Subject: Forced Marsh From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 14:02:26 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/opinion/27young.html?ex=1285473600&en=65acea7096b85743&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 27, 2005 Forced Marsh By ROBERT S. YOUNG and DAVID M. BUSH IN the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, there has been much talk of rebuilding Louisiana's coastal wetlands and barrier islands. This proposal, which could cost an estimated $15 billion, has been advocated by Louisiana scientists, engineers, politicians and environmentalists alike, who explain that the state is suffering the highest rate of land loss in the nation and imply that restoring this land would reduce the damage from future storms. As coastal scientists, we are excited to see the idea of wetlands restoration so widely discussed. Yet we think the Louisiana plan is ill conceived. When a major storm tears apart any coastal area, people tend to take on an attitude that we can win this 'war' with the weather if we spend enough money. Sadly, then, hurricanes often bequeath gigantic urban renewal projects. Destroyed houses are replaced by bigger ones that lack even the protection of dunes that were eroded by the storm. Within a few years, more property than ever stands at risk. Now we are being told that we should spend billions not just on rebuilding houses and roads but on re-engineering the environment as well. Louisiana's coastal scientists, engineers and politicians suggest that without this coastal restoration project, all other efforts will be endangered. But it's not that simple, for several reasons. First, many people - scientists and otherwise - have insinuated that if we had begun wetlands restoration in the Mississippi Delta years ago, it would have reduced the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and the coast. This is highly unlikely. Storm surge waters approached the coast from the east, pushed into Lake Pontchartrain by the counterclockwise flow of the hurricane's winds; the natural wetlands that used to exist downriver from the city would have done little to mitigate the damage. Second, some have suggested that rebuilding the Louisiana barrier islands would protect the delta region in future storms. But just look what happened elsewhere: Hurricane Katrina's storm surge quickly inundated the barrier islands of the Gulf Islands National Seashore off Mississippi, which are far more robust and vegetated than the Louisiana islands ever were, on its way to devastating the state's shoreline. Let's face it, even if reconstructed, the Louisiana islands would be little more than a speed bump to a storm the size of Hurricane Katrina. In addition, none of the restoration plans address the root causes of wetland loss: man-made alterations to the Mississippi River that reduce the amount of sediment flowing into the marshes, the saltwater allowed in by navigation canals cut through the delta, and a lowering of ground levels throughout the region brought on by natural and industrial activities. We are being sold a giant engineering project intended to fix problems caused by engineering projects elsewhere on the river and in the delta. We find it paradoxical that many of the people calling for wetland restoration are also calling for higher levees to protect populated areas, since the levees, which prevent flooding and thus the natural addition of sediment to the marshes, are a big reason the wetlands are disappearing. And even if we could rebuild these wetlands, maintaining them at a time of rising ocean levels is probably untenable. We would be creating our own little Holland, with a need for ever-more expensive construction and maintenance far into the future. Last, if the government is going to spend $15 billion on restoration, let's put all the country's wetlands on the table. We seriously doubt that any objective scientific cost-benefit review would find that spending all that money in Louisiana makes sense. We believe there are many concerned and honest advocates for the project to restore coastal Louisiana. But their effort should not be mislabeled as 'storm protection,' and we shouldn't allow our emotional response to a natural disaster to cloud our long-term thinking about the best way to spend our money on repairing America's coastal regions. Robert S. Young and David M. Bush are professors of geology at, respectively, Western Carolina University and the University of West Georgia.

Subject: Taste for Brazilian Frugality From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 14:00:53 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/business/worldbusiness/27beer.html?ex=1285473600&en=b0ce4b735cb523bd&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 27, 2005 Belgian Brewer Acquires a Taste for Brazilian Frugality By PAUL MELLER BRUSSELS - John F. Brock, the chief executive of InBev, the world's biggest producer of beer, has been brushing up on his Brazilian. 'Loosely translated, jinga means effortless flair,' he said last week in an interview in his office in Leuven, near Brussels. Holding up a bottle of Brahma, a beer brand that Interbrew acquired a year ago when it bought AmBev, Brazil's biggest brewer, he said he intended to sell Brahma around the world on the strength of its jinga. But AmBev's influence in last year's deal that created InBev is less about the effortless flair of Brazilian dance, style and soccer and more about the unglamorous task of cutting costs. The old Interbrew prided itself on its marketing savvy and its focus on local markets. It called itself the world's local brewer. AmBev, on the other hand, which still functions under its old name and has its shares listed on the Brazilian stock exchange, is known in the beer industry for being obsessive about efficiency. 'The sales force there all drive gray cars because it is the cheapest color,' said Concepción Moreno, an analyst at the Belgian stock broker Petercam who visited AmBev's headquarters in Brazil last week. 'The chief executive and the chief financial officer share the same desk, paper and phone calls are rationed. Cost-cutting is a way of life, not a one-off activity.' Although Interbrew has economic and voting control over AmBev, the deal was 'almost a merger of equals,' Mr. Brock said. A marketing man to the core, he added, 'Hopefully we can combine the best of both companies.' Some analysts go a step further and describe last year's deal of 9.2 billion euros, or $11.1 billion at the current conversion rate, as a reverse takeover. InBev is centralizing much of the power that Interbrew handed to local management teams around the world, Mr. Brock said. AmBev managers have been moved into major positions at InBev's headquarters in Leuven, including Felipe Dutra, AmBev's top financial manager, as InBev's chief financial officer, and Juan Vergara, AmBev's head of Latin American operations, as head of purchasing for InBev. 'It's being dubbed the 'AmBevization' of Interbrew,' Ms. Moreno said. 'When the deal was first announced, I thought the Europeans, with their reputation for being well organized, would teach the Latin Americans, but it is quite the opposite.' Mr. Brock played down the impression that the Brazilians were taking over. The reason there are more AmBev staff at InBev headquarters than Interbrew people moved to Brazil is because of language. 'English is the working language here at InBev,' Mr. Brock said, adding, 'It's easier to move into that environment than into a Portuguese-speaking one.' Nevertheless, zero-based budgeting, AmBev's term for ruthless cost-cutting, has already been applied in Canada - where InBev sells Budweiser in a licensing agreement with its maker, Anheuser-Busch, as well as brands including Labatt. Europe and Russia are next in line, followed by Korea and Ukraine. By the end of 2007 InBev aims to cut costs by 300 million euros, or $361 million, in addition to the 280 million euros, or $337 million, it hopes to save through the takeover. Like the United States, Europe poses a challenge to brewers because beer consumption here is in decline. Shrinking populations and shifting consumption to other drinks like wine and spirits have forced brewers to think creatively. Beck's, a quintessentially German beer, has been given two brand extensions in an attempt to reach younger drinkers: Beck's Gold - darker in color, less bitter taste - and Beck's Green, also less bitter with a lemony taste. Beer purists may frown, but Mr. Brock said he believed such moves were essential. 'Look at what is working in the spirits industry: Vodkas with flavors, new packaging. There is a consensus in the drinks industry that consumers are seeking more variety,' he said. Mature markets in the developed world represent a third of InBev's activities. Most business takes place in Russia, China, eastern Europe, and now, with AmBev on board, Latin America. Brazil is the fourth-largest beer market in the world, and AmBev controls more than 60 percent of sales there. Exposure to some of the fastest-growing markets in the world is a mixed blessing, though. Returns on investment are slow in coming and there is greater risk. 'Many Belgians who bought InBev stock at the beginning are disappointed because they are not seeing the benefits in the price of their shares yet,' Ms. Moreno said. But foreign investors are looking more closely at the stock, she said. Investors with shares in brewers like Heineken and Anheuser-Busch are taking a closer look at InBev now, because it is not so dependent on sales in these mature markets, she said. Mr. Brock said he was aiming to achieve the highest profit margin in the business. 'We looked at Anheuser-Busch, with their strong record of cost-efficiency in the United States, and calculated that they must have a profit margin of 29 percent, so we set our target at 30 percent by the end of 2007,' he said. The company will still look for acquisition targets in developing markets it already occupies, especially in Russia, where Mr. Brock said brewing capacity was having trouble keeping up with demand. But InBev is also looking at new markets, he said. The company has no presence in Mexico, Vietnam or Thailand, three of the biggest emerging beer markets. 'They are on our list of markets we will enter in time,' Mr. Brock said. Perhaps with the help of the superefficient Brazilians, those moves may come sooner rather than later.

