It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
"Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!"
Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
"I thought he died a while ago."
For life's a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.
John Updike
There has been no criminal investigation to date, so evidence supporting criminality has not been uncovered -- no one is looking for it. Liberals hate to think that Obama, led by Geithner and Summers, is part of a grand cover-up scheme, but that is exactly what is going on. How else can you explain the lack of criminal investigations? Why isn't the FBI breaking down the doors of the commercial and investment banks and grabbing computers so as to preserve incendiary e-mails that will most definitely implicate executives? Why are managements that caused this still in their jobs and still receiving bonuses? Are the bonuses paid to the folks at AIG that caused its collapse nothing more than hush money? How can the rating agencies still be in business? Why don't we make one arrest and lean on the bankster to see if he will fold like the cheap suit that he is and name other conspirators? The FBI spends more time investigating $2,000 drug buys than they have to date investigating the biggest heist in the history of the world: $40 trillion, that's trillion with a T, that's 40 million bags each containing $1 million.Maybe you think it is some crazy left-wing loonie who wrote this over at Mother Jones or at The Nation. Think again. The writer is a former investment banker with Goldman Sachs, which, by the way, reported a good chunk of change as profits!
I think the situation may actually be worse.O M G!
What worries me most about our situation at this moment is that while our current leadership on economic strategy issues now talks about the mistakes of their (and our) past, their policies are pointing us back in the same direction. The latest evidence in this regard is the regulatory plan released by the Treasury this June.This plan is a long list of technocratic tweaks. But when you dig through all the details, it is hard to find anything that will really make a difference to the functioning of our financial system. Most importantly, we will still have banks that are perceived as "too big to fail," and these institutions will have access to government bailouts under vague and completely open-ended terms. In what way will this encourage responsible lending in the future?
Johnson makes a point that I hadn't thought about:
And the way in which the Obama administration is attempting to extricate us from the crisis -- with unconditional support for big banks, regardless of costs -- is not addressing the fundamental imbalance of power that favors the financial sector. If anything, the big banks that survive in this sector have now become more powerful -- the political market share of JP Morgan Chase or Goldman Sachs has increased because Lehman and Bear Stearns are out of business.The firms left standing have become even more powerful!
The typical solution to such medical waste (most recently described in a New York Times Magazine article by utilitarian ethicist Peter Singer) is to ration health care spending, often with dubious mathematical formulae—in short, to starve the beast.Sanghavi's essay is way more interesting, and less rhetorical than others, because of observations like this one:
We now recognize and treat problems that were previously hidden or never diagnosed—which is a good thing. Consider these sample statistics, all from generally reliable federal agencies: One percent of the population has celiac disease, causing anemia and other problems, one in 150 children tests positive for autism spectrum disorders, 2 percent to 5 percent of adults have an eating disorder, 20 percent of children are overweight, one in 22 pregnancies is complicated by a minor or major birth defect, and 10 percent of people have asthma. The list goes on. In the past, people just lived with these problems. Today, for better or worse, we do not simply let them go—and that costs more and more money.In other words, in the olden days, people lived (or died) with problems that hadn't been given names. And some problems are getting to be more common--like with prostate--because we have more and more men living very long years; in years past, rarely did a man live that long to suffer from prostate issues.
[The] barriers to development lie not in a lack of aid but in poor human capital and weak social and political institutions. Although Western economists came rather later to this conclusion than the Soviets, most now accept it. Practice, though, continues to lag theory. Too often, those tasked with development still view it—as the Soviets initially did—as an engineering problem, a matter of building roads, factories, and schools.
The 2009 U.S. inspector general’s audit report cites the renovation of a power station in Khost. After installing three new generators, the Americans handed the plant over to the Afghans, only to find that within a few months two of the three no longer worked. Similarly, the British have invested millions of dollars into digging hundreds of wells in southern Afghanistan in an attempt to “win the hearts and minds” of villagers. The new wells bypass existing institutions for the stewardship of water resources while not putting anything in their place. Afghans, not used to having unrestricted access to so much water, have responded by pumping with abandon. As a result, the water table has dropped, increasing the danger of drought. Meanwhile, according to Nipa Banerjee, nearly half of the schools in Kandahar province sit empty because there are no teachers to staff them. Yet the Canadian government is pressing ahead with plans to build even more schools. Such failures are entirely typical and predictable. They reveal how “hearts and minds” operations, undertaken to support the short-term goals of counterinsurgency, can have damaging effects on long-term development.
In some respects, Soviet advisers, despite their failings, were somewhat better than ours. Ivanov, for instance, studied Dari at the School of Oriental Languages. As he and his wife recounted over a bowl of homemade borscht, rather than living in a fortified compound, he had an apartment in the Soviet-built Mikrorayon district of Kabul with his family (unthinkable for a contemporary adviser) and drove himself without escort to work every day (at least as unfathomable).
