"it is a disaster for the left to abandon a commitment to reason"

A couple of days ago I remembered Alan Sokal's effort, when commenting about peer-review, and today the academic pops up again in The Philosophers' Magazine :) (ht)
I liked this part of that essay:

When thinking about why Sokal gets involved with these debates, it’s important to remember his political motivations. Sokal is a man of the left who once spent a few summers teaching maths at the National University of Nicaragua during the Sandinistas’ rule. Underlying his work outside of physics is a strong conviction that it is a disaster for the left to abandon a commitment to reason. In his book, he cites one such example of someone who wanted to claim that science is not universal, but varies according to how the individual is situated in the world: “A German can look at and understand Nature only according to his racial character.”
“This of course is a quotation from Ernst Krieck, a notorious Nazi ideologue, who was rector of the University of Heidelberg in 1937-38. I was flabbergasted – well maybe not flabbergasted – when I came across it. This doesn’t show that postmodernists are Nazis or anything. What it shows is a kind of uncanny overlap of ideas between, on the one hand, left-wing postmodernists, and the other hand, extreme right wing nationalists, whether they’re German or Hindu nationalists.”
Whether he’s right or wrong, this is why the debate that Sokal started matters, and is why, intellectual impostor or not, philosophers too should pay attention to him.

350.org .... check it out

Awesome ad ... but, Woods is protesting ....

So, apparently the billboards are on hold :(

An even funnier ad is here :)

I shot the serif, er, sheriff :)

Success .... at the end of it all ...

To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give one's self; to leave the world a little better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm, and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived... This is to have succeeded.

                                                                                                           Ralph Waldo Emerson

ht

The Armenian genocide: Another test of US' testicular fortitude?

The House Foreign Affairs Committee voted, by a narrow one-vote margin, on a non-binding resolution "condemning as genocide the mass killing of Armenians early in the last century by the Ottoman army."
Of course, as a reader of this blog you are fully aware that this is not the genocide that happened in 1994 in Rwanda.  Or the genocide carried out by the Nazis.  Or .... well, you get the point, which Samantha Power articulated in her book A problem from hell.

The Armenian genocide happened (yes, Turkey, it happened!) almost a hundred years ago and we still lack the testicular fortitude to take a stand on it.  The presidential candidate who was praised for her testicular fortitude, Hilalry Clinton, is now the Secretary of State.  So, what was her response?  Ahem, not much different from the previous secretaries who all lobbied against such a resolution!

“We do not believe that the full Congress will or should vote on that resolution and we have made that clear to all the parties involved,” Clinton said. 

So, you are thinking, but the candidate who beat Clinton in the primaries, Barack Obama, promised change.  In fact, the following is what he said two years ago: (ht)

I also share with Armenian Americans – so many of whom are descended from genocide survivors - a principled commitment to commemorating and ending genocide. That starts with acknowledging the tragic instances of genocide in world history. As a U.S. Senator, I have stood with the Armenian American community in calling for Turkey's acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide. Two years ago, I criticized the Secretary of State for the firing of U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, after he properly used the term "genocide" to describe Turkey's slaughter of thousands of Armenians starting in 1915. I shared with Secretary Rice my firmly held conviction that the Armenian Genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence. The facts are undeniable. An official policy that calls on diplomats to distort the historical facts is an untenable policy. As a senator, I strongly support passage of the Armenian Genocide Resolution (H.Res.106 and S.Res.106), and as President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide.
Genocide, sadly, persists to this day, and threatens our common security and common humanity. Tragically, we are witnessing in Sudan many of the same brutal tactics - displacement, starvation, and mass slaughter - that were used by the Ottoman authorities against defenseless Armenians back in 1915. I have visited Darfurian refugee camps, pushed for the deployment of a robust multinational force for Darfur, and urged divestment from companies doing business in Sudan. America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian Genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides. I intend to be that President.

I guess elections are nothing but castrations...

Meanwhile, Turkey is already ticked off, and has begun a lobbying campaign.  The Turkish government has recalled its ambassador to the US for consultations, and

A Turkish government statement condemned the vote, saying, "“This decision, which could adversely affect our co-operation on a wide common agenda with the US, also regrettably attests to a lack of strategic vision.”