Subject: David Swensen From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 13:18:50 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: September 6, 2005 Yale Manager Blasts Industry By TOM LAURICELLA - WALL STREET JOURNAL WSJ: You had hoped to give small investors a road map for beating the market based on Yale's approach to investing. What happened? Mr. Swensen: I found when I started down that path that individuals just don't have the same set of investment opportunities available to them that we do here at Yale. In fact, the evidence showed me that the mutual-fund industry has completely failed to provide reasonable active-management returns to individuals. WSJ: To say that it completely failed -- that's a pretty harsh statement to make. Mr. Swensen: I think the evidence is there. The crux of the failure is with the for-profit management of funds for individuals. Mutual-fund managers have a fiduciary responsibility to investors. Obviously, if they are operating in a for-profit mode, they have a profit motive. When you put the profit motive up against fiduciary responsibility, that fiduciary responsibility loses and profits win. WSJ: But the investment managers that Yale hires -- or any other institutional investor hires -- are out to make money. Mr. Swensen: But there it's a fair fight. In the context of Yale, you've got a sophisticated institutional investor on the one hand and a for-profit provider of investment services on the other hand. And we can go toe-to-toe and end up with a fair result. If you look at Yale's history over the last 20 years, we have excellent results in terms of active-management returns. The problem in the mutual-fund industry is that you've got a sophisticated provider of investment services on the one hand and, on the other, you have an unsophisticated consumer. That imbalance leads to behaviors that line the pockets of mutual-fund managers and at the expense of the individual investor. WSJ: What is some of the evidence that you believe shows that mutual funds have failed small investors? Mr. Swensen: The data I cite in the book was put together and analyzed by Rob Arnott (chairman of manager Research Affiliates LLC). He adjusts for survivorship bias, an incredibly important phenomenon. If you don't do that, you are going to get a false picture of what the world looks like. WSJ: So if you look at the regular data on fund performance, you're not seeing the whole story? Mr. Swensen: You're not seeing the losers that disappear. They could disappear because they go out of business or because cynical managers of mutual funds will take poorly performing funds and merge them into better-performing funds, and so the record of the poor performer disappears. The picture that you get if you just look at the survivors is dominated by the winners -- but of course investor dollars were invested with the losers that disappeared. And if you look at the aggregate results of the mutual-fund industry on an after-fee, after-tax basis and adjust it for survivorship bias, the probability that you are going to end up with market-beating returns is de minimus. According to (Mr. Arnott's data), the 10-year after-tax shortfall for mutual funds is 4.5% per year relative to what you would have gotten if you had put your money in an index fund. That doesn't even take into account the fees for advice ... which takes you from a de minimus probability to a virtual certainty that you will end up losing relative to the market. WSJ: What keeps funds from living up to their promise? Mr. Swensen: So many of the behaviors that lead to high-quality investment performance diminish (managers') profits. For example, size is the enemy of performance. If you limit assets under management, you have a much better chance of beating the market. But asset gathering improves profits. So what happens? Almost invariably, managers are out there gathering assets, trying to increase profits, and it comes at the expense of generating investment returns. Concentration is another important factor in generating high levels of incremental returns. We have managers in Yale's portfolio that will hold three or four or five stocks, or maybe eight or 10 stocks. You have to have an enormous amount of conviction, and you have to really believe that you have got an edge to make those kinds of concentrated bets. But it's not sensible for a mutual fund to do that from a business perspective because the volatility of the results relative to the market will be way too great, and the manager of the mutual fund will likely not be able to amass the same level of assets they would if they pursued a much more diversified strategy. It also doesn't scale. If you are trying to run a concentrated portfolio and have a huge amount of assets under management, you just can't do it. One of the best managers out there has had as few as three securities and never more than 10. If you're Fidelity Magellan, with $50 billion or $60 billion, there's no way you can just put three stocks in the portfolio. As we're going down the laundry list of reasons why mutual funds fail, you have to talk about the turnover in the portfolios. A very significant portion of assets in mutual funds are taxable, and the overwhelming majority of mutual-fund assets appear to be managed with complete indifference to the tax consequences. It's probably not criminal, but it should be. WSJ: But there are portfolio managers who practice a very low-turnover, high-conviction style of managing mutual funds. Mr. Swensen: Southeastern Asset Management (manager of Longleaf Partners Funds) is one, and there are probably a handful of others. But that brings us to the second set of problems, which has to do with the way that individuals behave. I looked at the results of three years before and three years after the technology-stock bubble. If you looked at the stated investment returns, they went up for three years and went down for three years. So the results over the six-year period were basically zero -- no harm, no foul. Then you look at the cash flows. Because people chased performance, the overwhelming fund flows occurred in '99 and 2000. So individuals bought in right at the top and ended up suffering in the downturn. There was massive wealth destruction. Even though Southeastern does a wonderful job of managing ... they suffered substantial withdrawals in '99 and 2000 because investors were disenchanted with the low turnover, concentrated, steady-as-she-goes strategy. WSJ: You have issue with fees charges by funds as well. Mr. Swensen: Not only the investment-management fees but the 12b-1 fees, which are completely at odds with investor interests. You are out there charging fees for marketing and distribution, and so you are charging the investor for adding assets under management -- which ultimately hurts the investor's prospective returns. It's a very sweet deal for the mutual-fund industry, and it's terrible for the investor. WSJ: The fund industry says without these fees, it couldn't attract investors. Mr. Swensen: That was the argument when the SEC allowed them quite a number of years ago. I thought it was a specious argument and viewed it without merit then, and it certainly doesn't have merit now. WSJ: Some of these fees go to compensate financial advisers. Those folks are providing a service, so don't they need to be paid? Mr. Swensen: The amount that people pay for financial advice relative to the quality of what they get is totally out of whack. WSJ: For individuals, given the way the fund industry operates, you argue that they should be focusing on the not-for-profit companies and index funds such as Vanguard Group and TIAA-CREF. (Mr. Swensen is on the board of TIAA, but isn't directly responsible for mutual funds, which fall under CREF.) What does that get you? Mr. Swensen: Well it doesn't give you much to talk about at cocktail parties! It gets you a well-diversified equity-oriented portfolio that ought to be good for all seasons. WSJ: When it comes to diversifying a portfolio, you have somewhat unconventional asset-allocation recommendations. Mr. Swensen: When I arrived here 20 years ago, we had a pretty typical institutional portfolio, maybe two-thirds in domestic stocks and another big chunk in domestic bonds and a smattering of alternatives. And if you apply the principle of diversification and the notion of the equity orientation to these portfolios...they fail the test of diversification because there is a huge chunk in domestic equities, and they generally fail the test of equity orientation because there is too much in fixed income and cash. Currently at Yale, we've got a half a dozen asset classes with weights ranging between 5% and 25%. And I identify a half dozen asset classes that individuals ought to have in their portfolio. Traditional bonds, inflation-indexed bonds, domestic equities, foreign-developed equities, emerging-market equities and real-estate securities. WSJ: You argue investors should have just 30% in domestic stocks. But most people think 'I'm a super-long-term investor, so I'm going to be loaded to the gills with domestic stocks or just stocks.' Mr. Swensen: There are lots of ways you can produce equity-like returns without exposure to domestic stocks. So the foreign equities and foreign emerging equities and the real-estate positions ought to produce returns that are not dissimilar from those of U.S. stocks over reasonably long periods of time. It's important to point out that one size doesn't fit all and individual circumstance could lead an individual to hold a portfolio that would differ from the one that we're talking about right here. WSJ: If you like index funds, where do exchange-traded funds fit in? Mr. Swensen: To the extent that ETFs are focused on index management -- with the provision that the indexes are well-structured indexes -- I think they are absolutely great. It's another low-cost, even more tax-sensitive investment that people can use to implement a sensible asset allocation. But as they have grown in popularity, the waters have been polluted by a variety of ETFs that have essentially active-management components and poor fee structures. So it's a circumstance where buyers need to beware. WSJ: Most average investors think an index is an index. What should they be on the lookout for? Mr. Swensen: The S&P 500 is a well-structured index because it has relative low turnover and the low turnover leads to reasonable tax characteristics. But the Russell 2000, which consists of stocks ranked by market capitalization...as defined once a year, has ridiculous characteristics. The turnover is extraordinarily high. In a market that you expect will rise over time, it will have very poor tax consequences. It's very widespread and used a lot but ridiculously, poorly constructed.

