A Selective Tasting of Articles about Social, Economic, Scientific, Artistic, and Political Thought That Has Successfully Passed Thru Stage I of a Stupidity Filter. ****************We STRONGLY recommend using Firefox to browse this blog.*************
Iraq: The Cost/Benefit Analysis
An Immoral Philosophy, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times:
...Congressional Democrats, with support from many Republicans, are trying to expand [the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (Schip)], which already provides essential medical care to millions of children, to cover millions of additional children who ... lack health insurance.
But President Bush says that access to care is no problem — “After all, you just go to an emergency room” — and, with the support of the Republican Congressional leadership, he’s declared that he’ll veto any Schip expansion on “philosophical” grounds.
It must be about philosophy, because it surely isn’t about cost. One of the plans ... would cost less over the next five years than we’ll spend in Iraq in the next four months. And it would be fully paid for by an increase in tobacco taxes.
The House plan, which would cover more children ... offsets Schip costs by reducing subsidies to Medicare Advantage — a privatization scheme that ... costs taxpayers 12 percent more per beneficiary than traditional Medicare.
Strange to say, however, the administration, although determined to prevent any expansion of children’s health care, is also dead set against any cut in Medicare Advantage payments.
So what kind of philosophy says that it’s O.K. to subsidize insurance companies, but not to provide health care to children?
Well, here’s what Mr. Bush said...: “They’re going to increase the number of folks eligible through Schip; some want to lower the age for Medicare. And then all of a sudden, you begin to see a ... a strategy ... to get more people to be a part of a federalization of health care.”
Now, why should Mr. Bush fear that insuring uninsured children would lead to a further “federalization” of health care...? It’s not because he thinks the plans wouldn’t work. It’s because he’s afraid that they would ...[and] that voters, having seen how the government can help children, would ask why it can’t do the same for adults.
And there you have the core of Mr. Bush’s philosophy. He wants the public to believe that government is always the problem... But it’s hard to convince people ... when they see it doing good things. So his philosophy says that the government must be prevented from solving problems, even if it can. In fact, the more good a proposed government program would do, the more fiercely it must be opposed.
This sounds like a caricature, but it isn’t. ...[T]his good-is-bad philosophy has always been at the core of Republican opposition... Thus back in 1994, William Kristol warned against passage of the Clinton health care plan “in any form,” because “its success would signal the rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment that such policy is being perceived as a failure in other areas.”
But it has taken the fight over children’s health insurance to bring the perversity of this philosophy fully into view. ...[D]enying basic health care to children whose parents lack the means to pay for it, simply because you’re afraid that success in insuring children might put big government in a good light, is just morally wrong.
And the public understands that. According to a recent ... poll, 9 in 10 Americans — including 83 percent of self-identified Republicans — support an expansion of the children’s health insurance program.
There is, it seems, more basic decency in the hearts of Americans than is dreamt of in Mr. Bush’s philosophy.
The French Connections, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times:
"There was a time when everyone thought that the Europeans and the Japanese were better at business than we were. In the early 1990s airport bookstores were full of volumes ... promising to teach you the secrets of Japanese business success. Lester Thurow’s 1992 book, “Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan, Europe and America,” which spent more than six months on the Times best-seller list, predicted that Europe would win.
Then it all changed, and American despondency turned into triumphalism. Partly this was because the Clinton boom contrasted so sharply with Europe’s slow growth and Japan’s decade-long slump. Above all, however, our new confidence reflected the rise of the Internet. ...[M]ost of Europe except Scandinavia lagged far behind the U.S. when it came to getting online.
What most Americans probably don’t know is that ... as dial-up has given way to ... high-speed links — it’s the United States that has fallen behind.
The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did.
Even more striking is the fact that our “high speed” connections are painfully slow by other countries’ standards. ... Oh, and access is much cheaper...
What happened to America’s Internet lead? Bad policy. Specifically, the United States ... forgot — or was persuaded by special interests to ignore — ...that sometimes you can’t have effective market competition without effective regulation.
You see, ... to get [to the internet] you need to go through a narrow passageway, down your phone line or down your TV cable. And if the companies controlling these passageways can behave like the robber barons of yore, levying whatever tolls they like on those who pass by, commerce suffers.
America’s Internet flourished in the dial-up era because federal regulators ... forced local phone companies to act as common carriers, allowing competing service providers to use their lines. Clinton administration officials ... tried to ensure that this open competition would continue — but the telecommunications giants sabotaged their efforts, while The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page ridiculed them as people with the minds of French bureaucrats.
And when the Bush administration put Michael Powell in charge of the F.C.C., the digital robber barons were basically set free to do whatever they liked. As a result, there’s little competition in U.S. broadband — if you’re lucky, you have a choice between ... the local cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly. The price is high and the service is poor, but there’s nowhere else to go.
Meanwhile, as ... Business Week explains, the real French bureaucrats used judicious regulation to promote competition. As a result, French consumers get to choose from a variety of service providers who offer reasonably priced Internet access that’s much faster than anything I can get, and comes with free voice calls, TV and Wi-Fi.
It’s too early to say how much harm the broadband lag will do to the U.S. economy as a whole. But it’s interesting to learn that health care isn’t the only area in which the French, who can take a pragmatic approach because they aren’t prisoners of free-market ideology, simply do things better.
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Previous (7/20) column: Paul Krugman: All the President’s Enablers
Next (7/27) column: Paul Krugman: The Sum of Some Fears
Update: Paul Krugman emails:
I wrote a piece on this, "Digital Robber Barons?", back in 2002 - unfortunately, it looks my worries were justified. Also, Matthew Yglesias had a piece 2 years ago (which I somehow missed).
The broadband penetration statistics are at http://www.oecd.org/document/7/0,3343,en
_2649_34223_38446855_1_1_1_1,00.htmlConnection speeds are at http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0705/
New Home Sales Down Substantially
05.23.07 | 2:00 AM on Wired.COM You could hardly have asked for a clearer demonstration of the futility of copy protection than the events of the past three weeks. The DVD-encryption key that sparked a user rebellion on Digg in early May is now largely moot. Despite having been posted to hundreds of thousands of websites and garnering attention worldwide, the key is now useless, because the industry group that oversees HD DVD and Blu-ray copy protection has changed its encryption scheme to use a different one.
The new key, in turn, has itself already been leaked, even before it was scheduled to go into effect this week.
Perhaps in recognition of the futility of stopping the spread of an obsolete code, the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator (the industry group behind the AACS copy-protection standard) seems to have abandoned its earlier threats of legal action.
"It apparently was highly controversial (for the AACS Licensing Administrator) to send the legal threat letters," says Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "I assume they would need to have consensus before they could step up to any lawsuits. And, in any event, it's too late for this key -- it's been immortalized as an internet celebrity thanks to the first legal threats, and will likely outlive all of us, no matter how many lawsuits are brought."
The AACS Licensing Administrator seems likely to turn to technical means of defending its copy-protection system now rather than legal ones. Instead of playing Whac-A-Mole, trying to pursue legal actions against people who post the encryption-processing key, the group is now playing keep away, trying to stay one step ahead of the hacker community by releasing new keys and revoking old ones faster than they can be cracked.