One day in the life of .... an Iraqi refugee

We use euphemisms to hide away the real trauma and tragedies in lives all around.  "Displaced persons" is one such sterile euphemism.  The Iraq situation has triggered the displacement of quite few, many of whom have ended up as refugees in Jordan.

How is the daily life of such a refugee in Jordan?  What were some of these refugees doing back in Iraq?  Here is one example--a photo narrative.

Yes, the title of this post is a play on Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

The ghosts of presidents past :)

Presidential Reunion from Will Ferrell

Turning peer review into modern-day holy scripture

Controversies over "peer review" in research is not anything new.  My favorite story is the one about Alan Sokal, the physicist, getting an essay "Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity" published in Social Text.  Talk about the filtering work of peer-review!

Recently, the "hard sciences" have been forced to defend peer-review thanks to various controversies.  In writing about peer-review at Spiked, Frank Furedi notes:

Increasingly, peer review is cited as kind of unquestioned and unquestionable authority for settling what are in fact political disputes. Consequently, the findings of peer review are looked upon, not simply as statements about the quality of research or of a scientific finding, but as the foundation for far-reaching policies that affect everything from the global economy to our individual lifestyles.

Increasingly, peer review has been turned into a quasi-holy institution, which apparently signifies that a certain claim is legitimate or sacred. And from this perspective, voices which lack the authority of peer review are, by definition, illegitimate. Peer review provides a warrant to be heard – those who speak without this warrant deserve only our scorn.

You can almost visualise peer-review dogmatists waving their warrant and demanding that their opponents be silenced. For someone like George Monbiot, the British climate-change alarmist, peer review is the equivalent of a holy scripture. Boasting of his encounter with an opponent, who challenged him to a debate on speed cameras, Monbiot wrote: ‘I accepted and floored him with a simple question.’ Predictably, the question was: ‘Has he published his analysis in a peer-reviewed journal?’

In a world where opponents can be ‘floored’ simply because they lack the authority provided by the ritual of peer review, it is not surprising that there is considerable incentive to manipulate the system of peer review, to bend it to one’s own will and needs. 

Yep.  It is all mashed potatoes if they are not peer-reviewed :)

Wild Dances ... well, Ukrainian

I used Ruslana's 2004 EuroVision song for the warm-up in my intro class today :)  It certainly is high energy, eh!  I wonder if this song ever worked its way into the presidential elections there ....?

Meet "Uncle Ali": the Yemen version of Musharraf!

The president of Yemen is Ali Abdullah Saleh .... but is more well known as Uncle Ali:

Yemenis call him "Uncle Ali," and he is the only president in Yemen’s chaotic modern history whom they’ve had time to get to know on a first-name basis. Ibrahim al-Hamdi, who led a military coup that toppled the civilian government of the northern Yemen Arab Republic and became president in 1974, was assassinated three years later. His successor, Ahmad al-Ghashmi, lasted barely eight months before he was blown up by an exploding briefcase. Saleh, a former army tank driver with a primary school education who grew up in the dusty tribal village of Bayt al-Ahmar, was elected by a committee to the presidency of the republic later that same year. He stayed in office until 1990, when the north and the formerly Soviet-allied South Yemen rejoined, and has held on to power as president of reunited Yemen ever since.

 What kind of a ruler is he?  He is the Yemeni Pervez Musharraf:

The best reason Saleh has not to push hard against al Qaeda may be a paradoxical one: if he were to eliminate America’s enemies in Yemen, he wouldn’t be able to fight them anymore. If the group remains a threat, Saleh’s cash-strapped government receives huge sums of money and pledges of political support from the international community, so why would Saleh slaughter his cash cow? "So long as there is al Qaeda, no one will let him fail. It’s simple," said Naif al-Gunas, the speaker of the opposition coalition, the Joint Meetings Party. A war against a dissolute enemy like al Qaeda also allows Saleh to use counterterrorism funds and military resources to battle his internal enemies—the Shiite rebel group in the north, and the separatists in the south—simply by accusing them both of being allied with al Qaeda, which he has done repeatedly. (The alliances are mostly unproven, but, as one parliament member put it, "Shared enemies make unlikely bedfellows.")