The flow of Western advisers is driven by supply rather than demand. The Afghans get what we send them, not what they ask for. Few high-ranking civil servants are willing to go to Afghanistan. As a result, the West sends young and inexperienced personnel to “mentor” much older Afghan colleagues. Few have any knowledge of Afghan languages. Valerii Ivanov told me that his Afghan contacts say that they laugh when these zealous Westerners tell them how to manage their affairs. Now President Obama is promising to send hundreds more. We can hardly imagine that, if he can actually find that many—and so far he appears to be having trouble—such a large number will really consist of highly experienced, properly qualified personnel with appropriate cultural understanding. More will not mean better.
Worse, in our efforts to fight the Taliban, we are providing Afghanistan with a massive army, a huge police force, and vast numbers of schools, hospitals, roads, and so on. All of this has to be paid for. The Afghan state cannot do so, nor will it ever be able to. When the Soviets left, Najibullah’s regime survived only as long as Moscow paid the bills. The same will be true for Karzai and his successors.
The election in Afghanistan is round the corner. Any odd development there, along with chaos in its neighboring countries--Iran and Pakistan--can make 2009 one milestone year in global history. Here is to hoping for an uneventful remainder of 2009.
[A] spokesman for the White House budget office said postponing the review from mid-July until mid-August isn’t unusual during a president’s first year in office.Exhibit B (Economist's Voice):“Because of the unique circumstances of a transition year, we are, like President George W. Bush in 2001, releasing the mid-session review a few weeks later than as is usual in non- transition years,” Kenneth Baer, communications director for the Office of Management and Budget, said.
Bush’s first mid-year review was released Aug. 22, 2001, and the one issued in former President Bill Clinton’s first year in office came out on Sept. 1, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. ...
A worsening jobs picture compared with February’s forecast and a still-weak economy may make the deficit picture look worse than the $1.84 trillion forecast this year, about four times the previous record of $455 billion. Next year’s deficit was projected to decline to $1.26 trillion.
Gibbs said he expected the review to show “the budget situation is going to be even more challenging” than February’s forecast. He didn’t elaborate.
Although this year's record deficit has attracted a lot of attention, the real concern is the unsustainability of the federal budget over the next 10 years and longer. The budget situation presents policy makers with a very delicate balancing act between encouraging economic recovery and establishing fiscal sustainability, according to Alan Auerbach of U.C. Berkeley and William Gale of Brookings.The following sentence in Exhibit B is a mind-boggler:
In 2009, the U.S. federal deficit will be larger than the entire GDP of all but six other countries.All but six other countries have GDPs less than the US federal government's deficit. What a way to understand how huge our economy is!
My grandfather used to say: "Life is astonishingly short. Now, in my memory, it is so compressed that I can hardly understand, for example, how a young person can decide to ride to the next village without being afraid that--apart from accidents--even the time allotted to a normal, happy life is far too short for such a journey."If only I could write like that. That one paragraph is all the short story titled "The Next Village" by, who else but, Frank Kafka.
"I'm a specialist in 18th and 19th Century music. It was customary to not only applaud but to stop and do other things between movements in concerts.
"At the premieres of Haydn and Beethoven they would do two movements and then have a ballet or a singer. Often they would have refreshments. And they didn't listen to everything in complete silence."
Martin Cullingford, deputy editor of Gramophone magazine, also admits things have changed.
"Up until the beginning of the 20th Century applause between movements was normal. Mozart certainly appreciated it. That changed - now it's not the thing that's expected to happen. When people do it's always slightly embarrassing."
Is there any limit to how much you would want your insurer to pay for a drug that adds six months to someone’s life? If there is any point at which you say, “No, an extra six months isn’t worth that much,” then you think that health care should be rationed.A simple question, right? How much are you willing to pay? We do this individually all the time, whether it is for the pets at home, or for the humans we love. Yet, this is practically an unspeakable topic, and how we arrive at these decisions is supposedly not because of dollar calculations.
The debate over health care reform in the United States should start from the premise that some form of health care rationing is both inescapable and desirable. Then we can ask, What is the best way to do it?Indeed.
From James Tyler (For Trustees)If only such spams were for real!
Managing Partner (Anderson & Tyler)
London - United Kingdom.
Notification of Bequest
On behalf of Anderson and Tyler Chambers, Trustees and Executors of the
estate of Late Schulz Wagner, I once again try to notify you as my earlier
letter was returned undelivered. I hereby attempt to reach you again by
this same email address on the WILL. I wish to notify you that late Schulz
Wagner made you a beneficiary to his WILL. He left some money to you in
the codicil and last testament of his WILL.
