlier this year to discuss the plan, they were told that our parliamentarians were too busy dealing with the expenses scandal.

Correa has made it clear that if he does not get backing for his plan, he will be forced to allow further drilling in Yasuni. “Climate change has been produced principally by the rich countries,” he has said, “and they have a duty to take responsibility for that. What we are proposing is a constructive way to redress the imbalance and stop further polluting of the planet.”

The entire Amazon region is the largest green lung in the world. Its trees and plants produce one-fifth of the Earth’s oxygen and absorb as much CO2 every year as is created by the burning of fossil fuels in the entire EU. Preserving the natural environment in this area is a key element of the fight against global warming.

The bloodbath among the locals must also come to an end: the Zavala family were innocents swept up in the thirst for oil.

But is anyone really listening?

Christine Toomey, London Times

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Full article: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6931573.ece

Karen Quintal, with a Leksell frame screwed into her skull before surgery for a tumor.

One was a middle-aged man who refused to get into the shower. The other was a teenager who was afraid to get out.

The man, Leonard, a writer living outside Chicago, found himself completely unable to wash himself or brush his teeth. The teenager, Ross, growing up in a suburb of New York, had become so terrified of germs that he would regularly shower for seven hours. Each received a diagnosis of severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, or O.C.D., and for years neither felt comfortable enough to leave the house.

But leave they eventually did, traveling in desperation to a hospital in Rhode Island for an experimental brain operation in which four raisin-sized holes were burned deep in their brains.

Today, two years after surgery, Ross is 21 and in college. “It saved my life,” he said. “I really believe that.”

The same cannot be said for Leonard, 67, who had surgery in 1995. “There was no change at all,” he said. “I still don’t leave the house.”

Both men asked that their last names not be used to protect their privacy.

The great promise of neuroscience at the end of the last century was that it would revolutionize the treatment of psychiatric problems. But the first real application of advanced brain science is not novel at all. It is a precise, sophisticated version of an old and controversial approach: psychosurgery, in which doctors operate directly on the brain.

In the last decade or so, more than 500 people have undergone brain surgery for problems like depression, anxiety, Tourette’s syndrome, even obesity, most as a part of medical studies. The results have been encouraging, and this year, for the first time since frontal lobotomy fell into disrepute in the 1950s, the Food and Drug Administration approved one of the surgical techniques for some cases of O.C.D.

While no more than a few thousand people are impaired enough to meet the strict criteria for the surgery right now, millions more suffering from an array of severe conditions, from depression to obesity, could seek such operations as the techniques become less experimental.

Before Ross, 21, had brain surgery two years ago, his obsessive-compulsive disorder kept him from leaving the house. “It saved my life,” he said.

But with that hope comes risk. For all the progress that has been made, some psychiatrists and medical ethicists say, doctors still do not know much about the circuits they are tampering with, and the results are unpredictable: some people improve, others feel little or nothing, and an unlucky few actually get worse. In this country, at least one patient was left unable to feed or care for herself after botched surgery.

Moreover, demand for the operations is so high that it could tempt less experienced surgeons to offer them, without the oversight or support of research institutions.

And if the operations are oversold as a kind of all-purpose cure for emotional problems — which they are not, doctors say — then the great promise could quickly feel like a betrayal.

“We have this idea — it’s almost a fetish — that progress is its own justification, that if something is promising, then how can we not rush to relieve suffering?” said Paul Root Wolpe, a medical ethicist at Emory University.

It was not so long ago, he noted, that doctors considered the frontal lobotomy a major advance — only to learn that the operation left thousands of patients with irreversible brain damage. Many promising medical ideas have run aground, Dr. Wolpe added, “and that’s why we have to move very cautiously.”

Dr. Darin D. Dougherty, director of the division of neurotherapeutics at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard, put it more bluntly. Given the history of failed techniques, like frontal lobotomy, he said, “If this effort somehow goes wrong, it’ll shut down this approach for another hundred years.”

A Last Resort

Five percent to 15 percent of people given diagnoses of obsessive-compulsive disorder are beyond the reach of any standard treatment. Ross said he was 12 when he noticed that he took longer to wash his hands than most people. Soon he was changing into clean clothes several times a day. Eventually he would barely come out of his room, and when he did, he was careful about what he touched.

“It got so bad, I didn’t want any contact with people,” he said. “I couldn’t hug my own parents.”

Before turning to writing, Leonard was a healthy, successful businessman. Then he was struck, out of nowhere, with a fear of insects and spiders. He overcame the phobias, only to find himself with a strong aversion to bathing. He stopped washing and could not brush his teeth or shave.

“I just looked horrible,” he said. “I had a big, ugly beard. My skin turned black. I was afraid to be seen out in public. I looked like a street person. If you were a policeman, you would have arrested me.”

Both tried antidepressants like Prozac, as well as a variety of other medications. They spent many hours in standard psychotherapy for obsessive-compulsive disorder, gradually becoming exposed to dreaded situations — a moldy shower stall, for instance — and practicing cognitive and relaxation techniques to defuse their anxiety.