At the end of the day, Saleh’s ability to sell his own temporary allegiance to the highest bidder is his main political asset, and for the time being the U.S. seems to have secured the dubious prize. While the concern, following the attempted Christmas bombing, was that Yemen would be the next Afghanistan, and Saleh the next Hamid Karzai, in truth the Yemeni president resembles no one so much as former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Like Saleh, Musharraf took vast amounts of American military aid intended for the fight against terrorism and spent it on his own military priorities, including an arms buildup against India and a secret nuclear weapons program. Like Saleh, he balanced occasional crackdowns on al Qaeda with a broader live-and-let-live gentleman’s agreement, allowing the organization to thrive and metastasize in the tribal areas. And like Saleh, he was seen by Washington as the best available partner we had, regardless of his flaws—which, perhaps, he was, at least for awhile. In Yemen, as in Pakistan, the only thing more daunting than the odds of the alliance producing anything of value is the lack of other options.

And we know how well the pro-Musharraf angle worked for the US and Pakistan, don't we?

Not your grandpa's Wal-Mart!

Yes, Wal-Mart is huge.  How huge?  consider this:

Wal-Mart has more than 10,000 suppliers in China. In addition, about a million farmers supply produce to the company's 281 stores in China. If Wal-Mart were a sovereign nation, it would be China's fifth- or sixth-largest export market.

That huge!
The old story was about Wal-Mart the evil giant.  But, as I noted recently, the market-savvy Wal-Mart is transforming in ways that might surprise those confined by their ideological blinders.  Wal-Mart is flexing its muscles to promote a green thinking among its suppliers:

"We heard that in the future, to become a Wal-Mart supplier, you have to be an environmentally friendly company," Fung said. "So we switched some of our products and the way we produced them."

And there is more:

"For those who may still be on the sidelines, I want to be direct," Wal-Mart chief executive Lee Scott said sternly. "Meeting social and environmental standards is not optional. I firmly believe that a company that cheats on overtime and on the age of its labor, that dumps its scraps and its chemicals in our rivers, that does not pay its taxes or honor its contracts will ultimately cheat on the quality of its products. And cheating on the quality of products is the same as cheating on customers. We will not tolerate that at Wal-Mart."
Now new suppliers are screened for environmental practices.

And for those worried that the Chinese government does not seem to care about the environmental impacts of its economic growth strategies?  Here is the killer:

Many China experts say Wal-Mart's guidelines could be more important than the government's.
"They are the rule setters," said Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Beijing-based group. "Before Wal-Mart only cared about price and quality, so that encouraged companies to race to the bottom on environmental standards. They could lose contracts because competition was so fierce on price."
Wal-Mart's suppliers have been forced to get serious about pollution, Ma said. "Wal-Mart says if you're over the compliance level, you're out of business. That will send a powerful signal."

"The rot set in with Ronald Reagan"

The best articulation, yet, that I have come across of the state of Conservatism in America:

Traditional conservatives disdain populism and respect knowledge. They believe in balancing the government’s books. And they are pragmatists who are suspicious of ideology. Reagan debased all these ideas – and modern American conservatism is still suffering the consequences.

Rachman writes how this Reaganism has led to Sarah Palin:

The most damaging idea propagated by the Reagan myth is the cult of the idiot-savant (the wise fool). You can see it in the very first line of Dinesh D’Souza’s admiring biography of Reagan, which proclaims: “Sometimes it really helps to be a dummy.” Mr D’Souza recounts numerous stories in which intellectuals – even conservative intellectuals – disdained Reagan. They scorned his tendency to spend cabinet meetings sorting jelly beans into different colours, and his taste for flaky anecdotes. But, Mr D’Souza concludes, the “dummy” was right and the pointy-heads were wrong.
A dangerous chain of reasoning flows from this popular version of history. Reagan was apparently stupid and often startlingly ignorant – but he was vindicated by history. Therefore, goes the theory, ignorance and stupidity are good signs. They show that a politician is in tune with the deeper wisdom of the people. Once you start thinking like that, it is but a short step to Sarah Palin.