Subject: Time to Connect the Dots From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 13:11:27 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/28/opinion/28wed1.html September 28, 2005 Time to Connect the Dots Along with ruined homes and upended trees, the recent hurricanes left behind a revived debate about global warming. While some environmentalists point to the wreckage as a kind of retribution for America's failure to control greenhouse gas emissions, right-wing talk show hosts repeat, over and over, that even if global warming did exist, there is no proof it had anything to do with Rita and Katrina. In a way, they're all right. It is impossible to link Katrina or Rita, or any particular hurricane, specifically to global warming. This does not mean that President Bush and the rest of us should not be connecting the dots. These are natural disasters - but with human fingerprints. Hurricanes derive their strength from warm ocean waters. Ocean temperatures have been rising over the last 100 years, along with atmospheric temperatures. Hurricanes have therefore become bigger and more destructive and are likely to grow even more violent in the future. This cycle cannot be reversed any time soon. But one thing humans can do is to reduce their own contribution to global warming by controlling industrial emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The alarm bells have been ringing for a long time, but Katrina and Rita should serve as yet another warning to an administration that has belittled the science of global warming. The emerging hurricane problem is size, not quantity. The scientists who have studied the issue have not detected any increase in the number of hurricanes. Yet these same scientists - in research reports appearing in reputable journals like Science, Nature and The Journal of Climate - have detected increases of up to 70 percent in hurricane intensity, a measure that combines the power of a hurricane and its duration. There has been a commensurate increase in damage, mainly because more and more people have stubbornly put themselves at risk by moving to low-lying coastal areas. But the hurricanes' added strength has clearly contributed to the ever-higher toll in lives and property damage. Being cautious folk, the scientists point out that cyclical lulls and surges in hurricane activity may also have something to do with stronger storms. But even if they are completely wrong in linking warming to intensity, which seems unlikely, global warming will have other undesirable consequences, including a significant rise in sea level. In the last century, sea level rose 4 to 8 inches around the world, and most scientists expect a further rise of 2 to 3 feet in this century. According to one government study, a 20-inch rise in sea level by 2100 could put 3,500 square miles of the southern coast of the United States underwater - rendering efforts to restore the Everglades and the Louisiana coastline essentially pointless. A large-scale breakup of the polar ice sheets would, of course, make matters much worse. Dikes could protect some regions, like Manhattan and the Netherlands, but most coastlines would be inundated. Humanity cannot avoid a warmer Earth and some rise in sea level, largely because of the gases we have already deposited in the atmosphere. But the worst outcomes may be avoided if the world takes concerted action to stabilize industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. This, of course, presupposes aggressive leadership from the United States, which produces more than a quarter of these emissions. But this is a role that Mr. Bush has shown no appetite for at all.