To no avail.

“It worked for a while for me, but never lasted,” Ross said. “I mean, I just thought my life was over.”

But there was one more option, their doctors told them, a last resort. At a handful of medical centers here and abroad, including Harvard, the University of Toronto and the Cleveland Clinic, doctors for years have performed a variety of experimental procedures, most for O.C.D. or depression, each guided by high-resolution imaging technology. The companies that make some of the devices have supported the research, and paid some of the doctors to consult on operations.

In one procedure, called a cingulotomy, doctors drill into the skull and thread wires into an area called the anterior cingulate. There they pinpoint and destroy pinches of tissue that lie along a circuit in each hemisphere that connects deeper, emotional centers of the brain to areas of the frontal cortex, where conscious planning is centered.

This circuit appears to be hyperactive in people with severe O.C.D., and imaging studies suggest that the surgery quiets that activity. In another operation, called a capsulotomy, surgeons go deeper, into an area called the internal capsule, and burn out spots in a circuit also thought to be overactive.

An altogether different approach is called deep brain stimulation, or D.B.S., in which surgeons sink wires into the brain but leave them in place. A pacemaker-like device sends a current to the electrodes, apparently interfering with circuits thought to be hyperactive in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (and also those with severe depression). The current can be turned up, down or off, so deep brain stimulation is adjustable and, to some extent, reversible.

In yet another technique, doctors place the patient in an M.R.I.-like machine that sends beams of radiation into the skull. The beams pass through the brain without causing damage, except at the point where they converge. There they burn out spots of tissue from O.C.D.-related circuits, with similar effects as the other operations. This option, called gamma knife surgery, was the one Leonard and Ross settled on.

The institutions all have strict ethical screening to select candidates. The disorder must be severe and disabling, and all standard treatments exhausted. The informed-consent documents make clear that the operation is experimental and not guaranteed to succeed.

Nor is desperation by itself sufficient to qualify, said Richard Marsland, who oversees the screening process at Butler Hospital in Providence, R.I., which works with surgeons at Rhode Island Hospital, where Leonard and Ross had the operation.

“We get hundreds of requests a year and do only one or two,” Mr. Marsland said. “And some of the people we turn down are in bad shape. Still, we stick to the criteria.”

For those who have successfully recovered from surgery, this intensive screening seems excessive. “I know why it’s done, but this is an operation that could make the difference between life and death for so many people,” said Gerry Radano, whose book “Contaminated: My Journey Out of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder” (Bar-le-Duc Books, 2007), recounts her own suffering and long recovery from surgery. She also has a Web site, freeofocd.com, where people from around the world consult with her.

But for the doctors running the programs, this screening is crucial. “If patients are poorly selected or not followed well, there’ll be an increasing number of bad outcomes, and the promise of this field will wither away,” said Dr. Ben Greenberg, the psychiatrist in charge of the program at Butler.

Dr. Greenberg said about 60 percent of patients who underwent either gamma knife surgery or deep brain stimulation showed significant improvement, and the rest showed little or no improvement. For this article, he agreed to put a reporter in touch with one — Leonard — who did not have a good experience.

The Danger of Optimism

The true measure of an operation, medical ethicists say, is its overall effect on a person’s life, not only on specific symptoms.

In the early days of psychosurgery, after World War II, doctors published scores of papers detailing how lobotomy relieved symptoms of mental distress. In 1949, the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize in medicine for inventing the procedure.

But careful follow-up painted a darker picture: of people who lost motivation, who developed the helpless indifference dramatized by the post-op rebel McMurphy in Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” played by Jack Nicholson in the 1975 movie.

The newer operations pinpoint targets on specific, precisely mapped circuits, whereas the frontal lobotomy amounted to a crude slash into the brain behind the eyes, blindly mangling whatever connections and circuits were in the way. Still, there remain large gaps in doctors’ understanding of the circuits they are operating on.

In a paper published last year, researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden reported that half the people who had the most commonly offered operations for obsessive-compulsive disorder showed symptoms of apathy and poor self-control for years afterward, despite scoring lower on a measure of O.C.D. severity.

“An inherent problem in most research is that innovation is driven by groups that believe in their method, thus introducing bias that is almost impossible to avoid,” Dr. Christian Ruck, the lead author of the paper, wrote in an e-mail message. The institute’s doctors, who burned out significantly more tissue than other centers did, no longer perform the operations, partly, Dr. Ruck said, as a result of his findings.

In the United States, at least one patient has suffered disabling brain damage from an operation for O.C.D. The case led to a $7.5 million judgment in 2002 against the Ohio hospital that performed the procedure. (It is no longer offered there.)

Most outcomes, whether favorable or not, have had less remarkable immediate results. The brain can take months or even years to fully adjust after the operations. The revelations about the people treated at Karolinska “underscore the importance of face-to-face assessments of adverse symptoms,” Dr. Ruck and his co-authors concluded.