Meanwhile, within the storehouses of knowledge--in academia--postmodernism, in a way, legitimized such bizarre descent into stupidity by championing an argument that every interpretation is equally valid.  The idiot savant of Reagan-Bush-Palin is similarly reflected in the challenge in the public domain of how old the universe is, or natural selection and evolution, and even in the fantastic growth of the conspiracy theory industry.  The joke is not on Reagan or Palin, but on us in academia :(

Hmmm.... that was a digression :)  Rachman concludes:

The real Reagan was, in fact, rather more pragmatic than the “Reagan myth” that sprang up after he left office. Real Reagan was willing to raise taxes in extremis, and became a firm believer in arms-reduction talks. Today’s American conservatives, who claim the mantle of Reagan, would regard these ideas as treachery and weakness. Reagan was ultimately a successful president. But he left behind a poisonous legacy for the conservative movement.

Blindness, Bahamas, and Botox

There was Alexander Hamilton from the great state of New York .... and then the contemporaries ... Take it away, Jon Stewart:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The New York Crimes - David Paterson & Charles Rangel
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

Obama's teleprompter problems continue ...

Obama Caught Lip-Syncing Speech

Yes, Virginia, there's "an app" for that :)

Stereotyping people based on their favorite NY Times writer

This (ht) is funny; how come some people are so creative?

Maureen Dowd
Women who remember fondly the first time they got their period.
Thomas Friedman
Men who refer to young women as "young lady."
Nicholas D. Kristof
People who are terrified others will find out that they don't actually read the NYTimes.
David Pogue
Your friend who sneers whenever they hear the phrase "social media expert" yet call themselves that.
Guy Trebay
Your friend's friend who always forgets to pay their part of the bill.
Frank Rich
People who spit when they talk.
Andrew Pollack
That guy your spouse knows who paid to have his whole genealogy mapped out.
Paul Krugman
People who realize that he's better looking than George Clooney.
David Brooks
People who recognize a fellow D&D player when they see ‘em.
Gail Collins
Your aunt in Boston.

[Lauren Leto's got a WordPress blog, because Tumblr's for pansies. Truth. She's based out of Detroit, counting fat stacks of cash from her book, Texts From Last Night, which you probably contributed to inadvertently. She also wrote an awesome blog post about who your favorite author is that she'll probably also get a book deal for. I say: If you're in a bar with people from Detroit, make sure they're on your side.]

The author of this post can be contacted at tips@gawker.com

Chart of the day: why we have fiscal problems

So, after retirement, at the official retirement age, and on an average, one can look forward to almost two additional decades of life here in the US.

This is when social security benefits kick in, along with Medicare, ...

You make the call :)

Cartoon of the day

I am thankful that I am not unemployed

First the graph here shows (ht):

The blue line is the number of workers unemployed for 27 weeks or more. The red line is the same data as a percent of the civilian workforce.

According to the BLS, there are a record 6.31 million workers who have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks (and still want a job). This is a record 4.1% of the civilian workforce.

More than six million people unemployed for more than half-a-year and still not discouraged enough and are looking for jobs!  What a recession this has been ....

Krugman messes up my mind some more:

We’ve been through the second-worst financial crisis in the history of the world, and we’ve barely begun to recover: 29 million Americans either can’t find jobs or can’t find full-time work.

So, can we help out the unemployed?:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took a shot across the Capitol at Sen. Jim Bunning, slamming the Kentucky Republican for his one-man filibuster of unemployment benefits, which are due to expire Sunday.

"It is really hard to understand why one senator in the United States Senate is holding up the extension of unemployment insurance at this time," said Pelosi. "But he is, and I'm pleased that the Senate Democrats are trying to make a move to dislodge that."

Adds Megan McArdle:

His cunning plan to put a hold on the reauthorization of unemployment benefits until the Democrats agree to fund them out of existing stimulus dollars will not do much good, and it could do great harm.

Take the dog for a wok?