Subject: In Heeding Health Warnings From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 09:34:06 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/health/27cons.html?ex=1285473600&en=eba5e4d4fc481c0a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 27, 2005 In Heeding Health Warnings, Memory Can Be Tricky By DEBORAH FRANKLIN In briefing consumers on health risks, public health campaigns often rely on a catchy strategy: they list the myths about a behavior or product, then follow up those misconceptions with the truth. Check any Internet search engine and you will find 'myths and facts' on health topics like abortion, acne, vaccines and weight loss. But new research suggests that even the sharpest consumer can be tripped up by these warnings because of a flaw in the way we remember what we read or are told. As time passes, the studies show, people remember the health information they were given. But they forget which part was myth, and which was the truth. Experts say consumers and doctors need to be aware of this problem so they can make sure that quirks of memory do not harm anyone's health. 'Here's what happens,' said Ian Skurnik, a psychologist and assistant professor of marketing at the University of Toronto, who worked with colleagues from the University of Michigan to study the phenomenon. 'You notice that your grandmother has been taking useless medical treatments, and you're worried,' he said. 'You tell her, 'You know, Granny, shark cartilage doesn't help your arthritis.' You tell her three times to make sure she understands, and she seems to.' He continued, 'But a few days later you talk to her again and find the warnings have had precisely the opposite effect of what you intended.' This common problem arises, Dr. Skurnik said, because in laying down a memory trace, the human brain seems to encode the memory of the claim separately from its context - who said it, when and other particulars, including the important fact that the claim is not true. The detailed memory of the experience of learning the information begins to fade almost immediately, and the contextual clues fade faster than the core claim. 'Long after you've forgotten the context, the claim will still seem vaguely familiar,' Dr. Skurnik said. That is when a well-documented effect that Dr. Skurnik calls 'the illusion of truth' kicks in. Numerous studies over the last few decades have shown that unless people have some countervailing context or information to grab hold of, they tend to regard information that seems familiar as true. To test the power of that effect related to health claims, Dr. Skurnik and colleagues gave 64 volunteers a few dozen bits of unrelated medical information that they were unlikely to have heard before, like 'Corn chips contain twice as much fat as potato chips' and 'Aspirin destroys tooth enamel.' The researchers arbitrarily labeled half the statements false and half as true. Each item was read aloud and simultaneously presented on a computer screen at least once, but half the items appeared three times within the list. Half the volunteers were college students ages 18 to 25. The others were healthy adults, ages 71 to 86. Thirty minutes after the volunteers had seen the information, the researchers showed them another list of items that contained all the previous statements, with some new items mixed in. They were asked to identify which statements were false, which were true and which were new. The same kind of quiz was repeated three days later. The results, published in the March 2005 issue of The Journal of Consumer Research, showed that the older adults were much more likely than the younger ones to misremember the false statements as true, an effect that was exacerbated three days later. What's more, having seen a statement three times in the initial list helped the younger people remember it correctly, but made things worse for the older volunteers. 'Even quite elderly people remain good detectors of information that's new, versus something they have seen before,' Dr. Skurnik said. 'But in this case, that ability worked against them.' The repetition of a warning underscored its familiarity. The implications of the findings are not limited to older people, Dr. Skurnik said. In a follow-up study not yet published, he and his colleagues presented college-age volunteers with a health information pamphlet from the Web site of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called 'Is It a Flu Shot Fact or Myth?' In boldface type, the pamphlet contained eight statements about the flu vaccine - six labeled false, one true and one 'maybe.' Each statement was followed by a sentence or two of explanation in smaller type. 'Immediately after reading the flier, participants made few mistakes in recalling whether a particular statement from the flyer was described as a fact or myth, and there was no difference in the type of mistake,' the researchers reported. 'However,' the researchers continued, 'after a half an hour, participants were much more likely to misremember a fact as a myth.' 'I think the message to physicians from this study and others is that even if you have lots to tell your patient in an office visit, you have to tell them several ways and over time to make sure they understand,' said Dr. Joanne Schwartzberg, who oversees the health literacy program of the American Medical Association. Dr. Schwartzberg advises patients never to worry about saying to a doctor: ' 'Wait a minute, I need a little more time to see if I've got that right. When I go home, you want me to do this; is that right?' ' Putting complicated health instructions in your own words and repeating them aloud should help anchor the information accurately in your memory. But Dr. Skurnik said, 'Don't trust your memory.' Office visits are often time-pressured, anxiety-provoking, and packed with new and technical information - exactly the conditions most likely to jumble a memory of what was said. Whenever possible, get written information from the doctor, he said, and take a notebook to appointments to jot down instructions. It can also help to take along a friend or family member. Patients under the intense stress of a new diagnosis may be those most likely to scan headlines and sift through Web pages in search of information. Print out what you read online, Dr. Skurnik suggested, so that you can go back later and identify the source of the information, as well as the particulars. And doctors, he said, would do well to make sure that anything they hand out is written in simple, direct factual language. 'It's not enough to ensure that people get good information from credible sources,' Dr. Skurnik said. 'You also have to make sure that they'll be able to recall whether it's true or false later on.'

Subject: For Survivors of Cancer From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 06:12:10 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/health/article-page.html?res=9406EFDB163BF935A35754C0A9629C8B63&fta=y July 6, 2004 For Survivors of Cancer, All Calories Are Not Equal By JANE E. BRODY After her third battle with cancer, Diana Dyer decided she needed something more than surgery and chemotherapy to keep the disease at bay. During treatment, she ate whatever she could tolerate to get the calories her body needed. But afterward, her goal was to use diet to minimize the risk of recurrence. She searched the scientific literature for guidance and developed a plan based, she recognized, on ''very little clinical science'' but on the best science available. She increased her exercise; reduced her alcohol intake; avoided saturated fats in animal foods and the trans and hydrogenated fats in processed foods; switched to olive and canola oils; gave up red meats and poultry but ate more soy foods, fatty fish and eggs, rich in omega-3 fatty acids; doubled her fiber intake through whole grains, legumes and nine or more servings a day of fruits and vegetables; replaced diet sodas with tomato and orange juice, and green tea; stuck to low-fat dairy products; and added nuts and flax seeds to her diet. She describes her plan, including what to do when eating out, in a book, ''A Dietitian's Cancer Story'' (Swan Press, $15.95), and offers two weeks of menus and recipes on her Web site, www.cancerrd.com. Part of the sales of the book benefit the American Institute for Cancer Research. The book can be ordered through the institute at (800)843-8114. Also helpful on the subject is the American Cancer Society's publication ''Nutrition for the Person With Cancer: A Guide for Patients and Families,'' available by calling (800)ACS-2345. Will Ms. Dyer's approach help keep her free of cancer? So far she has been healthy. And the diet will lower her risk of heart disease. A diagnosis of cancer is a wake-up call for many people. Hoping to maximize their chances of survival, however, many patients turn to strange diets, supplements and herbal remedies with little or no scientific evidence to establish their worth. Some may be harmful. To help health care providers and their patients make the best choices based on the best available evidence, three years ago the American Cancer Society published in the journal CA a guide on nutrition during and after cancer treatment. It was designed to help the more than 1.2 million people who each year receive cancer diagnoses and the more than nine million Americans who have thus far survived cancer. The article is online (caonline.amcancersoc.org) or can be found in the May/June 2001 issue. In addition to the nutritional advantages gained from the suggested dietary measures, making improvements in living habits has important psychological benefits by helping patients regain a sense of control over their lives. During Treatment Current approaches to cancer treatment -- surgery, radiation and chemotherapy -- may not only change a person's nutritional needs but also interfere with the ability to consume, digest, absorb and assimilate food. In most cases, cancer treatment increases a person's caloric needs while making it more challenging to meet them. Small, frequent meals and snacks and foods that are easy to chew, swallow, digest and absorb -- and that are appealing -- are recommended, even if they are high in calories or fat. This is not a time to try to lose weight or worry about how healthful foods might be. Meeting one's caloric needs is the primary goal; during treatment, it is often helpful to add beverages like Ensure or Boost as temporary aids. Cancer patients are also urged to engage in light, regular physical activity to counter fatigue; to stimulate appetite and digestion; to prevent constipation; to maintain energy and muscle mass; to provide relaxation; and to reduce stress. But the cancer society's experts warn against consuming high levels of certain supplements that may do more harm than good. Folic acid, for example, can interfere with the action of some chemotherapeutic drugs, like methotrexate, that act as folic acid antagonists. And high doses of antioxidants, like vitamins C and E, which patients sometimes take in hope of protecting normal cells, may reduce the effectiveness of therapies that work by causing oxidative damage to cancer cells. The experts recommend as a prudent approach during treatment ''not to exceed the upper limits of the Dietary Reference Intakes for vitamin supplements and to avoid other nutritional supplements that contain antioxidant compounds.'' Cancer treatment often suppresses immune responses, and so it is also important to pay particular attention to food safety. Do not eat raw fish or undercooked meats and poultry or drink unpasteurized juices; rinse all fruits and vegetables; and protect foods eaten uncooked from the drippings or utensils used on raw meats, poultry and seafood. Once active treatment ends, the goal is to rebuild muscle strength and correct problems like anemia that may have been caused by treatment. Again, this is not a time to diet; the emphasis should be on eating healthful foods. Although daily exercise may not prevent recurrence or slow the progression of cancer, the experts note that it can ''reduce anxiety and depression, improve mood, improve self-esteem and reduce symptoms of fatigue, nausea, pain and diarrhea.'' Eating for Good Health The cancer society experts say, ''There is no evidence to support fasting as a healthy practice during cancer treatment or beyond.'' Vegetarian diets and macrobiotic diets based on whole grains, fruits and vegetables, beans, fermented soy products, nuts, seeds and teas ''can be consistent with a healthy diet'' as long as consumers are careful to take in enough calories and essential nutrients. But the experts found ''no data to support the claim that a macrobiotic diet reduces cancer incidence or recurrence'' any more than the less restricted regimen the society recommends, which includes animal protein foods in moderation. Although a one-a-day type of multivitamin-mineral supplement can help compensate for nutrient shortfalls, the experts advise against doses above the recommended intake for any nutrient. ''There is no evidence that any nutritional supplement can reproduce the apparent benefits of a diet high in vegetables and fruits,'' the experts say. Alcohol is best avoided or consumed in moderation -- at most a drink a day for women, two for men -- since it is associated with an increased risk of breast, lung and digestive cancers. Purple grape juice helps protect against heart disease. Teas are all right for cancer survivors, as long as they are made from plants that are ordinarily used for foods or beverages. Caffeine is all right, too; it has no link to cancer. The jury is still out on the benefits and risks of estrogen-rich soy foods for survivors of breast and prostate cancers, though they are not believed to be hazardous when consumed in moderation, say, at one meal a day. But breast cancer survivors should avoid supplements of soy concentrates and isoflavones. High-fat diets, in general, are not advisable for cancer survivors, or for anyone. In place of animal-derived fats and polyunsaturates, some experts recommend monounsaturates like olive and canola oils and the fats in avocados, nuts and fish, which have been associated with protection against cancer and heart disease. Foods high in sugars may have no adverse effect on cancer, but they have limited nutrient value and often supplant more healthful foods. As Ms. Dyer discovered, until there is evidence to the contrary, eating lots of fruits and vegetables and whole grains rich in potentially protective fiber and phytochemicals should be the goal for all cancer survivors. In fact, for everyone.