This may sound strange and unbelievable to you, but it is real and true.
Being a widely traveled man, he must have been in contact with you in the
past or simply you were referred to him by one of his numerous friends
abroad who wished you good. Schulz Wagner until his death was a very
generous individual who loved to assist the needy. His great philanthropy
earned him numerous awards during his lifetime. Schulz Wagner died on the
5th day of May 2009 at the age of 72 years, and his WILL is now ready for
execution. According to him this money is to help the poor and the needy.
Please if I reach you, as I am hopeful, endeavor to get back to me as soon
as possible to enable me conclude my job
.... the Newt Gingrich revolution, swept into Congress by the midterms of 1994. Its troops came armed with a reform agenda titled the “Contract With America” and a mother lode of piety. Their promises included an end to federal deficits, the restoration of national security, transparent (and fewer) House committees, and “a Congress that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family.”That the class of ’94 failed on almost every count is a matter of history, no matter how hard it has retroactively tried to blame its disastrous record on George W. Bush. Its incompetence may even have been greater than its world-class hypocrisy. Its only memorable achievements were to shut down the government in a fit of pique and to impeach Bill Clinton in a tsunami of moral outrage.
The class of ’94 gave us J.D. Hayworth and Bob Ney of the Jack Abramoff casino-lobbying scandals. Ney, a House committee chairman, did 17 months in jail. It gave us the sexual adventurers Mark Sanford, John Ensign and Mark Foley. (All these distinguished gentlemen voted for articles of impeachment, as did Gingrich, their randy role model.) The class of ’94 also included a black Republican, J. C. Watts, who at least had the integrity to leave Congress in 2003 to become a bona fide lobbyist rather than go on a K Street lobbyist’s payroll while still in public office. He was a fleeting novelty; there’s been no black Republican elected to either chamber of Congress since. Today the G.O.P.’s token black is its party chairman, Michael Steele, who last week unveiled his latest strategy for recruiting minority voters. “My plan is to say, ‘Y’all come!’ ” he explained, adding “I got the fried chicken and potato salad!”
Among Sotomayor’s questioners, both Coburn and Lindsey Graham are class of ’94. They — along with Jeff Sessions, a former Alabama attorney general best known for his unsuccessful prosecutions of civil rights activists — set the Republicans’ tone last week. In one of his many cringe-inducing moments, Graham suggested to Sotomayor that she had “a temperament problem” and advised that “maybe these hearings are a time for self-reflection.” That’s the crux of the ’94 spirit, even more than its constant, whiny refrain of white victimization: Hold others to a standard that you would not think of enforcing on yourself or your peers. Self-reflection may be mandatory for Sotomayor, but it certainly isn’t for Graham.
In his ’94 Congressional campaign in South Carolina, Graham made a big deal of promising to enact term limits. At the Clinton impeachment, he served as a manager of the prosecution. That was then, and this is now. Graham hasn’t even term-limited himself — an action he could have taken at any time unilaterally — and his pronouncements on marital morality (unencumbered by any marital attachments of his own) are a study in relativism. On “Meet the Press,” he granted absolution to his ’94 classmate Sanford, now his state’s governor, for abusing his office with his taxpayer-financed extramarital “trade mission” to Argentina. “I think the people of South Carolina will give him a second chance,” he said, as long as “Jenny and Mark can get back together.” Maybe Graham judges the Sanfords by a more empathetic standard than the Clintons because the Republican lieutenant governor who would replace Sanford is already fending off rumors that he’s gay.
Graham has also given a pass to his ’94 classmate Ensign, now a Nevada senator. Ensign not only committed adultery with an employee but sat by as his wealthy parents gave the mistress and her cuckolded husband nearly $100,000 to ease their pain. Ensign’s lawyer deflected questions that this beneficence might be hush money by claiming it was part of the senior Ensigns’ “pattern of generosity.”
When asked about these unsavory matters, Graham said that an ethics investigation of Ensign “isn’t high” among his priorities. This moral abdication still puts him on a higher plane than Coburn, who has been a murky broker in Ensign’s sexcapades. The husband of Ensign’s mistress told The Las Vegas Sun that Coburn urged Ensign to give him and his wife more than $1 million to pay off their mortgage and “move them to a new life.” Too bad no one thought of that one for the “Contract With America.”