"The right to eat cats and dogs is under threat" in China, reports the Economist.
My question for the magazine: whatever happened to coming up with punny headlines?  Missed an opportunity for linking dog and "wok" :)

The proposed law would make the “illegal consumption or sale” of dog- or cat-meat punishable by a fine of up to 5,000 yuan ($730) or imprisonment for up to 15 days. But opponents are still many and vociferous both in the press and online. Dog-eating, they argue, is a time-honoured tradition and China is not yet ready for Western-style prissiness about consuming such animals. Perhaps, they suggest hopefully, the word “illegal” could be taken to mean that there might still be a legal way of killing cats and dogs for the table.

A couple of years ago, students in one of my classes asked me about the "holy cow" and, therefore, not much of a beef market in India.  I then engaged them in a discussion, and followed up with a comment that what we eat is culturally determined.

I then asked them how we might draw the line--what is it that prevented them from eating dogs?  The students seemed to be appalled that I would even ask such a question.

I  sensed that I had detected a chink in their armor, and went for the next step.  I asked them if they would be ok with having immigrant neighbors--immigrants from, say, South Korea, whose dog one day disappeared because, well, it became food.  If we banned eating dogs here, then couldn't we use that same law to ban eating chicken and beef as well?  Boy, I could see in their eyes that they wished they had never brought up the holy cow question :)

Let me refer you back to an old posting on eating dog meat ...

The spread of GM crops

Hey, the Economist is also on to the GM crop issue--I suppose there are lots of people who understand that there is more to the world than being preoccupied with the US, Western Europe, AfPak, and Iraq
Anyway, the Economist makes points that provide a larger context than my comments on the Bt-brinjal controversy in India.
The magazine notes:

in Europe, opposition to GM food appears as strong as ever, despite increasingly strident scientific dissent. The European arm of Greenpeace, a green pressure group, still denounces the technology and gloats about a decline of over a tenth in cultivation of GM crops in Europe last year. Sir David King, a former scientific adviser to the British government, argues that the unjustified vilification of GM is leading to needless deaths. He thinks the delay in the introduction of flood-resistant GM rice, for example, has condemned many in the poor world to starvation.

I tell you, we need to seriously start thinking about feeding 9 billion people

Pakistan: even Saudi Arabia is worried!

For the few of you who thought you had nothing to worry about when it came to Pakistan, ahem:

“Well, Pakistan is a friendly country, and therefore, any time we see dangerous things in a friendly country, we are not only sorry but also worried,” Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal told Indian journalists here in response to questions.

The prince said it was the duty of all political leaders in Pakistan to unite to “see that extremism does not find its way to achieving gain in that country. It can only happen if political leadership in Pakistan is united. We hope that it will be achieved.”

Meanwhile, Musharraf is on a lecture tour, and his schedule apparently includes Oregon.  I can't but think that the old general is constantly plotting his sweet revenge :(

A man of constant sorrow

On the death of a friend

For unknown reasons, I was reminded of a friend with whom I had lost touch over the past years, particularly after moving to Oregon.

So, I googled him ... only to find out that Shahab Rabbani died almost two years ago.

Monday, June 9, 2008
In Memoriam: Dr. Shahab Rabbani, SPPD Alumnus
from SPPD Staff Reports
The USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development deeply mourns the loss of an exemplary – and beloved – member of its alumni community, Dr. Shahab Rabbani.
After a years-long battle with cancer, Dr. Rabbini has passed away. His funeral services took place on Friday, June 6, at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

Shahab was from Iran, and was one of the many who were forced to exit the country after the theocratic revolution in 1979.  His exit was a story struggling his way through sympathetic Eastern European countries, then to Western Europe, and finally to the Land of the Free.

We had quite a few lunches together, and occasional dinners too.  Learnt a lot about Iran and some of the cultural aspects there.  Through him I came to know about a religion called "Mithraism", which apparently was a serious competitor to Christianity back in Rome. It was fascinating to find out how much Mithraism, Hinduism, and the Zorastrian faith have/had in common, and how Christianity itself has a lot of common ground with Mithraism.