Subject: Which of These Foods Will Stop Cancer? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 05:57:59 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/health/27canc.html?ex=1285473600&en=faa02f09bd83a2bc&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 27, 2005 Which of These Foods Will Stop Cancer? (Not So Fast) By GINA KOLATA Leslie Michelson does not have prostate cancer, but as chief executive officer of the Prostate Cancer Foundation he knows all too well how bad the disease is. So Mr. Michelson, 54, changed his diet. He used to avoid cruciferous vegetables, like cauliflower and brussels sprouts, hating their taste. Now he has them three or four times a week. He rarely ate fish, but now has it three times a week. He eats tomato sauce at least twice a week. 'I'm persuaded that with prostate cancer, diet makes a difference,' he said. Mr. Michelson is one of a growing number of people worried about cancer - because it is in their families or because they have seen friends suffer with the disease - who are turning to diets for protection. Cancer patients, doctors say, almost always ask what to eat to reduce their chances of dying from the disease. The diet messages are everywhere: the National Cancer Institute has an 'Eat 5 to 9 a Day for Better Health' program, the numbers referring to servings of fruits and vegetables, and the Prostate Cancer Foundation has a detailed anticancer diet. Yet despite the often adamant advice, scientists say they really do not know whether dietary changes will make a difference. And there lies a quandary for today's medicine. It is turning out to be much more difficult than anyone expected to discover if diet affects cancer risk. Hypotheses abound, but convincing evidence remains elusive. Most of the proposed dietary changes are unlikely to be harmful - less meat, more fish, more fruits and vegetables and less fat. And these changes in diet may help protect against heart disease, even if they have no effect on cancer. So should people who are worried about cancer be told to follow these guidelines anyway, because they may work and will probably not hurt? Or should the people be told that the evidence just is not there, so they should not deceive themselves? Dr. Barnett Kramer, deputy director in the office of disease prevention at the National Institutes of Health, said: 'Over time, the messages on diet and cancer have been ratcheted up until they are almost co-equal with the smoking messages. I think a lot of the public is completely unaware that the strength of the message is not matched by the strength of the evidence.' But Dr. Arthur Schatzkin, chief of the nutritional epidemiology branch in the National Cancer Institute division of cancer epidemiology and genetics, said people wanted answers, even if they are not are not definitive. 'It is not enough to say that, well, this is complicated science and maybe in seven or eight years we will have new methods in place' that might resolve the issues, Dr. Schatzkin said. 'We have a responsibility to give the best advice we can while pointing out where the evidence is uncertain and how we're working to improve the science.' That, however, is little consolation to cancer patients and family members who are terrified that cancer might strike them next. And there are more and more. As the population ages, the number of cancer patients is soaring. From 1997 to 2004, the number of Americans with cancer jumped, to 9.6 million from 9.4 million. Cancer strikes one in two men and one in three women in their lifetimes. Most people want some sort of control, a way to prevent the disease from ever striking them or, if it does strike, to keep it from recurring. Many think of diet as a strategy. Cassindy Chao, 36, of Oakland, Calif., said cancer runs in her family. Her mother has ovarian cancer and her grandmother died of the disease. 'I am absolutely frantic about it,' she said. Ms. Chao has made substantial changes in her diet, for example, drinking carrot juice, loading up on green and leafy vegetables and switching to organic meats. 'Some people might want to wait for the evidence, but I've noticed it takes a while,' Ms. Chao said. 'I'm not going to wait.' Dr. Tim E. Byers, a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, was convinced that up to 20 percent of cancers were being caused by diet and he wanted to be part of the exciting new research that would prove it. 'I felt we were really on the cusp of important new discoveries about food and how the right choice of foods would improve cancer risk,' Dr. Byers sad. That was 25 years ago, when the evidence was pointing to diet. For example, cross-country comparisons of cancer rates suggested a dietary influence. 'For prostate cancer, if you look around the world, there might be 50-fold or greater differences in rates; they're huge,' said Dr. Meier Stampfer, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. 'There are also big differences, many-fold differences, around the world for breast cancer and colon cancer.' And when people move from low risk countries to high risk countries, they or their children acquire the cancer rates of their new countries. At the same time, some cancers were inexplicably becoming more common or, just as inexplicably, fading away in the United States. In 1930, for instance, stomach cancer was the second leading cause of cancer death in women and the leading cause in men. Now, Dr. Stampfer says, stomach cancer is not even listed in the American Cancer Society's 10 leading cancers. 'So people think, 'What's happened in the past 70 years to make that change?' ' he said. 'Diet comes to mind.' There were also differences in diets in countries where cancer rates were high and in those with low rates. With breast cancer, for example, researchers could draw a straight line directly relating the amount of fat in the diet to the rate of breast cancer in the population. 'People looked at it and said, 'Here it is - fat causes breast cancer,' ' Dr. Stampfer said. Next came studies that compared the diets of people who developed cancer to the diets of those who did not. Those studies, Dr. Schatzkin said, tended to show that dietary fiber protected against colon cancer, that fruits and vegetables protected against colon and other cancers and that a low-fat diet protected against breast cancer. There were, of course, a few nagging questions. For example, people who had cancer might remember their diets differently. 'Whenever people get cancer, the first thing they ask is, 'Why me?' ' Dr. Stampfer said. 'And then they try to answer that question.' If colon cancer patients heard that fiber protected against colon cancer, for example, they might recall eating less fiber than people without cancer. Dr. Stampfer said evidence from one of his studies indicated that was occurring, at least with fat and breast cancer. But, he said, when he published a paper saying so, 'a lot of people didn't believe it.' The best studies are the hardest to conduct: prospective studies that that follow healthy people for years instead of looking backward and relying on memory. Even better - and harder and more expensive - are studies that randomly assign people to follow a particular diet or not. But those more difficult studies were well worth doing, researchers said. And as more studies started, scientists hoped for definitive evidence that diet affected cancer. The Fiber Theory But as the results from those studies have begun to roll in, many researchers say they are taken aback. The findings, they say, are not what they expected. Fat in the diet, the studies found, made no difference for breast cancer. 