AACS Licensing Administrator representatives refused to comment on the group's strategy or lack of legal activity this month.
AACS is the digital rights management standard used by next-generation high-definition movie discs. Both of the two competing high-definition optical disc standards, HD DVD and Blu-ray, employ AACS to protect content from being copied.
AACS uses encryption keys to keep that content locked down. Last month, Digg removed a user's post that contained the encryption key, sparking a widespread revolt as irate web surfers reposted the key all over the internet. Today, a Google search for the 32-character key returns nearly 1.5 million results.
It's not the first time that an industry's attempt to secure its content has been thwarted by a vast army of internet users bent on breaking a copy-protection scheme. The promise of AACS was that it would be more bulletproof than the Content Scrambling System, or CSS, the encryption scheme on DVDs. CSS was broken in 1999 by a trio of computer-security researchers, including Jon Lech Johansen, better known as "DVD Jon," who was all of 15 years old at the time. The program they created, DeCSS, showed DVDs to be easily exploited, and today a wide variety of programs will decrypt and copy DVDs. What's more, attempts to thwart the spread of the DeCSS algorithm resulted in an outpouring of creative publications based on it, including T-shirts and even an epic poem written in haiku stanzas.
AACS is supposed to be superior to CSS in that it uses device- and title-specific keys. Since the AACS Licensing Administrator can revoke device keys on compromised players and issue fresh title keys for new HD DVDs that will not work with compromised players, it would seem to be able to stay one step ahead of the hacker community. A new set of keys was due to be released May 22.
Unfortunately for the AACS Licensing Administrator, the new keys have already been broken and it will be 90 days before the consortium can release another update. As Wired and other sources noted last week, SlySoft, a software publisher that makes tools for getting around copy protection on movies, updated its AnyDVD HD program to exploit an as-yet-unpublished key. According to security expert Ed Felton, SlySoft had likely already found the exploit in a prior version, but kept the attack a secret until all the other keys were blacklisted.
AACS Licensing Administrator refuses to reveal or speculate as to what its next steps might be. A statement released earlier this year is vague as to specifics.
"AACS LA has multiple tools, both technical and legal in nature, available to address threats to the AACS technology. AACS LA views these tools as complementary, and will use them as appropriate under any particular set of circumstances," the statement reads.
"I think that you have to remember AACS is a collection of people who don't actually agree on most of these issues," says von Lohmann. "Anything that AACS can say under its own name is certain to have been negotiated by many lawyers for many days."
"It's a delicate thing to keep all those guys on a single press release," von Lohmann says. "My expectation is that they will probably reign in the legal activity with respect to keys. I think you have to view what happened a few weeks ago as a remarkable failure in that light."
War Crimes and the White House
The Dishonor in a Tortured New 'Interpretation' of the Geneva Conventions
By P.X. Kelley and Robert F. Turner
Thursday, July 26, 2007; A21
One of us was appointed commandant of the Marine Corps by President Ronald Reagan; the other served as a lawyer in the Reagan White House and has vigorously defended the constitutionality of warrantless National Security Agency wiretaps, presidential signing statements and many other controversial aspects of the war on terrorism. But we cannot in good conscience defend a decision that we believe has compromised our national honor and that may well promote the commission of war crimes by Americans and place at risk the welfare of captured American military forces for generations to come.
The Supreme Court held in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld last summer that all detainees captured in the war on terrorism are protected by Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which prescribes minimum standards of treatment for all persons who are no longer taking an active part in an armed conflict not of an international character. It provides that "in all circumstances" detainees are to be "treated humanely."
This is not just about avoiding "torture." The article expressly prohibits "at any time and in any place whatsoever" any acts of "violence to life and person" or "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment."
Last Friday, the White House issued an executive order attempting to "interpret" Common Article 3 with respect to a controversial CIA interrogation program. The order declares that the CIA program "fully complies with the obligations of the United States under Common Article 3," provided that its interrogation techniques do not violate existing federal statutes (prohibiting such things as torture, mutilation or maiming) and do not constitute "willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse done for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the individual in a manner so serious that any reasonable person, considering the circumstances, would deem the acts to be beyond the bounds of human decency."
In other words, as long as the intent of the abuse is to gather intelligence or to prevent future attacks, and the abuse is not "done for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the individual" -- even if that is an inevitable consequence -- the president has given the CIA carte blanche to engage in "willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse."
It is firmly established in international law that treaties are to be interpreted in "good faith" in accordance with the ordinary meaning of their words and in light of their purpose. It is clear to us that the language in the executive order cannot even arguably be reconciled with America's clear duty under Common Article 3 to treat all detainees humanely and to avoid any acts of violence against their person.
In April of 1793, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson wrote to President George Washington that nations were to interpret treaty obligations for themselves but that "the tribunal of our consciences remains, and that also of the opinion of the world." He added that "as we respect these, we must see that in judging ourselves we have honestly done the part of impartial and rigorous judges."
To date in the war on terrorism, including the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and all U.S. military personnel killed in action in Afghanistan and Iraq, America's losses total about 2 percent of the forces we lost in World War II and less than 7 percent of those killed in Vietnam. Yet we did not find it necessary to compromise our honor or abandon our commitment to the rule of law to defeat Nazi Germany or imperial Japan, or to resist communist aggression in Indochina. On the contrary, in Vietnam -- where we both proudly served twice -- America voluntarily extended the protections of the full Geneva Convention on prisoners of war to Viet Cong guerrillas who, like al-Qaeda, did not even arguably qualify for such protections.
The Geneva Conventions provide important protections to our own military forces when we send them into harm's way. Our troops deserve those protections, and we betray their interests when we gratuitously "interpret" key provisions of the conventions in a manner likely to undermine their effectiveness. Policymakers should also keep in mind that violations of Common Article 3 are "war crimes" for which everyone involved -- potentially up to and including the president of the United States -- may be tried in any of the other 193 countries that are parties to the conventions.
In a letter to President James Madison in March 1809, Jefferson observed: "It has a great effect on the opinion of our people and the world to have the moral right on our side." Our leaders must never lose sight of that wisdom.
Retired Gen. P.X. Kelley served as commandant of the Marine Corps from 1983 to 1987. Robert F. Turner is co-founder of the University of Virginia's Center for National Security Law and a former chair of the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security.
The U.S. embassy in Iraq is set to open this fall. Projected to cost $592 million, the embassy will employ a staff of 4,000 people and assume operating costs totaling $1.2 billion a year. It will be a 104-acre complex -- the size of approximately 80 football fields -- and the largest U.S. embassy in the world. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked for an additional $50 million in May "to add more structures" to the embassy. "It's all for them [the U.S], all of Iraq's resources, water, electricity, security," observed an Iraqi. "It's as if it's their country, and we are guests staying here."