The Long Way Back

Ross said he felt no difference for months after surgery, until the day his brother asked him to play a video game in the basement, and down the stairs he went.

“I just felt like doing it,” he said. “I would never have gone down there before.”

He said the procedure seemed to give the psychotherapy sessions a chance to work, and last summer he felt comfortable enough to stop them. He now spends his days studying, going to class, playing the odd video game to relax. He has told friends about the operation, he said, “and they’re O.K. with it — they know the story.”

Leonard is still struggling, for reasons no one understands. He keeps odd hours, working through most nights and sleeping much of the day. He is not unhappy, he said, but he has the same aversion to washing and still lives like a hermit.

“I still don’t know why I’m like this, and I would still try anything that could help,” he said. “But at this point, obviously, I’m skeptical of the efficacy of surgery, at least for me.”

Ms. Radano, who wrote the book about her recovery, said the most important thing about the surgery was that it gave people a chance. “That’s all people in this situation want, and I know because I was there,” she said while getting into her car on a recent afternoon.

On the passenger seat was a container of decontaminating hand wipes. She pointed and laughed. “See? You’re never completely out.”

Benedict Carey, New York Times

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Full article and photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/27/health/research/27brain.html

Sometimes you write an elegy without meaning to. In the early 1990s, when Thomas Mallon began his book on people and their letters, you were marveling at your spiffy new dial-up modem, if you so much as knew what one was. His fine meditation on the art of ­letter-writing — he intended it as a companion to “A Book of One’s Own,” his study of people and their diaries — naturally reads differently today: The very physics of our universe, Mallon notes, have fundamentally altered. Time and distance are no longer what they once were. With them have gone, to varying degrees, privacy, eccentricity, suspense, your local stationer and, very nearly, the United States Postal Service. Intimacy has yielded to oversharing.

No matter. Mallon heads off — at long last — on an astute, exhilarating tour of the mailbag, one that has only acquired greater flavor while he was off writing novels and checking his e-mail these last 10 years. He quotes a 1928 chronicler: “The history of postal service has been the history of civilization,” a statement that anyone who has lived in a country with three mail deliveries a day (or been starved to death by five a week) knows to be true. And of course whole historical periods and inner lives have been extracted and resurrected from letters. Without them we would have no court of Louis XIV, no George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, an entirely insufferable John Adams. Among other things, letters are the lifeblood of history, the beating heart of biography.

To Mallon they are tools with which to monitor the interior climate. His chapter titles — “Absence,” “Friendship,” “Advice,” “Complaint,” for starters — offer a virtual tour of the human condition. He concedes that his categories are fluid and arbitrary, as indeed they are. There is no reason whatever that Colette and her elemental passions belong to “Confession.” Similarly, Mallon feels free to depart from the beaten track. His old friends and the obvious suspects are all here — Flaubert and Sand, Freud and Jung, the Mitfords in all their ferocious fluency — but so are plenty of unknowns. Mallon sometimes embraces the obvious (“84 Charing Cross Road”), sometimes avoids it altogether (“Cyrano”!). He will visit some favorites and neglect others, but even the reader who lies futilely in wait for Elizabeth Bowen cannot fault him: the result is by any measure a charming, discursive delight. “Yours Ever” is nuanced, informed, full-blooded, a vigorous literary salute. Mallon offers up his text as one that “bows down to its bibliography, one that presents itself as a kind of long cover letter to the cornucopia of titles listed back there,” a line, I might add, that could serve as a fine definition of belles-lettres.

He opens with “Absence,” which used to be as good a reason as any to set pen to paper. It is impossible to resist the New York gems of the newly arrived William Faulkner, recovering, for example, from his first subway ride: “The experience showed me that we are not descended from monkeys, as some say, but from lice.” Faulkner found work at Lord & Taylor, where for a short time his mother sent his mail. The Postal Service betrays him, but only because Faulkner’s handwriting verges on the indecipherable. And of course he ultimately discovers the wait for mail is interminable: “Things happen and then unhappen by the time I hear of them,” he grouses, reminding us that once upon a time there was some suspense to this communication business. Over and over the postage stamp reveals itself to be the discontent’s best friend. There is plenty of on-the-page psychotherapy here, except when there is not: “Don’t believe that stuff about hereditary influences affecting the child. Insanity on all four sides of my family, and look at me! A model of mental stability if ever there was one,” Tennessee Williams boasts to Maria St. Just. Some of Mallon’s correspondents demonstrate an astonishing self-awareness. On his own behalf and Zelda’s, F. Scott Fitzgerald offers their daughter some impeccable advice: “Just do everything we didn’t do and you will be perfectly safe.”