Shahab's parents--his mother, in particular--were big fans of Indian movies, even from their years in Tehran. I quote Shahab ofen; he said something along the lines of: "my mother could not understand a word uttered in the movies.  But, she laughed when the heroine laughed and cried when the heroine cried, and enjoyed the songs."  Of course, the older Hindi songs were unlike the contemporary ones--the older songs in Hindi often reflected the Persian cultural heritage that the Mughals brought with them.  His parents were also rice eaters and Shahab joked that if there was no rice served at parties that his parents went to, well, after they returned home they would eat a little bit of rice :)   

Shahab was more a creative arts person than the architect/planner that worked as in his day job.  I suspect that he enjoyed the arts infinitely more.  I remember going to the first exhibition that he had of his photos--in the library at Beverly Hills.  The guy was in his elements, and significantly different from his persona at work, and more like the person he was at the lunches and coffees we had.  One of the sites still has links to some of his works, along with an email address to contact him. (That is from where I grabbed the photo.)  I suppose you never cease to exist in the internet.

Shahab did get married, finally, and he and Olga visited us when we lived in Bakersfield.  I am still searching through to track that photo down :(

I guess sometimes we drift away in our lives and soon we lose contact with people that we later wish we hadn't drifted away to the point of not even knowing that there was a long battle with cancer and then death.

Am absolutely glad our paths crossed, Shahab.

The cost of providing public services

Germany is an outlier in one regard at least: it runs a trade surplus:

Germany’s trade surplus is by far the largest in Europe, reaching 135.8 billion euros ($184.9 billion) in 2009, according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics office. Germany’s surplus was more than triple that of the Netherlands, which was in second place.

Thanks to the high-value items that it continues to manufacture and sell all around the world.  Many of these are low-volume catering to a niche demand, like:

Glasbau Hahn is a miniature multinational company, generating more than 60 percent of its sales abroad and dominating its narrow but lucrative niche: the global market for museum display cases. Even King Tut’s mummy lies in a climate-controlled vitrine made in Glasbau Hahn’s workshop, which sits next to a railyard and across the street from a Fiat showroom.
As Glasbau Hahn and thousands of other small German exporters rebound from a dreadful 2009, they give the European Union a much-needed shot of growth.

Here in the US we have been accumulating trade deficits, budget deficits, .... Will it be geographically not appropriate to write in this context "there is something rotten in the state of Denmark" :)

The continuing economic woes at home will, finally, begin to wake us up the various realities.  We have recognized the excess compensation, particularly at companies that are failing.  We don't do anything about that is a different issue of political impotence incompetence.  Perhaps that is because we taxpayers struggle to figure out how much non-shareholders can have a say in the affairs of the private sector.  And now with the Supreme Court affirming the rights of corporations, we might as well bid adieu forever to gaining a shareholder bill of rights!

But, almost all the taxpayers will soon start reacting to cost inefficiencies in the public sector.  And there are plenty of them.  As Matt Welch notes while summarizing Steven Greenhut's essay (yes, they are libertarians) on how public servants became our masters:

public-sector unions are not just growing the pie of government on all levels; they are brazenly gobbling up two, three, and even 20 times the amount that they were taking just a few years ago—on guaranteed contributions to their pension plans alone. Wherever you see a politician or public servant warning about “draconian” cuts to public services, you almost certainly are witnessing an agency whose employees have negotiated a sweetheart pension deal within the last decade. It’s awfully hard to balance a budget, let alone improve public services, when you’re tripling a major line item.

And from another report--this is from California Watch:

Amid a crippling fiscal crisis, managers throughout California's government have routinely allowed their employees to amass unused vacation time, enabling hundreds of workers to end their public-service careers with payouts topping $100,000, a California Watch investigation has found.
One worker combined vacation and compensatory time to walk away with more than $800,000, records show.

Ouch!
The same report also points out the hidden cost of employee furloughs:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has instituted mandatory furlough days that most state workers must use before their vacation days. The result, according to several large departments, is that workers are banking more time off than ever, offsetting short-term savings with long-term liabilities.

We are doing furloughs in Oregon, too, and sometimes the number of furlough days is as much as the vacation time in the private sector--two weeks.  So, yes, we too are merely postponing the payment date on the costs.

Finally, the cost of the pension obligations that I have blogged about before.

So, back to Germany: how come they are able to pull it off despite significant public sector involvement in the economy?