In building this lavish symbol of occupation, the United States subsidized the company First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting (FK), a foreign contractor with egregious labor abuses. In a hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee yesterday, several former managers and employees of FK reported on the conditions at the embassy, which ranged from "deplorable" living conditions to "kidnapping" of employees. Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) responded, "If what you are telling us is right, something appears to be seriously wrong with the management and oversight of this project."
SLAVE LABOR: Yesterday's hearing confirmed the serious abuses that have been reported for nearly two years. Because of the U.S. refusal to employ Iraqis inside the Green Zone, "most of the laborers were from such countries as India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Sierra Leone, the committee was told." FK lied to the workers, as "all of our tickets said we were going to Dubai," testified an embassy technician, "adding that an FK manager instructed him not to tell any of the Filipinos that they were going to Baghdad." Rory Mayberry, a former subcontract employee of the FK, told the Committee yesterday: "Let me spell it out clearly: I believe these men were kidnapped by First Kuwaiti to work at the U.S. Embassy."
One worker signed up be a "telephone repair man," and when workers discovered they were headed to Baghdad en route, an FK manager waved an MP5 gun in the air to "settle down" the employees. In Baghdad, workers toiled for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and for as little as $10 a day, according to John Owens, former FK manager. If a construction worker needed new shoes or gloves, he was told "No, do with what you have" by FK managers, Owens testified. "When drinking water was scarce in the blistering heat, coolers were filled on the banks of the Tigris, a river rife with waterborne disease, sewage and sometimes floating bodies."
THE SECRET EMBASSY: The planning for the embassy has been marked by a veil of secrecy by the State Department. In May, architectural firm Bergine Define Yaeger posted pictures of the embassy's design online, but two days later, the Department ordered the pictures removed, alleging a "security risk" for "our employees overseas." In his efforts to obtain information from the Department about the embassy, Waxman "said that for two weeks he was unable to get documents and cables he had requested. Some were delivered only Thursday in response to a subpoena, he said." But a Nov. 2005 State Department Inspector General (IG) report curiously found no evidence of abuse. The IG even alleged that employees "sought" overtime work. "No interviewee was aware of any worker who had been mistreated," the IG reiterated yesterday, dismissing the allegations.
CONTRACTS FOR WAR ALLIES: The United States is largely is responsible for FK's rise. "The company was a $35 million firm in early 2003 and now holds nearly $2 billion in contracts; largely U.S. funded and related to Iraq," reports CorpWatch. When originally contracted, FK's human rights abuses were well-documented, and the company had "little experience in projects on the scale envisioned for the embassy." Furthermore, there were several lower bidders than FK, including "one award-winning American company, Framaco, [which] offered to do the job for as much as $70 million less than First Kuwaiti." Why a Kuwaiti company? Some have alleged that its work as a subcontractor under Halliburton may explain its rise in Iraq. Additionally, Kuwait was the only country bordering Iraq that staged U.S. troops before the invasion. President Bush ordered 100,000 troops to Kuwait to be "ready to conduct an operation" in February 2003; subsequently, some have alleged the contract may be a reward for Kuwait's pre-war support.
Wag the dog indeed:
In the shadows of fallen comrades
In a few short months many of us would join the fight for embattled Fallujah, and our instructors at the Marine Corps School of Infantry —- most of whom were sergeants freshly returned from Iraq or Afghanistan themselves —- intended to harden us accordingly. Whenever I remember those grueling months, I think of Daniel, a reserved, tough 19-year-old Marine from North Carolina who was my constant companion.
Although we hadn't known each other long, we preferred each other's company —- a simple enough bond, but nonetheless one that in difficult times and places is invaluable in itself. Lance Cpl. Daniel F. Swaim —- to give him his full name and rank —- was an expert shooter, a thoughtful friend, and a quiet bunkmate, though we spent little enough time sleeping in our beds. More often, we lay shivering in crude foxholes, nodding on and off in two-hour shifts under the frigid constellations of January. Everything we suffered, we suffered together.
Almost two years have passed since the explosion that killed him. During that time, other comrades of mine have fallen, but Daniel was the first. Over the course of these many months, hardly a day has passed that I haven't seen his face in my mind and recalled the miseries —- minor, in retrospect —- that we endured as we trained for our first tour in Iraq. I remember him once mentioning that sometimes he thought he was destined to die "over there." It was as though on the eve of his hunting, he could already hear the baying of the hounds; as if, his scent-trail preceding him into the future, his aggressors had already gained his final retreat.
Perhaps his air of solemn resignation was a mere idiosyncrasy, or perhaps it was wisdom. For if we do have a destiny, the menaces we flee throughout life are but tricks of misdirection, the baleful howling upon our heels is but a mock pursuit, and it is we in truth who, wending our way ineluctably thither, close the gap with fate.
Daniel, moribund but stoic, will always remain imprinted upon my memory, for the loss of a fellow warrior is an everlasting grief. As we tread hard paths in dread places, the brotherhood between us holds forth against the darkness, guaranteeing each that should he fall, he would ever remain inside an unbreakable circle. That very bond, though, renders it difficult to accept that the departed have passed beyond where we, the living, may follow.
From the first day of boot camp, Marines learn that pain is endured together —- always, unfailingly together. Thus, it feels wrong —- unjust, perhaps —- that the grim dispensations of suffering and death are visited upon a select few. The mission goes on, of course, and the demands of the day disperse the lees of sorrow, like a merciful wind keeping everything aflurry in its wake. But unbestirred by distraction, in the stillness and silence, those sorrows persist, sinking back through the ether to downwardly alight and settle upon familiar roosts.
Every day, more young men like Daniel perish in Iraq. In previous articles, I've steered clear of political commentary, if only to distance my voice from the braying demagoguery and tone-deaf hysteria of American politics. To keep mum in the midst of political controversy is a soldierly tradition, after all —- to paraphrase Tennyson: Ours not to reason why, Ours but to do and die.
But to watch one's brethren die is to be faced with questions that are inherently political. To wit, what is the value of human life? What is victory worth in the precious currency of American blood? To wage war, a nation must first examine this grim calculus, a calculus in which the worth of human life is implicitly quantified and wagered toward the purchase and enactment of the national will. No simple fixed-rate transaction, this —- unfortunately, war is always a high-stakes gamble. Hobby players and thrill-seekers might therefore exercise caution, examining the depth of their convictions before sitting to cards with opponents who have made a deal with the devil.
America now finds herself going head-to-head against just such an opponent in Iraq, and, for better or for worse, she looks ready to fold her cards and take a seat at the bar. The daily, wholesale slaughter, the perceived lack of progress, and the general feeling of weariness with this long campaign —- each day finds her will at a new low ebb. To argue whether America's ever-growing sacrifices represent mile markers on the long road to a rehabilitated Iraq, or, alternatively, whether they indicate that victory, if possible, has simply become too costly, is not my intent. That is for the American people to decide.
But at the risk of breaking with personal habit and soldierly tradition, I would admonish my countrymen upon a few points.