'For fat and breast cancer, almost all of the prospective studies were null,' Dr. Schatzkin said. Fiber, in the form of fruits and vegetables, seemed to have a weak effect or no effect on colon cancer. The more definitive randomized controlled trials were disappointing, too, with one exception. A study reported in May found that women with early stage breast cancer who followed a low-fat diet had a 20 percent lower risk of recurrence. Even so, the effects were just marginally statistically significant. The study's principal investigator, Dr. Rowan Chlebowski of the Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center, said it needed to be repeated before scientists would be convinced. Nonetheless, the study contrasted sharply with those preceding it. Several involved beta carotene and antioxidant vitamins like C and E, substances that scientists thought were the protective agent in fruits and vegetables. The idea was that antioxidants could mop up free radicals in the body, which left unchecked could damage DNA, causing cancer. Beta carotene was of special interest. People who ate lots of fruits and vegetables had more beta carotene in their blood, and the more beta carotene in the blood, the lower the cancer risk. But a four-year study that asked whether beta carotene, with or without vitamins C and E, could protect against colon polyps, from which most colon cancers start, found no effect. People who took either beta carotene, vitamin C, vitamin E or all three had virtually identical rates of new polyps compared to participants taking dummy pills. Another study, of 22,000 doctors randomly assigned to take beta carotene or a placebo, looked for an effect on any and all cancers. It found nothing. Two more, involving current and former smokers, found that those taking beta carotene actually had slightly higher lung cancer rates than those taking placebos. Studies of fiber and colon cancer were similarly disappointing. The fiber hypothesis had enormous appeal. Carcinogens from food can end up in stool. But when people eat a lot of fiber, their stool is bulkier and so carcinogens would be diluted. Bulkier stool is also excreted faster, reducing the time that the colon is in contact with cancer-causing substances. Fiber also binds bile acids in the bowel, substances that can damage the colon and, possibly, result in cancer. And the intestines metabolize fiber into short-chain fatty acids that seemed protective against cancer. Adding to the case for fiber was the fact that when researchers fed rodents carcinogens, the animals were protected against colon cancer if they also ate a lot of fiber. Based on these indications, the cancer institute financed two studies on high-fiber diets and colon polyps. In one, 2,079 people were randomly assigned to eat low-fat high-fiber diets or to follow their usual diets. In the other, 1,429 people were assigned to eat high-fiber bran cereals or wheat bran fiber or to eat cereal and bars that looked and tasted the same but that were low on fiber. Fiber, the studies found, had no effect. 'We had high expectations and good rationale,' Dr. Schatzkin said. But, he said, 'we got absolutely null results.' Now, the largest randomized study ever of diet and cancer is nearing completion, involving 48,835 middle-age and elderly women. The women were randomly assigned to follow a low-fat diet with five servings a day of fruits and vegetables and two of grains or to follow their usual diet. The question was whether the experimental diet could prevent breast cancer. The study is part of the Women's Health Initiative, a large federal project. When it began, the dietary fat hypothesis was ascendant. But after it was under way, other, less definitive studies failed to find any association between dietary fat and breast cancer. The Women's Health Initiative diet study's results should be ready early next year, said its principle investigator, Ross L. Prentice, a biostatistics professor at Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. And if it fails to find an effect? Dr. Prentice said he would still wonder. Maybe what matters is diet earlier in life, he said, or maybe the women in the study did not stick to their diets. Others say they suspect they were simply na�ve about the cross-country comparisons that persuaded them in the first place. 'People drew inferences that were in retrospect overenthusiastic,' Dr. Stampfer said. 'You could plot G.N.P. against cancer and get a very similar graph, or telephone poles. Any marker of Western civilization gives you the same relationship.' Because of the striking differences in daily life between people in countries with high cancer rates and those in countries with low rates, diet may have nothing to do with the incidence of the disease, Dr. Schatzkin said. Or diet may play a large role but the questionnaires used to measure what people were eating might have been inadequate to find it. 'That's the problem.' Dr. Schatzkin said. 'We just don't know.' As for Dr. Byers, who once had such high hopes for the diet and cancer hypotheses, he says he is sadder now, but wiser. 'The progress has been different than I would have predicted,' Dr. Byers said. Specific food can affect general health, he added, but as for a major role in cancer, he doubts it. He now believes that it is the amount of food people eat, not specific foods or types of foods, that may make a difference. 'I think the truth may be that particular food choices are not as important as I thought they were,' Dr. Byers said. Individual Approaches Meanwhile, patients and those worried about cancer are adopting their own idiosyncratic dietary paths. Many know that the evidence is not solid, but they would rather take a chance that their diets will make a difference than wait helplessly for their fates to play out. That is the view of John Napolitano, a New York graphic designer and marketer. Three years ago, when he was 55, Mr. Napolitano found out that he had prostate cancer and that it had spread to his bones. Now, hoping to slow its progress, he avoids sugar and fat and almost never eats meat. He eats natural and organic foods. He drinks lots of water and green tea. He starts each day by whipping up a smoothie with a protein supplement and flaxseed. 'My diet is very different now than what it was three years ago,' Mr. Napolitano said, adding that thinks that his new diet helped. 'Until recently, I was totally symptom free,' he said. 'I can't endorse anything I'm doing, but I've never had nausea, never had constipation' from his treatments. Dr. Brad Efron, a professor of statistics at Stanford, has a different dietary approach. He does not have prostate cancer, but he had a couple of scares and he has friends who have it. So he is taking selenium, a trace mineral found in plants. A study that randomly assigned people to take selenium or not to see whether it protected against skin cancer found that it had no effect on that cancer, but that the men taking it had only a third as many prostate cancers. Now, the National Cancer Institute is conducting a study on whether selenium protects against prostate cancer. Dr. Efron chose not to wait. He even published a statistical analysis concluding that the prostate effect was likely to be real. 'One of my colleagues said, 'Why do you think something that people thought would work on skin cancer has anything to do with you?' ' he said. 'There's always a leap of faith. But I'm scared of prostate cancer and I wanted psychological reassurance.'