Mallon knows why we are reading over his shoulder; we are in it for a glimpse of the great man in his pajamas, the great writer on a lark, his stylistic guard down, conjuring with the crumbs and lint, the burnt toast and sprained egos of everyday existence. (This is why some people write biography, as Mina Curtiss, in “Other People’s Letters,” made clear.) He is incisive on the subject of Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt’s equal “for epistolary output and bumptious eloquence.” Why is Churchill so good? He is simultaneously id and ego, “wholly onto every appetite and piece of foolishness in his makeup but sometimes quite unable to squelch their appearance on paper.” At the opposite end of the spectrum is Lincoln, that epistolary anorexic. He is as unforthcoming as Jefferson was expansive. “If Jefferson’s letters can be a sort of Louisiana Purchase, lighting out for more territory than they require, Abraham Lincoln’s are a struggle for union, battles for exactitude and strict coherence, limited-objective campaigns fought on short rhetorical rations,” Mallon notes. He advances his own theory about why diaries fail to extract similar riches from American politicians: Diaries are “unpollable.” “Letters, by contrast, with their actual and immediate audience, offer presidents a kind of flesh to be pressed, recipients who can be wheedled, ordered about, asked for approval, burdened with confidences.”

Think of a letter, Ralph Waldo Emerson urged his daughter, as “a kind of picture of a voice.” Mallon recognizes letters as well to be monuments, marathons, performance art. He neglects neither Ann Landers nor the Unabomber. By way of unexpected detours — Jean Harris turns into the Madame de Sévigné of the prison world — he delivers up epistolary swooning, stroking, wincing, mulling, composting. For the most part the transitions are fluid, but occasionally he makes a jarring turn, swerving, for example, not altogether safely, from Eudora Welty to Thomas Jefferson. But his book is meant to be a ramble, a loose-limbed survey of that forgiving territory where you could safely park your despair, issue a cry from the heart, offer advice, share the ancillary epiphany, exact revenge; where you might be, in short, melancholy, tentative, boastful, sulky, brooding, nuts — emotions for which the letter (and that extinct species, the unsent letter) have always been the perfect medium. “We are most essentially ourselves when frantic and fidgety,” Mallon observes — you can always tell a novelist at 100 yards — and this is a book of shirttails untucked and egos exposed. With good reason “Yours Ever” takes as its hero Charles Lamb, author of “mood-driven miniatures,” precisely what Mallon has knit together here.

Mallon allows himself an occasional note of regret: he wonders, for example, if Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz’s mid­century correspondence is “the kind of considered exchange to which e-mail is now doing such chatty, hurry-up violence.” For the most part though he gets through “Yours Ever” without succumbing to nostalgia. This reviewer was not so stalwart. It is next to impossible to read these pages without mourning the whole apparatus of distance, without experiencing a deep and plangent longing for the airmail envelope, the sweetest shade of blue this side of a Tiffany box. Is it possible to sound crusty or confessional electronically? It is as if text and e-mail messages are of this world, a letter an attempt, however illusory, to transcend it. All of which adds tension and resonance to Mallon’s pages, already crackling with hesitations and vulnerabilities, obsessions and aspirations, with reminders of the lost art of literary telepathy, of the aching, attenuated rhythm of a written correspondence. Mallon’s readers can only thank him for his tardiness.

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/books/review/Schiff-t.html

The Germans must have a term for it. Doppel­gedanken, perhaps: the sensation, when reading, that your own mind is giving birth to the words as they appear on the page. Such is the ego that in these rare instances you wonder, “How could the author have known what I was thinking?” Of course, what has happened isn’t this at all, though it’s no less astonishing. Rather, you’ve been drawn so deftly into another world that you’re breathing with someone else’s rhythms, seeing someone else’s visions as your own.

One of the pleasures of reading Alice Munro derives from her ability to impart this sensation. It’s the sort of gift that requires enormous modesty on the part of the writer, who must shun pyrotechnics for something less flashy: an empathy so pitch-­perfect as to be nearly undetectable. But it’s most arresting in the hands of a writer who isn’t too modest — one possessed of a fearless, at times, fearsome, ambition.

From the beginning, Munro has staked her claim on rocky, rough terrain. Her first dozen books are rooted mostly in southwestern Ontario, mostly in the lives of women. Although the stories are, on the surface, bastions of domesticity — they’re full of mothers and daughters and aunts and cousins, darning and gardening, aprons and cakes — Munro flays this material with the unflinching efficiency of a hunter skinning a rabbit. More recently, in “The View From Castle Rock,” she broadened her narrative territory by venturing both into 17th-­century Scotland and beyond the boundaries of conventional fiction, mining her family history to produce an unabashed amalgam of invention and fact. Her new book, “Too Much Happiness,” represents at once a return to her habitual form and a furthering of her exploratory sensibilities.

The collection’s 10 stories take on some sensational subjects. In fact, a quick tally yields all the elements of pulp fiction: violence, adultery, extreme cruelty, duplicity, theft, suicide, murder. But while in pulp fiction the emotional climax coincides with the height of external drama, a ­Munro story works according to a different scheme. Here the nominally momentous event is little more than an anteroom to an echo chamber filled with subtle and far-reaching thematic reverberations.