First, war should never be an enterprise undertaken by nations that require certainty. Uncertainty and setbacks are a part of war and a daily reality on the streets of Iraq. No professional soldier feels betrayed when, in the course of a mission, he encounters hiccups, dilemmas, or bad odds. Nor does he feel betrayed because his mission involves death, for that is the predictable plight of a soldier: to kill and to be killed, to "do and die" as chance or destiny dictate. But to watch one's brethren cut down as America alternately pounces, vacillates, backpedals and chases her tail —- this is a betrayal beyond reckoning.
Second, as great patriots such as Daniel die for causes they presume their nation is committed to achieving, a great nation, in turn, accepts nothing less than the victory for which it has bade its sons and daughters bleed.
On either part —- soldier and nation —- there is the presumption of honor.
And so regardless of what determination America reaches concerning the fate of Iraq, I urge her, so long as she exists, never to enter another war unless she goes to win. Should she ask her sons and daughters to take up arms, may she honor their sacrifices with the unflagging conviction and strength of conscience that are necessary to achieve victory. And if she cannot stomach the stakes involved, if the sacrifices of young men such as Daniel do not bolster her resolve but merely plunge her deeper into moral confusion and hysteria, may she, for her own good and for the good of the world, cease pretending at war altogether.
Bastards !!
Resisting the Drums of War
By Steve Watson
Is it possible that the anthrax attacks were launched from within our own government? A former Bush 1 advisor thinks it is.
Francis A. Boyle, an international law expert who worked under the first Bush Administration as a bioweapons advisor in the 1980s, has said that he is convinced the October 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people were perpetrated and covered up by criminal elements of the U.S. government. The motive: to foment a police state by killing off and intimidating opposition to post-9/11 legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the later Military Commissions Act.
"[The anthrax used was] a trillion spores per gram, [refined with] special electro-static treatment. This is superweapons-grade anthrax that even the United States government, in its openly proclaimed programs, had never developed before. So it was obvious to me that this was from a U.S. government lab. There is nowhere else you could have gotten that."
The Waiting Game
Being without health insurance is no big deal. Just ask President Bush. "I mean, people have access to health care in America," he said last week. "After all, you just go to an emergency room."
This is what you might call callousness with consequences. The White House has announced that Mr. Bush will veto a bipartisan plan that would extend health insurance, and with it such essentials as regular checkups and preventive medical care, to an estimated 4.1 million currently uninsured children. After all, it's not as if those kids really need insurance - they can just go to emergency rooms, right?
O.K., it's not news that Mr. Bush has no empathy for people less fortunate than himself. But his willful ignorance here is part of a larger picture: by and large, opponents of universal health care paint a glowing portrait of the American system that bears as little resemblance to reality as the scare stories they tell about health care in France, Britain, and Canada.
The claim that the uninsured can get all the care they need in emergency rooms is just the beginning. Beyond that is the myth that Americans who are lucky enough to have insurance never face long waits for medical care.
Actually, the persistence of that myth puzzles me. I can understand how people like Mr. Bush or Fred Thompson, who declared recently that "the poorest Americans are getting far better service" than Canadians or the British, can wave away the desperation of uninsured Americans, who are often poor and voiceless. But how can they get away with pretending that insured Americans always get prompt care, when most of us can testify otherwise?
A recent article in Business Week put it bluntly: "In reality, both data and anecdotes show that the American people are already waiting as long or longer than patients living with universal health-care systems."
A cross-national survey conducted by the Commonwealth Fund found that America ranks near the bottom among advanced countries in terms of how hard it is to get medical attention on short notice (although Canada was slightly worse), and that America is the worst place in the advanced world if you need care after hours or on a weekend.
We look better when it comes to seeing a specialist or receiving elective surgery. But Germany outperforms us even on those measures - and I suspect that France, which wasn't included in the study, matches Germany's performance.
Besides, not all medical delays are created equal. In Canada and Britain, delays are caused by doctors trying to devote limited medical resources to the most urgent cases. In the United States, they're often caused by insurance companies trying to save money.
This can lead to ordeals like the one recently described by Mark Kleiman, a professor at U.C.L.A., who nearly died of cancer because his insurer kept delaying approval for a necessary biopsy. "It was only later," writes Mr. Kleiman on his blog, "that I discovered why the insurance company was stalling; I had an option, which I didn't know I had, to avoid all the approvals by going to 'Tier II,' which would have meant higher co-payments."
He adds, "I don't know how many people my insurance company waited to death that year, but I'm certain the number wasn't zero."
To be fair, Mr. Kleiman is only surmising that his insurance company risked his life in an attempt to get him to pay more of his treatment costs. But there's no question that some Americans who seemingly have good insurance nonetheless die because insurers are trying to hold down their "medical losses" - the industry term for actually having to pay for care.
On the other hand, it's true that Americans get hip replacements faster than Canadians. But there's a funny thing about that example, which is used constantly as an argument for the superiority of private health insurance over a government-run system: the large majority of hip replacements in the United States are paid for by, um, Medicare.
That's right: the hip-replacement gap is actually a comparison of two government health insurance systems. American Medicare has shorter waits than Canadian Medicare (yes, that's what they call their system) because it has more lavish funding - end of story. The alleged virtues of private insurance have nothing to do with it.
The bottom line is that the opponents of universal health care appear to have run out of honest arguments. All they have left are fantasies: horror fiction about health care in other countries, and fairy tales about health care here in America.
All the President's Enablers
In a coordinated public relations offensive, the White House is using reliably friendly pundits - amazingly, they still exist - to put out the word that President Bush is as upbeat and confident as ever. It might even be true.
What I don't understand is why we're supposed to consider Mr. Bush's continuing confidence a good thing.
Remember, Mr. Bush was confident six years ago when he promised to bring in Osama, dead or alive. He was confident four years ago, when he told the insurgents to bring it on. He was confident two years ago, when he told Brownie that he was doing a heckuva job.
Now Iraq is a bloody quagmire, Afghanistan is deteriorating and the Bush administration's own National Intelligence Estimate admits, in effect, that thanks to Mr. Bush's poor leadership America is losing the struggle with Al Qaeda. Yet Mr. Bush remains confident.
Sorry, but that's not reassuring; it's terrifying. It doesn't demonstrate Mr. Bush's strength of character; it shows that he has lost touch with reality.
Actually, it's not clear that he ever was in touch with reality. I wrote about the Bush administration's "infallibility complex," its inability to admit mistakes or face up to real problems it didn't want to deal with, in June 2002. Around the same time Ron Suskind, the investigative journalist, had a conversation with a senior Bush adviser who mocked the "reality-based community," asserting that "when we act, we create our own reality."
People who worried that the administration was living in a fantasy world used to be dismissed as victims of "Bush derangement syndrome," liberals driven mad by Mr. Bush's success. Now, however, it's a syndrome that has spread even to former loyal Bushies.
Yet while Mr. Bush no longer has many true believers, he still has plenty of enablers - people who understand the folly of his actions, but refuse to do anything to stop him.
This week's prime example is Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, who made headlines a few weeks ago with a speech declaring that "our course in Iraq has lost contact with our vital national security interests." Mr. Lugar is a smart, sensible man. He once acted courageously to head off another foreign policy disaster, persuading a reluctant Ronald Reagan to stop supporting Ferdinand Marcos, the corrupt leader of the Philippines, after a stolen election.