Subject: Implant Program for Heart Device From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 05:50:49 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/business/27heart.html?ex=1285473600&en=cdf55577e90d70d4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 27, 2005 Implant Program for Heart Device Was a Sales Spur By BARRY MEIER By January, about 80 cardiologists nationwide completed an evaluation run by the Guidant Corporation of one of its products, an improved electrical component, known as a lead, that connects an implanted cardiac device to the heart. In exchange for implanting the lead in three patients and completing five survey forms, each physician received $1,000 from Guidant. 'The primary purpose of the study was to get feedback on how well the system worked,' said Dr. Wayne O. Adkisson, a cardiologist in Portsmouth, Va., who took part. The program did generate feedback. But internal Guidant documents and e-mail messages provided to The New York Times suggest that the initiative also had another apparent goal - increasing sales of the company's most sophisticated and expensive heart devices. Those devices are advanced pacemakers called cardiac resynchronization therapy devices, or C.R.T.'s. They cost about $29,000 each. The program proved so successful in increasing Guidant C.R.T. sales that when the survey ended in January, company executives sent around congratulatory e-mail messages, the records show. 'It generated 300 implants,' one January e-mail message stated. 'Let's say that just 25% were incremental ... that yields >$2 million in new sales with physicians who are not necessarily Guidant friendly. We paid each physician who completed all five surveys $1,000 so our total cost was $80,000.' In a statement, Guidant said that it ran surveys like the lead evaluation to generate data on how doctors use company products so that it could improve future models. Critics of the industry have long charged that some companies have used research studies to mask what are really marketing efforts that provide financial incentives to doctors to get them to use a new drug. Now, the Guidant documents and recent interviews suggest that the line between research and product promotion may also be blurring where heart devices are concerned. A C.R.T. regulates the beating of one side of the heart independently from the other. The Guidant lead was intended to be easier to use and to reduce the chronic hiccupping that some implant patients develop when a lead from a C.R.T. is placed too close to a nerve. The Guidant records indicate that many doctors approached by the company to take part in its lead study were not those who regularly implanted its heart devices, but rather those more apt to use the units of competitors. Though the agreement signed by doctors taking part in the lead evaluation did not explicitly require them to implant a Guidant C.R.T. along with the lead, they effectively had to do so because of software-related issues. One Guidant document is a chart that indicates that, on average, the monthly number of company C.R.T.'s implanted by physicians taking part nearly doubled during the survey period that began last September. A person professing to be a Guidant employee provided the documents to The Times. The Times provided Guidant either with copies or text from the documents. Guidant, while declining to confirm the records, did not dispute their authenticity. 'In order to respond best to the needs of patients and preferences of physicians, Guidant has sometimes utilized market research and evaluation programs of our F.D.A.-approved and -cleared products,' said Guidant. The disclosure of the records comes amid a growing controversy over how heart device manufacturers release data about product failures to doctors and patients. Since late May, Guidant has recalled tens of thousands of heart devices, and some units implanted during the survey were probably among the models affected. The two other major heart device companies, Medtronic Inc. and St. Jude Medical, also said they run product evaluation programs. All three companies said their payments to doctors for taking part in such surveys reflected reasonable compensation for a physician's time. 'Any payments made in connection with such surveys are in modest amounts,' Medtronic said in a statement. A number of physicians who participated in the Guidant evaluation said their involvement in such reviews did not influence which company's units they implanted. Still, the Guidant survey and ones like it raise questions about what doctors tell patients about any added payments they may be receiving in connection with a heart product's use, several experts said. Several doctors who took part in the Guidant survey said that they did not tell their patients about the payments they received. It is illegal under federal law in certain circumstances to provide financial benefits to doctors to induce them to use a product or service. In its statement, Guidant said that all of its research and evaluation programs 'are intended to comply with applicable laws.' Product evaluation surveys like the Guidant one are far less rigorous than a traditional clinical study of a drug or a medical device in their purpose, scientific rigor and oversight. But several heart specialists suggested in interviews that heart device makers may also be using formal post-marketing studies of devices that the Food and Drug Administration has already approved - to increase sales as they battle for market share. There is little question that many post-marketing studies of heart devices like defibrillators and pacemakers have yielded crucial data, including those that have shown patients implanted with defibrillators survive longer than patients who are treated only with drugs. A defibrillator sends out an electrical charge intended to interrupt a chaotic and often fatal type of heart rhythm. A pacemaker regulates a heart that is beating too fast or too slowly. But other post-marketing studies may yield far less data. Consider, for example, a study that St. Jude Medical is currently running. It began recruiting doctors and medical centers last October to participate in a study intended to follow for two years the health outcomes of 5,000 patients implanted with either a defibrillator or a C.R.T. with a defibrillator made by St. Jude Medical. A copy of the study's protocol shows that St. Jude Medical will pay $2,000 to doctors or medical centers for every patient. Of that amount, a doctor will get $500 when a device is implanted, with the remainder paid over a two-year period when a physician submits patient data. According to the protocol, the study, which is technically called an outcomes registry, will yield data on how different types of heart patients implanted with the St. Jude Medical devices fare over time. The Times asked four cardiologists not involved in the study to review the protocol. Two of the doctors said that the study might provide St. Jude Medical with some useful data about its device. But the other two doctors said they saw little value in it. One, Dr. Robert Rea, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic, said, 'The amount of information that can be gleaned from these kind of trials is relatively limited.' St. Jude Medical, which is based in St. Paul, said it believed that the study would produce valuable information. 'We also hope that some of the analyses from the registry will lead to additional product advancements and help us to define specific test hypotheses for future prospective, randomized clinical studies,' the company said in a statement. The company also said in its statement that study data would be given to Medicare and to the F.D.A., the latter to fulfill post-marketing study obligations imposed by the F.D.A. In order to get reimbursement, Medicare now requires doctors to submit data to a national registry it operates when they implant a defibrillator. There is nothing to suggest that doctors implanting heart devices, either in connection with clinical studies or product surveys, are doing so unnecessarily. And several doctors, including those not involved in the evaluation of the new Guidant lead, said that the component offered potential benefits. At issue is the way that electricity is conducted from an advanced pacemaker - a C.R.T. - into the heart. A C.R.T. has three leads. Each carries electrical impulses, which cycle at various rates, like, say, 60 beats a minute. But if the wire put on the heart's left ventricle is positioned too close to a nerve, the regular electrical impulse it emits can set off involuntary hiccupping. While relatively rare, the problem may require added surgery, which poses risks for the patient. The Guidant lead allows the pulsing position to be changed electronically. Dr. Marc J. Girsky, a cardiologist in Los Angeles who took part in the Guidant survey, said he believed that one purpose was to collect data on the various tests and methods that different doctors used to implant the new lead so that a uniform technique might be developed. 'It is not clear what the established technique would be,' Dr. Girsky said. Some physicians like Dr. Girsky who took part in the survey, which was known by the acronym MERITS, often used Guidant devices. But many other doctors involved did not, company records indicate. Along with the January e-mail message that refers to 'physicians who are not necessarily Guidant friendly' - an industry euphemism for doctors who are not regular customers - another Guidant e-mail message that month stated that the program was 'targeted at our 'B' customers.' A spreadsheet also shows that some doctors had implanted few, if any, Guidant C.R.T.'s before September of last year. Dr. Adkisson, the cardiologist in Virginia, was one of them. In a recent interview, he said that about 90 percent of the devices he used in recent years were Medtronic units, and that one of the two hospitals where he practiced had a contract with that company. Still, when approached by a Guidant sales representative last fall about becoming involved in the lead survey, he said he agreed because he liked doing research. 'I thought there was enough legitimacy to it to say it was O.K.,' Dr. Adkisson said. Doctors filled out one form when the survey started, one form after each of three implants and one form at the end of the survey. The questionnaires sought technical data about the lead's use as well as a doctor's subjective impressions. Dr. Adkisson said that it took him about 10 minutes to fill out each form. As technical data from the survey came into Guidant, company officials projected the impact of C.R.T.'s used by doctors in the survey on revenue, the documents indicate. C.R.T.'s are the fastest-growing and most profitable segment of the heart device industry. Both Ronald W. Dollens, the chief executive of Guidant, and J. Frederick McCoy Jr., the head of its cardiac implant unit, did not respond to written questions related to their awareness of the program In its statement, Guidant said that the data collected from the lead survey was already being put to good use. 'In an effort to be responsive to our physician customers, we take feedback from physicians regarding post-market products very seriously,' the company stated. 'Data collected were aggregated and provided to more than 30 Guidant product development engineers in June 2005.' Dr. Adkisson said last week that he had yet to see it.