In “Wenlock Edge,” a college student visits a wealthy man in his home, where she is invited to dine and then to read aloud . . . naked. “And may I ask you please — may I ask you please — not to cross your legs?” he says before sitting opposite her. This scene, swollen with shame and eros, with intimations of power and predation, ends without apparent incident. Only later does the narrator come to understand that the violation, the humiliation from which she may never recover, lies in her unquestioning acquiescence. “A far greater shame it seemed now, than at the time. He had done something to me, after all.”

In “Dimensions,” a triple murder occurs, but it neither drives the plot nor crowns its arc. Instead, the story focuses on the tentative rekindling of animus in a bereft mother, sparked first by a most unlikely, most unpalatable, source and then, in the final, beautiful pages, by the urgent need for her to use her own reanimating breath. (A note about the word “beautiful”: Munro isn’t interested in standard literary aesthetics. She doesn’t traffic in the artful, the lyrical or the euphonious. When she savages your heart, it’s with language almost ostentatious in its refusal to be pretty.)

Refusal is an important element in ­Munro’s fiction. Time and again, whether with minute gestures or on a grand scale, her characters refuse to obey convention and rebel against authority. The young mother in “Deep-Holes” continues to nurse her 5-month-old infant despite her geologist husband’s disapproval. (“He thought Sally was far too casual about the whole procedure, sometimes going around the kitchen doing things with one hand while the infant guzzled.”) In “Face” — one of two stories told from a man’s perspective — a character’s protest against an enforced separation takes the form of self-mutilation. And the narrator of “Child’s Play,” after informing us that children “are monstrously conventional,” relates how she and a childhood friend transgressed not simply against propriety but against human life itself. We are shocked, shocked — only to realize, seconds later, that it’s the shock of recognition. We have entertained similar notions; we are that way too.

Munro’s own contrarian streak is displayed in the structure of her narratives. Many writers begin a story in medias res, but a Munro story is liable to end in the middle of things — that is, well before (or well beyond) the moment when a reader expects to find resolution. The very shape of things, along with our sense of what is important and why, seems to shift as we proceed. The real story keeps turning out to be larger than, and at canted angles to, what we thought it would be. The effect is initially destabilizing, then unexpectedly affirming.

In the introduction to her 1996 volume of “Selected Stories,” Munro reveals an endearing idiosyncrasy: “I don’t always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction.” She goes on to explain that she doesn’t read in order to find out what happens so much as to experience the world of the story, to inhabit it for a while, “wandering back and forth” in it, discovering the ways it alters her perspective. This Alice-in-Wonderland propensity, this inclination to regard fiction as a dynamic creation and the reader as a mutable participant, may provide a key to reading Munro. More than that, it suggests something provocative about the uses of fiction, about its moral purpose as well as its potential to have an impact on our lives.

The final, title, story delivers something else again. Picking up on the methodology of “Castle Rock,” it imagines the life of a historical figure, in this case Sophia Kovalevsky, a 19th-century Russian mathematician and novelist. Munro allows the seams between research and imagination to show, and the result is something bold and strange and unexpectedly moving. Near death, Sophia imagines life’s sorrows becoming “something like a plague in a ballad, part of an old story,” while events and ideas seem to be “taking on a new shape, seen through sheets of clear intelligence, a transforming glass.” I can think of no better way to describe Munro’s own singular abilities.

It has become practically de rigueur for reviewers to refer to Munro as “our ­Chekhov,” so I wondered whether Sophia’s nationality might represent an authorial wink. As for the comparison, I don’t know. On the basis of mutual brilliance it may be apt. But wasn’t it John Donne who said “comparisons are odious”? And at this point in Munro’s career, how much can it add? What is certain is this: She is our Munro. And how fortunate we are to call her that.

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Full article and photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/books/review/Cohen-t.html

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See also:

‘Too Much Happiness’

Too Much Happiness

Many persons who have not studied mathematics confuse it with arithmetic and consider it a dry and arid science. Actually, however, this science requires great fantasy.
—Sophia Kovalevsky

i

On the first day of January, in the year 1891, a small woman and a large man are walking in the Old Cemetery, in Genoa. Both of them are around forty years old. The woman has a childishly large head, with a thicket of dark curls, and her expression is eager, faintly pleading. Her face has begun to look worn. The man is immense. He weighs 285 pounds, distributed over a large frame, and being Russian, he is often referred to as a bear, also as a Cossack. At present he is crouching over tombstones and writing in his notebook, collecting inscriptions and puzzling over abbreviations not immediately clear to him, though he speaks Russian, French, English, Italian and has an understanding of classical and medieval Latin. His knowledge is as expansive as his physique, and though his speciality is governmental law, he is capable of lecturing on the growth of contemporary political institutions in America, the peculiarities of society in Russia and the West, and the laws and practices of ancient empires. But he is not a pedant. He is witty and popular, at ease on various levels, and able to live a most comfortable life, due to his properties near Kharkov. He has, however, been forbidden to hold an academic post in Russia, because of being a Liberal.