Yet that political courage was nowhere in evidence when Senate Democrats tried to get a vote on a measure that would have forced a course change in Iraq, and Republicans responded by threatening a filibuster. Mr. Lugar, along with several other Republicans who have expressed doubts about the war, voted against cutting off debate, thereby helping ensure that the folly he described so accurately in his Iraq speech will go on.
Thanks to that vote, nothing will happen until Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, delivers his report in September. But don't expect too much even then. I hope he proves me wrong, but the general's history suggests that he's another smart, sensible enabler.
I don't know why the op-ed article that General Petraeus published in The Washington Post on Sept. 26, 2004, hasn't gotten more attention. After all, it puts to rest any notion that the general stands above politics: I don't think it's standard practice for serving military officers to publish opinion pieces that are strikingly helpful to an incumbent, six weeks before a national election.
In the article, General Petraeus told us that "Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously." And those security forces were doing just fine: their leaders "are displaying courage and resilience" and "momentum has gathered in recent months."
In other words, General Petraeus, without saying anything falsifiable, conveyed the totally misleading impression, highly convenient for his political masters, that victory was just around the corner. And the best guess has to be that he'll do the same thing three years later.
You know, at this point I think we need to stop blaming Mr. Bush for the mess we're in. He is what he always was, and everyone except a hard core of equally delusional loyalists knows it.
Yet Mr. Bush keeps doing damage because many people who understand how his folly is endangering the nation's security still refuse, out of political caution and careerism, to do anything about it.
No sign of summer as forecasters predict yet more rain
Rainfall of 20 to 30mm is expected in many areas but the total could reach 90mm in places.
Dozens of people had to be evacuated from their homes and all roads into the town were closed after a heavy downpour yesterday afternoon. Lifeboat crews were sent out to rescue people and animals stranded by the floods.
Britain has already been lashed by unprecedented levels of rain. Last month was the wettest June since records began, and in parts of Yorkshire an average month's rainfall came down in just one day. Up to 30,000 homes were hit by floods and the government was forced to pledge £8m in aid for the worst-affected areas.
Meanwhile, many parts of continental Europe, including Germany, are sweltering in temperatures of up to 45C (113F).
This time last year Briton was experiencing a very different kind of extreme weather. A year ago today, the highest UK temperature for July of 36.3C (97.3F) was recorded in Charlwood, Surrey.
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As temperatures in southern Europe reach record heights, traditional holiday playgrounds may soon become unbearably hot and dangerously dry
Greece is now on a war footing against weather phenomena 'the likes of which we have never seen', the country's Public Order Minister, Byron Polydoras, warned this weekend.
Polydoras was speaking as countries around the Mediterranean roasted, with temperatures soaring to 'furnace levels', as one meteorologist described it.
Temperatures are likely to reach 43C in the shade this week, making this the hottest summer on record for Greece in the past century. Macedonia has declared a state of emergency. Spain, Italy and France are experiencing droughts that are measuring up to become the worst on record.
The New Recruit
Atlantic Unbound | May 1, 2007
Interviews - Brian Mockenhaupt
.....
here was a time when battlefields were simpler, enemies were more predictable, and young people lined up at the draft office ready to serve. Today, the Army is struggling to train its all-volunteer force of half a million active-duty soldiers, many of whom are less prepared for combat than their predecessors were. Efforts to attract 80,000 new recruits are proving equally daunting. But as Brian Mockenhaupt argues in his June Atlantic story, Americans must make due with “The Army We Have.”
Our Biotech Future - NY Review of Books - July 14th, 2007
USHMM & Google
Bruce Sterling's: "Dispatches from the Hyperlocal Future" from Wired.com
Asset Recovery - Dell's ARS Plan
A sugar-cube-sized electric generator that feeds on environmental vibrations has been developed. It could power swarms of wireless sensors or even medical implants, researchers claim.
The new micro-generator harvests power electromagnetically, exploiting the wobbling of several magnets attached to a millimetre-sized cantilever. It measures just 7.0 millimetres by 7.0 mm by 8.5 mm, and the team behind it say it is the most efficient micro-generator yet developed.
The generator converts 30% of environmental kinetic energy into electrical power, and could keep all sorts of low-power devices running without batteries – particularly when alternatives like solar power are not an option.
Steve Beeby, an engineer at the University of Southampton, UK, led development of the device. He says it could power devices attached to bridges, large buildings and other structures that experience vibration.
Beeby notes, for example, that small battery-powered accelerometers are already attached to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, US. These monitor movement of the bridge to help engineers predict structural problems, but their batteries must be recharged regularly.
"Vibration energy harvesting is receiving a considerable amount of interest as a means for powering wireless sensor nodes," Beeby says. "By removing wires and batteries, there is the potential for embedding sensors in previously inaccessible locations."
To demonstrate a potential application for their micro-generator, Beeby's team used it to power a small wireless accelerometer (see image, right).
A larger version of the same design – about the size of a coffee cup – is already sold by a company called Perpetuum, a spin-off from the Southhampton University research.
That device is used primarily to provide power for wireless sensors attached to oil refineries. The new micro-generator, called Mk2, was developed as part of a wider European project called Vibration Energy Scavenging (VIBES).
Mk2 contains four magnets made of neodymium iron boron, each measuring 1.0 mm by 1.0 mm by 1.5 mm. These are attached to the end of a cantilever a few millimetres long – two on top and two underneath. The cantilever is forked at one end, so that the magnets sit either side of a fixed copper coil, which is wound around a disc.
As the cantilever moves up and down in response to shaking, the magnets move and the magnetic field interacts with the disc to generate electrical power. The magnetic field produced by the arrangement of magnets is compact, meaning it is not easily affected by external magnetic fields.
In testing with the sort of vibration levels you might expect on a structure such as a bridge, the generator produced up to 46 microwatts of electrical power. Beeby says this is easily enough to power small devices such as wireless environmental sensors.
And while this is not enough to drive anything like an MP3 player or cellphone, he says it could certainly provide enough power for medical implants such as pacemakers – in this case, the beating of the heart providing the necessary vibrations.
The team compared the efficiency of their device to various other energy-harvesting micro-generators, ranging in size from a few cubic centimetres to less than a micron in width. Some of these devices use alternative methods to produce electrical power, exploiting piezoelectric or electrostatic processes instead.
In order to compare efficiencies accurately, the researchers had to create a mathematical graph that accounted for differences in the acceleration experienced. This showed their generator to be the most efficient yet.
"The results obtained are remarkable, obtaining a good voltage output in a very small volume," says Francesc Moll, who researches energy harvesting at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Spain. "The device is promising."
But Moll also cautions that such a generator would only be suitable for particularly low-power devices. "In the future, there may be electronic circuits that consume such low power levels, but nowadays the applicability is very limited," he told New Scientist. Another issue, he says, is that the power supplied may not be continuous.