Coburn maintains that he has immunity from testifying in any Ensign inquiry because he counseled Ensign as “a physician” and an “ordained deacon.” Coburn is an obstetrician and gynecologist, but never mind. What’s more relevant is the gall of his repeatedly lecturing Sotomayor last week on the “proper role” of judges — even to the point of reading her oath of office out loud. Coburn finds Sotomayor’s views “extremely troubling.” There’s nothing in Sotomayor’s history remotely as troubling as Coburn’s role in the Ensign scandal. Or as his inability to grasp Al Qaeda any better than he did the Nazis. In 2004, he claimed in all seriousness that the “gay agenda” is “the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today.”
Accounting for more than half the world’s production, India is the largest producer of mangoes. However, very little of the fruit is exported.
For a while, the export of mangoes to the United States was suspended because our Food and Drug Administration wanted to ensure that the mangoes and their packaging materials would not contain fruit flies and weevils.
Having overcome that barrier with sophisticated irradiation technology, India has resumed exporting mangoes, this time employing cargo ships instead of using air freight — which is expected to halve the retail price of Mangifera indica.
I was excited about this, because I missed the succulent and fantastically tasty varieties of mangoes that are available in India.
After arriving in Chennai, in my initial excitement of seeing hundreds of mangoes, I quickly dismissed my 11-year-old niece’s warning that some of the fruits might have been treated with chemicals that are harmful to humans. However, it turns out that my niece had the correct information after all.
Last week, most national newspapers, including The Hindu, reported the destruction of mangoes by government authorities in Chennai because chemicals had been used to ripen ones that had been harvested prematurely, thereby triggering their golden color. The chemicals included calcium carbide, arsenic and phosphorus.
To say that I am shocked is an understatement. Arsenic to improve the appearance and marketability of fruits that humans consume?
My parents were nonchalant about the news. “This happens every year,” was their comment.
I am even more appalled that such destruction of mangoes — because of illegal chemical usage — is an annual affair. I can only think that the manipulators are heartless sociopaths who need to be institutionalized for the rest of their lives.
Yes, India has laws and regulations in its books — from the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act to the Insecticide Act. But as a resource-starved developing country, India does not have sufficient enforcement mechanisms that we take for granted in America. I assume that the 7,500 kilograms of mangoes that were destroyed represent a much larger amount of fruit treated with these illegal chemicals.
However, the story of Indian mangoes is not unique.
As countries compete in the global market, a few producers succumb to the temptation for quick profits through various shortcuts. I bet many of us still remember the tragic experiences with tainted dog food and toothpaste from China, among other horror stories associated with imports from that country.
All it takes is a few unscrupulous producers to spoil the reputation for an entire industry, and the country as a whole. Sometimes, it is not the intentional acts but slippages in production processes that cause immense problems for consumers, as was the case with E. coli infected spinach or beef in the United States.
Thus, I am now even more appreciative of our regulatory agencies such as the FDA. Thanks to them, we rarely think twice about the fruits we buy in grocery stores, or even the anti-allergy pills we stock up on in order to be able to deal with an atmosphere that is full of grass seed pollen.
I am now convinced about the importance of strengthening the FDA, which has been systematically weakened over the years. We ought to recognize the importance of the FDA as a prime consumer protection agency and correspondingly increase the resources allocated for its various functions.
Given the extensive and ever-increasing level of importation of various food and drug items from all around the world, I urge our elected officials to explore ways for the Food and Drug Administration to inspect major production facilities outside the United States, too, to ensure the safety and well-being of Americans.
Such a structure could have an added benefit. Our consumer safety standards would then quickly spread to other countries, and even kids such as my niece will be able to enjoy the juicy mangoes that I did when I was young.
For The Register-Guard
Appeared in print: Monday, Jul 20, 2009
The Guardian:The 99 comics, which sell about 1m copies a year, enjoy a high profile in the Middle East. The adventures are to be made into an animated film, while the first of several 99-inspired theme parks has opened in Kuwait.
The creator of The 99 and founder of Teshkeel Media, Dr Naif Al- Mutawa, a psychologist by day, hopes his comics help dialogue and co-operation. Like Levitz, he is unsure of how the story will develop. "Are we going to have them working together from day one, or will they think the other is the enemy? Enemy number one is fear. You could open it with Obama's speech [in Cairo] with the two sets of superheroes watching it and having different reactions. There's plenty of possibilities."
The real question is what emerges after the almonds, tomatoes and cantaloupes disappear. What happens as ever more Central Valley farmland is retired, as is inevitable? What does the future look like for the northwest corner of Fresno County? Will the usual solution -- building a new prison -- be all that's conceived? Or can the sun-baked San Joaquin Valley become a hub of solar power and alternative energy, as some have suggested? If so, who will prepare workers for this new field?Rick Wartzman in the LA Times
... "We are part of a multibillion-dollar agricultural juggernaut that feeds the nation," Riofrio said. "But we've gotten chewed up and spit out."