His name suits him. Maksim. Maksim Maksimovich Kovalevsky.

The woman with him is also a Kovalevsky. She was married to a distant cousin of his, but is now a widow.

She speaks to him teasingly.

“You know that one of us will die,” she says. “One of us will die this year.”

Only half listening, he asks her, Why is that?

“Because we have gone walking in a graveyard on the first day of the New Year.”

“Indeed.”

“There are still a few things you don’t know,” she says in her pert but anxious way. “I knew that before I was eight years old.”

“Girls spend more time with kitchen maids and boys in the stables — I suppose that is why.”

“Boys in the stables do not hear about death?”

“Not so much. Concentration is on other things.”

There is snow that day but it is soft. They leave melted, black footprints where they’ve walked.
She met him for the first time in 1888. He had come to Stockholm to advise on the foundation of a school of social sciences. Their shared nationality, going so far as a shared family name, would have thrown them together even if there was no particular attraction. She would have had a responsibility to entertain and generally take care of a fellow Liberal, unwelcome at home.

But that turned out to be no duty at all. They flew at each other as if they had indeed been long-lost relatives. A torrent of jokes and questions followed, an immediate understanding, a rich gabble of Russian, as if the languages of Western Europe had been flimsy formal cages in which they had been too long confined, or paltry substitutes for true human speech. Their behavior, as well, soon overflowed the proprieties of Stockholm.

He stayed late at her apartment. She went alone to lunch with him at his hotel. When he hurt his leg in a mishap on the ice, she helped him with the soaking and dressing and, what was more, she told people about it. She was so sure of herself then, and especially sure of him. She wrote a description of him to a friend, borrowing from De Musset.

He is very joyful, and at the same time very gloomy —
Disagreeable neighbor, excellent comrade —
Extremely light-minded, and yet very affected —
Indignantly naïve, nevertheless very blasé —
Terribly sincere, and at the same time very sly.

And at the end she wrote, “A real Russian, he is, into the bargain.”

Fat Maksim, she called him then.

“I have never been so tempted to write romances, as when with Fat Maksim.”

And “He takes up too much room, on the divan and in one’s mind. It is simply impossible for me, in his presence, to think of anything but him.”

This was at the very time when she should have been working day and night, preparing her submission for the Bordin Prize. “I am neglecting not only my Functions but my Elliptic Integrals and my Rigid Body,” she joked to her fellow mathematician, Mittag-Leffler, who persuaded Maksim that it was time to go and deliver lectures in Uppsala for a while. She tore herself from thoughts of him, from daydreams, back to the movement of rigid bodies and the solution of the so-called mermaid problem by the use of theta functions with two independent variables. She worked desperately but happily, because he was still in the back of her mind. When he returned she was worn out but triumphant. Two triumphs — her paper ready for its last polishing and anonymous submission; her lover growling but cheerful, eagerly returned from his banishment and giving every indication, as she thought, that he intended to make her the woman of his life.

The Bordin Prize was what spoiled them. So Sophia believed. She herself was taken in by it at first, dazzled by all the chandeliers and champagne. The compliments quite dizzying, the marvelling and the hand kissing spread thick on top of certain inconvenient but immutable facts. The fact that they would never grant her a job worthy of her gift, that she would be lucky indeed to find herself teaching in a provincial girls’ high school. While she was basking Maksim decamped. Never a word about the real reason, of course — just the papers he had to write, his need for the peace and quiet of Beaulieu.
He had felt himself ignored. A man who was not used to being ignored, who had probably never been in any salon, at any reception, since he was a grown man, where that had been the case. And it wasn’t so much the case in Paris either. It wasn’t that he was invisible there, in Sonya’s limelight, as that he was the usual. A man of solid worth and negotiable reputation, with a certain bulk of frame and intellect, together with a lightness of wit, an adroit masculine charm. While she was an utter novelty, a delightful freak, the woman of mathematical gifts and female timidity, quite charming, yet with a mind most unconventionally furnished, under her curls.

He wrote his cold and sulky apologies from Beaulieu, refusing her offer to visit once her flurry was over. He had a lady staying with him, he said, whom he could not possibly present to her. This lady was in distress and needed his attention at the moment. Sonya should make her way back to Sweden, he said; she should be happy where her friends were waiting for her. Her students would have need of her and so would her little daughter. (A jab there, a suggestion familiar to her, of faulty motherhood?)

And at the end of his letter one terrible sentence.

“If I loved you I would have written differently.”

The end of everything. Back from Paris with her prize and her freaky glittery fame, back to her friends who suddenly meant no more than a snap of her fingers to her. Back to the students who meant something more, but only when she stood before them transformed into her mathematical self, which was oddly still accessible. And back to her supposedly neglected but devastatingly merry little Fufu.

Everything in Stockholm reminded her.