The Rollercoaster Ride of Pride, Shame, and Morality Sacrifice Is for Suckers
Friday 06 July 2007
On this Fourth of July, President Bush compared the Iraq war to the Revolutionary War, and called for “more patience, more courage and more sacrifice.” Unfortunately, it seems that nobody asked the obvious question: “What sacrifices have you and your friends made, Mr. President?”
On second thought, there would be no point in asking that question. In Mr. Bush’s world, only the little people make sacrifices.
You see, the Iraq war, although Mr. Bush insists that it’s part of a Global War on Terror™, a fight to the death between good and evil, isn’t like America’s other great wars — wars in which the wealthy shared the financial burden through higher taxes and many members of the elite fought for their country.
This time around, Mr. Bush celebrated Mission Accomplished by cutting tax rates on dividends and capital gains, while handing out huge no-bid contracts to politically connected corporations. And in the four years since, as the insurgency Mr. Bush initially taunted with the cry of “Bring them on” has claimed the lives of thousands of Americans and left thousands more grievously wounded, the children of the elite — especially the Republican elite — have been conspicuously absent from the battlefield.
The Bushies, it seems, like starting fights, but they don’t believe in paying any of the cost of those fights or bearing any of the risks. Above all, they don’t believe that they or their friends should face any personal or professional penalties for trivial sins like distorting intelligence to get America into an unnecessary war, or totally botching that war’s execution.
The Web site Think Progress has a summary of what happened to the men behind the war after we didn’t find W.M.D., and weren’t welcomed as liberators: “The architects of war: Where are they now?” To read that summary is to be awed by the comprehensiveness and generosity of the neocon welfare system. Even Paul Wolfowitz, who managed the rare feat of messing up not one but two high-level jobs, has found refuge at the American Enterprise Institute.
Which brings us to the case of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby Jr.
The hysteria of the neocons over the prospect that Mr. Libby might actually do time for committing perjury was a sight to behold. In an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal titled “Fallen Soldier,” Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University cited the soldier’s creed: “I will never leave a fallen comrade.” He went on to declare that “Scooter Libby was a soldier in your — our — war in Iraq.”
Ah, yes. Shuffling papers in an air-conditioned Washington office is exactly like putting your life on the line in Anbar or Baghdad. Spending 30 months in a minimum-security prison, with a comfortable think-tank job waiting at the other end, is exactly like having half your face or both your legs blown off by an I.E.D.
What lay behind the hysteria, of course, was the prospect that for the very first time one of the people who tricked America into war, then endangered national security yet again in the effort to cover their tracks, might pay some price. But Mr. Ajami needn’t have worried.
Back when the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity began, Mr. Bush insisted that if anyone in his administration had violated the law, “that person will be taken care of.” Now we know what he meant. Mr. Bush hasn’t challenged the verdict in the Libby case, and other people convicted of similar offenses have spent substantial periods of time in prison. But Mr. Libby goes free.
Mr. Bush says that Mr. Libby’s punishment remains “harsh” because his reputation is “forever damaged.” Meanwhile, Mr. Bush employs, as a deputy national security adviser, none other than Elliott Abrams, who pleaded guilty to unlawfully withholding information from Congress in the Iran-contra affair. Mr. Abrams was one of six Iran-contra defendants pardoned by Mr. Bush’s father, who was himself a subject of the special prosecutor’s investigation of the scandal.
In other words, obstruction of justice when it gets too close to home is a family tradition. And being a loyal Bushie means never having to say you’re sorry.
Much of US Favors Bush Impeachment: Poll
Washington - Nearly half of the US public wants President George W. Bush to face impeachment, and even more favor that fate for Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a poll out Friday.
The survey by the American Research Group found that 45 percent support the US House of Representatives beginning impeachment proceedings against Bush, with 46 percent opposed, and a 54-40 split in favor when it comes to Cheney.
The study by the private New Hampshire-based ARG canvassed 1,100 Americans by telephone July 3-5 and had an error margin of plus or minus three percentage points. The findings are available on ARG's Internet site.
The White House declined to comment on the poll, the latest bad news for a president who has seen his public opinion standings dragged to record lows by the unpopular war in Iraq.
The US Constitution says presidents and vice presidents can be impeached - that is, formally charged by the House - for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" by a simple majority vote.
Conviction by the Senate, which requires a two-thirds majority, means removal from office.
Just two US presidents have been impeached: Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 and acquitted in 1999; Andrew Johnson was impeached and acquitted in 1868. Disgraced president Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 when a House impeachment vote appeared likely.
In late April, left-wing Representative Dennis Kucinich, a long-shot Democratic presidential hopeful, introduced a resolution calling for Cheney's impeachment. To date, the measure has nine listed co-sponsors and a 10th set to sign on when the House returns to work next week.
But Democratic leaders appear unlikely to pursue such a course.
What's mine, and not mine...
Here & There
Equipment Shredding
The Pentagon is paying a contractor at least $900,000 to destroy old F-14s, a jet affectionately nicknamed "the turkey," rather than sell the spares at the risk of their falling into the wrong hands, including Iran's. "There were things getting to the bad guys, so to speak," said Tim Shocklee, founder and executive vice president of TRI-Rinse Inc. in St. Louis. "And one of the ways to make sure that no one will ever use an F-14 again is to cut them into little 2-by-2-foot bits."
Shocklee's company won a three-year, $3.7 million contract to render surplus equipment useless for military purposes. The work includes the recent demolition of 23 Tomcats in Arizona, accounting for about $900,000 of TRI-Rinse's contract. The military is considering using the same process on its other F-14s.
The company has developed portable shredding machinery so the Pentagon can have sensitive items destroyed on a base instead of shipping them long distances to be shredded.
The shearing machine, which uses pincers to rip apart the planes, weighs 100,000 pounds. The shredder is 120,000 pounds. An F-14 weighs about 40,000 pounds.
As powerful as the grinding machinery is, not all of the F-14 can be shredded. The landing gear - built to withstand the force of slamming onto an aircraft carrier's deck - must be cut by hand with a demolition torch. It's made from steel with parts of titanium, so the shears can't cut it and the shredder can't chew it.
Just Say AAA, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times:
What do you get when you cross a Mafia don with a bond salesman? A dealer in collateralized debt obligations (C.D.O.’s) — someone who makes you an offer you don’t understand.
Seriously, it’s starting to look as if C.D.O.’s were to this decade’s housing bubble what Enron-style accounting was to the stock bubble of the 1990s. Both made investors think they were getting a much better deal than they really were...
To understand the fuss over C.D.O.’s, you first have to realize that in the later stages of the great 2000-2005 housing boom, ... there was an explosion of subprime lending...
For a while, the risks of subprime loans were masked by the housing bubble itself: as long as prices kept going up, troubled borrowers could raise more cash by borrowing against their rising home equity. But once the bubble burst ... many of these loans were bound to go bad.
Yet the banks making the loans weren’t stupid... Subprime mortgages ... were securitized..., banks issued bonds backed by home loans, in effect handing off the risk to the bond buyers.