She sat in the same room, with the furniture brought at such foolish expense across the Baltic Sea. The same divan in front of her that had recently, gallantly, supported his bulk. And hers in addition when he skillfully gathered her into his arms. In spite of his size he was never clumsy in lovemaking.

This same red damask, on which distinguished and undistinguished guests had sat in her old lost home. Maybe Fyodor Dostoyevsky had sat there in his lamentable nervous state, dazzled by Sophia’s sister Aniuta. And certainly Sophia herself as her mother’s unsatisfactory child, displeasing as usual.

The same old cabinet brought also from her home at Pali – bino, with the portraits of her grandparents set into it, painted on porcelain. The Shubert grandparents. No comfort there. He in uniform, she in a ball gown, displaying absurd self-satisfaction. They had got what they wanted, Sophia supposed, and had only contempt for those not so conniving or so lucky.

“Did you know I’m part German?” she had said to Maksim.

“Of course. How else could you be such a prodigy of industry? And have your head filled with mythical numbers?”

If I loved you.

Fufu brought her jam on a plate, asked her to play a child’s card game. “Leave me alone. Can’t you leave me alone?”

Later she wiped the tears out of her eyes and begged the child’s pardon.

Continues…

I’m fond of Google, I have to say. I like Larry Page, who seems, at least in the YouTube videos I’ve watched, shy and smart, with salt-and-pepper bangs; and Sergey Brin, who seems less shy and jokier and also smart. Ken Auletta, the author of this absorbing, shaggy, name-droppy book, doesn’t seem to like either of them much — he says that Page has a “Kermit the Frog” voice, which isn’t nice, while Brin comes off as a swaggering, efficiency-obsessed overachiever who, at Stanford, aced tests, picked locks, “borrowed” computer equipment from the loading dock and once renumbered all the rooms in the computer science building. “Google’s leaders are not cold businessmen; they are cold engineers,” Auletta writes — but “cold” seems oddly wrong. Auletta’s own chilliness may be traceable in part to Brin’s and Page’s reluctance to be interviewed. “After months of my kicking at the door, they opened it,” he writes in the acknowledgments. “Google’s founders and many of its executives share a zeal to digitize books,” he observes, “but don’t have much interest in reading them.”

They’ll probably give more than a glance at “Googled.” I read the book in three huge gulps and learned a lot — about Google’s “cold war” with Facebook, about Google’s tussles with Viacom, about Google’s role in the “Yahoo-Microsoft melee” and about Google’s gradual estrangement from its former ally, Apple. Auletta is given to martial similes and parallels, from Prince Metternich in 19th-century Europe to Afghanistan now: “Privacy questions will continue to hover like a Predator drone,” he writes, “capable of firing a missile that can destroy the trust companies require to serve as trustees for personal data.” And he includes some revealing human moments: Larry Page, on the day of Google’s hugely successful stock offering, pulls out his cellphone and says, “I’m going to call my mom!”

But what Auletta mainly does is talk shop with C.E.O.’s, and that is the great strength of the book. Auletta seems to have interviewed every media chief in North America, and most of them are unhappy, one way or another, with what Google has become. Google is voracious, they say, it has gargantuan ambitions, it’s too rich, it’s too smug, it makes big money off of O.P.C. — other people’s content. One unnamed “prominent media executive” leaned toward Auletta at the 2007 Google Zeitgeist Conference and whispered a rhetorical question in his ear: What real value, he wanted to know, was Google producing for society?

Wait. What real value? Come now, my prominent executive friend. Have you not glanced at Street View in Google Maps? Have you not relied on the humble aid of the search-box calculator, or checked out Google’s movie showtimes, or marveled at the quick-and-dirtiness of Google Translate? Have you not made interesting recherché 19th-century discoveries in Google Books? Or played with the amazing expando-charts in Google Finance? Have you not designed a strange tall house in Google SketchUp, and did you not make a sudden cry of awed delight the first time you saw the planet begin to turn and loom closer in Google Earth? Are you not signed up for automatic Google News alerts on several topics? I would be very surprised if you are not signed up for a Google alert or two.

Surely no other software company has built a cluster of products that are anywhere near as cleverly engineered, as quick-loading and as fun to fiddle with, as Google has, all for free. Have you not searched?

Because, let me tell you, I remember the old days, the antegoogluvian era. It was O.K. — it wasn’t horrible by any means. There were cordless telephones, and people wore comfortable sweaters. There was AltaVista, and Ask Jeeves, and HotBot, and Excite, and Infoseek, and Northern Light — with its deep results and its elegant floating schooner logo — and if you wanted to drag through several oceans at once, there was MetaCrawler. But the haul was haphazard, and it came in slow. You chewed your peanut-butter cracker, waiting for the screen to fill.

Then Google arrived in 1998, sponged clean, impossibly fast. Google was like a sunlit white Formica countertop with a single vine-ripened tomato on it. No ads in sight — Google was anti-ad back then. It was weirdly smart, too; you almost never had a false hit. You didn’t have to know anything about the two graduate students who had aligned and tuned their secret algorithms — the inseparable Page and Brin — to sense that they were brilliant young software dudes, with all the sneakered sure-footedness of innocence: the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button in that broad blank expanse of screen space made that clear. Google would make us all lucky; that was the promise. And in fact, it did.

So why are the prominent media executives unhappy? Because Google is making lots of ad money, and there’s only so much ad money to go around. Last year almost all of Google’s revenue came from the one truly annoying thing that the company is responsible for: tiny, cheesy, three-line text advertisements. These AdWords or AdSense ads load fast, and they’re supposedly “polite,” in that they don’t flicker or have pop-ups, and they’re almost everywhere now — on high-traffic destinations like The Washington Post or MySpace or Discovery.com, and on hundreds of thousands of little Web sites and blogs as well. “It’s all of our revenue,” Larry Page said in a meeting that Auletta attended in 2007.

The headlines say things like “Laser Hair Removal,” “Christian Singles,” “Turn Traffic Into Money,” “Have You Been Injured?” “Belly Fat Diet Recipe,” “If U Can Blog U Can Earn,” “Are You Writing a Book?” and so on. Countless M.F.A., or Made for AdSense, Web sites have appeared; they use articles stolen or “scraped” or mashed together from sites like Wikipedia, and their edges are framed with Google’s text ads. The ads work on a cost-per-click scheme: the advertiser pays Google only if you actually click on the ad. If you do, he’s billed a quarter, or a dollar, or (for some sought-after keywords like “personal injury” or “mesothelioma lawyers”) $10 or more.

But think — when was the last time you clicked on a three-line text ad? Almost never? Me neither. And yet, in 2008, Google had $21.8 billion in revenue, about 95 percent of which flowed from AdWords/AdSense. (A trickle came from banner and video ads sold by Google’s new subsidiary, DoubleClick, and from other products and services.) These unartful, hard-sell irritants — which have none of the beauty or the humor of TV, magazine, radio or newspaper advertising — are the foundation of Google’s financial empire, if you can believe it. It’s an empire built on tiny grains of keyword-searchable sand.

The advertising revenue keeps Google’s stock high, and that allows the company to do whatever it feels like doing. In 2006, when Google’s stock was worth $132 billion, the company absorbed YouTube for $1.65 billion, almost with a shrug. “They can buy anything they want or lose money on anything they choose to,” Irwin Gotlieb, the chief of GroupM, one of Google’s biggest competitors in the media market, told Auletta. If Microsoft is courting DoubleClick, Google can swoop in and buy DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. If the business of “cloud” computing seems to hold great promise, Google can build 20 or 50 or 70 massive data centers in undisclosed locations around the world, each drawing enough power to light a small city. Earlier this month, Google announced it would pay $750 million in stock for a company called AdMob, to sell banner ads on cellphones. “Once you get to a certain size, you have to figure out new ways of growing,” Ivan Seidenberg, the chief executive of Verizon, said to Auletta. “And then you start leaking on everyone else’s industry.” That’s why Auletta’s C.E.O.’s are resentful.

True, the miracles keep coming: Google Voice, which can e-mail you a transcript of your voice mail messages; and Chrome, a quick, clever Web browser; and Android, the new operating system for mobile devices. One of the latest is an agreement to print books on an A.T.M.-style on-demand printer, the Espresso Book Machine. But perhaps there are too many miracles emanating from one campus now; perhaps brand fatigue is setting in. Google’s famous slogan, “Don’t be evil,” now sounds a little bell-tollingly dystopian.

When they were at Stanford, Page and Brin criticized search engines that had become too “advertising oriented.” “These guys were opposed to advertising,” Auletta quotes Ram Shriram, one of Google’s first investors, as saying. “They had a purist view of the world.” They aren’t opposed now. Now they must be forever finding forage for a hungry, $180 billion ad-maddened beast. Auletta describes an unusual job-interview test that Sergey Brin once gave to a prospective in-house lawyer: “I need you to draw me a contract,” Brin said to her. “I need the contract to be for me to sell my soul to the Devil.” That was in 2002, the year Google began work internally on what would become AdSense.

Now Page and Brin fly around in a customized Boeing 767 and talk sincerely about green computing, even as the free streamings of everyone’s home video clips on YouTube burn through mountaintops of coal. They haven’t figured out a way to “monetize” — that is, make a profit from — their money maelstrom, YouTube, although I notice that Coffee-mate and Samsung banners appear nowadays in Philip DeFranco’s popular video monologues. “The benefit of free is that you get 100 percent of the market,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, explained to Auletta. “Free is the right answer.” For a while, perhaps — but maybe free is unsustainable. For news­papers, Auletta writes, “free may be a death certificate.” Maybe in the end, even on the Internet, you get what you pay for.

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Full article: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/cartoons/20091123_ink_tank?pg=19