In principle, securitization should reduce risk... But ... it’s now clear that many investors ... didn’t realize what they were getting into.
And it’s also becoming clear that ... many investors were fooled by fancy financial engineering ... into believing they had protected themselves against risk, when they had actually done no such thing...
C.D.O.’s are ... supposed to transfer most of the risk of bad loans to a small group of sophisticated investors, who are compensated ... with a high rate of return, while leaving other investors with a “synthetic” asset that is, well, safe as houses.
S.& P., Moody’s and Fitch, the bond-rating agencies, have gone along..., telling investors that the synthetic assets created by C.D.O.’s are equivalent to high-quality corporate bonds. And investors have ... “snapped up” these securities “because they typically yield more than bonds with the same credit ratings.”
But the securities were never as safe as advertised, because the risk transfer wasn’t anywhere near big enough to protect investors from the consequences of a burst housing bubble. It’s not quite the metaphor I would have come up with, but here’s what ... Bill Gross had to say about C.D.O.’s...:
“AAA? You were wooed Mr. Moody’s and Mr. Poor’s by the makeup, those six-inch hooker heels, and a ‘tramp stamp.’ Many of these good-looking girls are not high-class assets worth 100 cents on the dollar.”
Now we’re looking at huge losses to investors who thought they were playing it safe. Estimates ... range from $125 billion to $250 billion, with some analysts warning that a wave of distress selling will deepen the housing slump even further.
Now, you might have thought that S.& P. and Moody’s, which gave Thailand an investment-grade rating until five months after the start of the Asian financial crisis, and gave Enron an investment-grade rating until days before it went bankrupt, would by now have learned to be a bit suspicious. And you would think that the regulators, in particular the Federal Reserve, would have learned from the stock bubble and the wave of corporate malfeasance that went with it to keep a watchful eye on overheated markets.
But apparently not. And the housing bubble, like the stock bubble before it, is claiming a growing number of innocent victims.
PARIS: A painter's drawings provide the unedited version of his œuvre as well as his visual work notes. All that is left out when the artist picks up his brushes is there, jotted down with the intensity of first impressions. "Corot," in 50 drawings on view at the Louvre until September, allows a glimpse into the secret world of one of the most intriguing French masters.
Jean-Baptiste Corot, the son of a milliner and her shopkeeper husband, was the quiet man of French art who turned out to be one of its great revolutionaries.
His parents apprenticed Jean-Baptiste to a cloth merchant. The experience having ended in failure, the youth was allowed to go his own way and trained under the painters Michallon and Bertin, in whose landscapes French art veered toward naturalism. They, however, adhered to the time-honored principles of balance in composition and color.
Was it because of his background, the Parisian petite bourgeoisie without the varnish of culture and manners, that Corot's approach was different from the start? His earliest sketches done in Italy between 1826 and 1828 reveal a love of nature in its uncouth quaintness.
In the summer of 1826 while travelling along the Tiber, Corot gazed at the caves near Papigno. The overhang of a steep rocky mound allowing the eye to roam beyond into a brightly lit space fascinated him. He sketched in pen and brown ink a tumultuous landscape that throws overboard the rules of harmonious composition. A huge tree rises in the foreground. The rocky overhang, although further away, seems to collide with it. The sketch is feverishly done, in short strokes and zigzag lines. This is very different from the ravishing little landscapes that Corot began painting around that time.
Near Civita Castellana, a brook running between bolders with disheveled trees bending over it caught the draftsman's eye. You can feel the cool of the water and the breeze making the curving branches sway. Not until Gustave Courbet's emergence would such pure naturalism reappear in French art. Some of Corot's graphic experiments were bolder still. The spindly, tortuous tree trunks and branches that he sketched in 1827 herald Egon Schiele's tormented pen strokes 80 years later or so. None of this is echoed in the young artist's paintings of Italian scenery.
Nor do these give the faintest hint that the landscapist occasionally sketched in a manner that harks back to early 16th century masters. A view of a steep rocky hillside crowned by tiny trees calls to mind some of Fra Bartolomeo's dainty sketches.
Corot's little-known interest in Medieval architectural design left no trace in his paintings either. A detailed drawing of the apse of a church in Rouen cannot be identified, but a sketch of the Western facade of the cathedral at Chartres done in 1830 leaves no doubt about the accuracy with which Corot observed churches. The houses around it are summarily outlined - it is the cathedral that Corot was concerned about when drawing. Remarkably, in his painting of the monument, the reverse effect is sought. Houses and trees fill the lower part of the cityscape, while the cathedral appears in the distance.
The differences separating Corot's sketches from his paintings are even more interesting in his portraiture, albeit distinctly more subtle. When observing humans, pencil in hand, Corot was receptive to an endless range of moods, with psychological nuances that somehow get lost in his painted portraits, marvelous as many are.
One of his earliest likenesses in black pencil shows a young countrywoman feeding her baby. The draftsman gave all his attention to her intense stare, and the mix of timidity and fierce determination conveyed by her body language. The shoulders, slightly huddled in diffidence, the protective gesture of her arms in which the infant is snugly cradled, are admirably observed.
In another sketch, later by a decade, Corot scrutinized a young woman's distress. With her head bent forward, she stares in frozen despair as if pondering her predicament. The seated posture is dispatched in a few strokes, but great care has been taken in rendering the shadows under the eyes and the unsmiling mouth. This is a far cry from Corot's ravishing portraits in oil of young women.
Even in those drawings in which the effect achieved comes closest to that of fully finished paintings, the depth of feeling, enhanced by the light touch, places them in another league.
A "Young Woman with Folded Arms" is seen seated, bending over her crossed arms, in an effort to think hard. She too is mirthless, a characteristic that is more common in Corot's sketches of women than in painted portraits.
When observing his sitters, Corot the draftsman seems to have taken an interest in characters that never appear in his pictures. One of his most extraordinary likenesses is that of a musician steadying her lute. She stares at the artist with the whites of her eyeballs showing above the pupils, as if in a fit of hysteria.
Corot's perception of the material world around him as well as of people varied constantly, swinging from one extreme to another in style as in mood, in contrast to his painting, in which the unity of tone is fairly constant at any given period of his career.
In 1852, the artist used the back of a card announcing a religious service celebrated in memory of his mother to jot down a landscape in a few lines. There are hardly any specific details. A vague human figure seems to be sketched in the foreground and a tiny dome looms in the distance. Three wobbly lines shooting up stand for trees. All the rest is abstract in what looks more like the transcription of mental notations than a figural drawing.
This trend towards the elimination of specific detail is equally apparent in some drawings done with great care in black chalk.
A fascinating case is that of a sketch of one of his own paintings. Corot did it from memory in March or April 1859, while staying in Arras, in order to give his friend Constant Dutilleux an idea of a painting, "Dante and Virgil," that he had sent to the Salon.
The picture, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, is sufficiently detailed to be unambiguous in subject. In the sketch two very small draped figures standing in a dark forest can be made out, but the wild beasts of the painting are barely visible and the trees are only identified by their black shafts. The foliage is reduced to a mass of black strokes. The dramatic atmosphere is solely conveyed through the use of black, not details.
The masterpiece in Corot's black manner is "A Woman Seated by a Bed." Seen three quarters back, she leans forward over what is supposed to be the bed, but is mysteriously flooded with light under a tent-like dais. A tiny statuette of a seated woman appears in the distance on an indistinct piece of furniture and a frame is vaguely visible on a wall. Few interior scenes are ever as short on detail.
In a landscape in pen and wash, the same allusive brevity prevails. Rippling green lines run in the foreground. The trees resemble irregular swaying bands with grayish green patches around. The landscape is suggested through rhythm and color. Nothing is actually depicted. Although the connection with oil painting of the period is clear enough, the differences remain considerable. The thrust is not weakened by painterly coloristic effects, the composition owes its lightness to the quasi-elimination of detail.
Corot the draftsman was thus as abruptly concise as Corot the painter was dreamily poetic. In his oil portraits, the painter reined in raw emotions. In his drawings, he responded to the harshness of life for women in a misogynist society.
To nonspecialists, the little-known facets to his œuvre that come out in the drawings are a revelation. A slim catalogue with factual entries by Arlette Sérullaz, curator emeritus of the prints and drawings department, accompanies the show. If you cannot make it to what is still called by many "le Cabinet des dessins," do not miss the delightful booklet.
U.S. finance firms are finding themselves major real estate owners as foreclosures mount
Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and JPMorgan Chase are listed in public records as the owners of at least 35 homes in the suburb, where 19,000 people live seven miles east of downtown Atlanta.
As foreclosures climb, Wall Street's lenders and investors are claiming a bigger chunk of Main Street. The value of U.S. homes held by commercial banks swelled 53 percent nationwide to $2.3 billion at the end of March, the highest since 1992, from $1.5 billion a year earlier, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
Home values and the $6 trillion U.S. mortgage-backed securities market are locked in a downward spiral. Bear Stearns is bailing out one hedge fund it controls and leaving another to liquidation by creditors. Both funds invested in securities backed by subprime loans. The loans, for borrowers with bad or limited credit histories, are secured by houses such as the one on Lilac Lane.
The share of U.S. subprime loans entering foreclosure in the first quarter was 2.43 percent, the highest in almost five years, the Washington-based Mortgage Bankers Association said. Subprime late payments rose to 13.77 percent, compared with 11.5 percent a year earlier.
Measured annually, the national median price for a previously owned home probably will drop 1.3 percent this year, the first decline since the Great Depression in the 1930s, according to Lawrence Yun, an economist at the Chicago-based National Association of Realtors
It's all about the money...
Sunday 01 July 2007
Hillary Clinton may be the one consistently coming out on top when Democratic voters are asked who they want to be their presidential candidate, but Barack Obama seems to be the one they reach into their wallets for.
Obama scored a clean win in the second round of the money race, raising about $5 million more than Clinton in the past three months.
The Illinois senator's campaign said he raised about $32.5 million in the second quarter, about $31 million of it available for use in the Democratic primary. Equally impressive, Obama has signed up more than 258,000 individual donors since he launched his campaign in February.
Clinton's spokesman, Howard Wolfson, informed supporters Friday that the New York senator's campaign expected to raise about $27 million in the same period, of which about $21 million is for the primary. Clinton has not said how many individual donors she has.
Obama hailed his fundraising success as "the largest grassroots campaign in history for this stage of a Presidential race."
"That's the kind of movement that can change the special interest-driven politics in Washington and transform our country. And it's just the beginning," Obama said in a press release.
The campaign said Obama has raised more than $55 million this year to put towards winning his party's nomination.
That may put him ahead of the totals available to Clinton, who raised less primary money last quarter, but who also transferred $10 million raised for her Senate reelection last year for a higher overall total.
Obama campaign manager David Plouffe trumpeted the fundraising success in a letter to supporters on Sunday-paying particular attention to the way Obama has apparently caught up with Clinton, the thinly-disguised "fellow candidate" below:
"Frankly, when we entered this race, we did not think that was possible. We estimated at this point of the campaign we'd be at least $20-25 million behind one of our fellow candidates. But due to the amazing outpouring of support from people all across the country, remarkably, we should be on at least even financial footing for the duration of the campaign."
The record-breaking sums raised by both Clinton and Obama suggest a growing Democratic financial advantage over Republicans, and also establish a growing gap between rich and poor candidates within the Democratic primary, with Obama and Clinton threatening to drown their rivals-and, perhaps, the state of Iowa-in paid advertisements.
Donors may only give up to $2,300 for the primary campaign, and $2,300 more for the general campaign. Money given over the $2,300 limit may be a sign of general election strength, or a sign that a candidate has rich friends, but it's not getting spent on TV in Iowa or early voting programs in California.
Former Sen. John Edwards' campaign said that "almost all" of his $9 million in the second quarter will be available for the primary, Bloomberg News reports, and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson's $7 million is said to be all primary money.
For those candidates, then, the totals available for primary spending (including the $10 million Clinton transferred from her 2006 Senate race) are:
Obama: $55.7 million (according to the campaign)
Clinton: $50 million (roughly, including $10 million transferred from her 2006 Senate race)
Edwards: $21 million-$22 million (that's based on his having said he raised about $13 million in primary money in the first quarter, plus "almost all" of the $9 million)
Richardson: $13 million (roughly, based on his having raised $6 million first quarter and $7 million second)
Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) has raised $7.3 million this year and transferred another $4.7 million for the primary from his Senate account, AP reports.
Figures for Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) and former Sen. Mike Gravel were not made available Sunday.
The Republican contenders are expected to announce their totals in the coming days, with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani likely to come out on top-but far short of Obama's and Clinton's numbers.
Bush Commutes Libby Prison Sentence
Monday 02 July 2007
Bush spares Libby from prison term.
Washington - President Bush commuted the sentence of former aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Monday, sparing him from a 2 1/2-year prison term in the CIA leak case.
Bush left intact a $250,000 fine and two years probation for Libby, according to a senior White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the decision had not been announced.
Bush's move came hours after a federal appeals panel ruled Libby could not delay his prison term in the CIA leak case. That decision put the pressure on the president, who had been sidestepping calls by Libby's allies to pardon the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Libby was convicted, (on four felony counts), in March 2007 of lying to authorities and obstructing the investigation into the 2003 leak of a CIA operative's identity. He was the highest-ranking White House official ordered to prison since the Iran-Contra affair.
Note: Wasn't the BIG DEAL about former President Clinton that "he lied under oath" when asked about his consensual sexual exploits with Monica Lewinsky? How does that compare with what Mr. Libby was tried, and found guilty of? Clinton was impeached, and Libby gets a pardon? Gag me with a f*&^%$ spoon !! If you don't see the hypocrisy of the Bush Administration and the Republican agenda in general here, then please ...stop reading this blog, and go elsewhere...now!
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From the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen": Aug. 26th, 1789
6. Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its foundation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and talents.
How well does 'Sicko' stand up to the facts
A slightly better than average guy.
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