Subject: Why I am Optimistic From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 15:23:48 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Precisely 15 of the 22 major international stock market are up over 18% in domestic currency. The strength of the dollar has been easily offset by gains in international stock prices, and there is no sign of stock market effect in countries in which real estate markets have cooled.

Subject: International Bull Market From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 15:22:39 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Again, while analysts fret there is a wide and deep international bull market in stocks. Every major international stock market is positive and almost all are up over 10% and many are up over 20% in domestic currencies for the year. The only markets below 10% are Ireland and Portugal, with large companies restructuring, and America, with large companies lagging.

Subject: NYT columnists From: Douglas To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 10:13:38 (EDT) Email Address: douglas.hinton@gmail.com Message: I afraid if we cave into the NYT payment demand other newspapers will follow, therefore I won't subscribe. Maybe there's another way to read Krugman's columns. There must be other newspapers we can access that carry NYT colunists. I know the International Hearld Tribune carries them, but they have the same payment scheme as the NYT. Does anyone know of other newspapers? Douglas

Subject: I posted part of PK's column From: Erica To: Douglas Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 16:34:12 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Uh, I just posted Krugman's latest a few posts down the thread. And I also heard that you might be able to get it from truthout.org. But I read it from Dailykos.

Subject: Re: NYT columnists From: Terri To: Douglas Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 13:45:50 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The way to access the New York Times is through your city or school library site. There should be access to the New York Times almost everywhere. I can gain complete access at any time though our city library.

Subject: What do you all think about this? From: Erica To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 08:05:50 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: There are a lot of Brownies. As Time magazine puts it in its latest issue, ''Bush has gone further than most presidents to put political stalwarts in some of the most important government jobs you've never heard of.'' Time offers a couple of fresh examples, such as the former editor of a Wall Street medical-industry newsletter who now holds a crucial position at the Food and Drug Administration. A tipster urged me to look for Brownies among regional administrators for the General Services Administration, which oversees federal property and leases. There are several potential ways a position at G.S.A. could be abused. For example, an official might give a particular businessman an inside track in the purchase of government property -- the charge against David Safavian, who was recently arrested -- or give a particular landlord an inside track in renting space to federal agencies. Some of the regional administrators at G.S.A. are longtime professionals. But the regional administrator for the Northeast and Caribbean region, which includes New York, has no obvious qualifications other than being the daughter of the chairman of the Conservative Party of New York State. The regional administrator for the Southwest, appointed in 2002 after a failed bid for his father's Congressional seat, is Scott Armey, the son of Dick Armey, the former House majority leader. (Time has a five page article about Are there other Mike Browns? Anyone read it yet?) Jack Abramoff is a lobbyist who was paid huge sums by clients such as casino-owning Indian tribes and sweatshop operators on Saipan. Two Degrees of Jack Abramoff is inspired by the remarkable centrality of Mr. Abramoff, who was indicted last month on charges of fraud, in Washington's power structure. The goal isn't to find important political players who were chummy with Mr. Abramoff -- that's too easy. Instead, you have to find people linked by employment. One degree of Jack Abramoff is someone who actually worked for the lobbyist. Two degrees is a powerful Washington figure who hired someone who formerly worked for Mr. Abramoff, or who had one of his own former employees go to work for Mr. Abramoff. Grover Norquist, the powerful antitax lobbyist, is a one-degree man. Mr. Norquist was Mr. Abramoff's campaign manager when he ran for chairman of the College Republican National Committee, then became his executive director. And don't dismiss this as kid stuff: as Franklin Foer explains in The New Republic, the college Republican organization pays serious salaries and has been a steppingstone for the likes of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. Mr. Rove, by the way, is a two-degree man. He hired Susan Ralston, Mr. Abramoff's personal assistant, as his own personal assistant. For those unfamiliar with what that means, Ms. Ralston became Mr. Rove's gatekeeper -- the person who determined who got to see the great man. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, is also a two-degree man. Tony Rudy, who worked for Mr. DeLay in several capacities, left to work for Mr. Abramoff. Finally, somebody should be considered a two-degree man on account of the recently arrested Mr. Safavian, who worked for both Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Norquist, then went first to the G.S.A. and on to the White House Office of Management and Budget, where he oversaw procurement policy. But I'm not sure who gets credit for hiring Mr. Safavian. Mr Krugman concludes: Something is rotten in the state of the U.S. government. And the lesson of Hurricane Katrina is that a culture of cronyism and corruption can have lethal consequences. I also heard that you may be able to link to Truthout.org for Paul's column. Anyone know if this is true?

Subject: I found this on another site From: Erica To: Erica Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 08:09:06 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: They actually printed it in whole. I took out a couple of paragraphs. But I am posting it so it can be discussed.

Subject: Re: I found this on another site From: Mik To: Erica Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 14:07:28 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Now why don't we hear from Ron Shawger or Maureen on this article?

Subject: Re: I found this on another site From: Erica To: Mik Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 16:28:46 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Mik, who is Ron and Maureen?

Subject: Nevermind, Maureen and Ron are trolls From: Erica To: Erica Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 16:58:14 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I read down the post and discovered the answer for myself. They are trolls, who for reasons of mental illness or known only to them, continue to post on a website dedicated to a man they so obviously hate. Is 'Krugman Hatred' a mental disease? I think that maybe much like 'conservatism' it is.

Subject: Suggestions From: RL To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 05:49:47 (EDT) Email Address: rafaelloring@yahoo.es Message: Hi bobby, I am afraid this forum will suffer greatly from NYT policy changes. Could I suggest some changes in the message board so this could still be a hot spot for comment & debate?. IMO the problem with the message board is that discussions go way down the board rapidly(specially due to Emma's prodigality of which I am very thankful by the way)and they get lost too soon. In other blogs I have seen boards working differently: as someone posts a message this goes all the way up to the beginning of the board. This ensures that debates can go on as long as they are alive, something that Haloscan board permitted here. It is possible to make changes in the message board so it works this way? thanks, RL

Subject: Re: Suggestions From: Dorian To: RL Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 02:10:31 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: This is a good idea. I second the motion. Dorian

Subject: krugman's columns From: byron To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 23:52:24 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I guess we can't read Pauls columns on this site now. The neo cons have managed to stop this also. What a bummer. Do we have to pay now to read his columns?

Subject: Re: krugman's columns From: jwood To: byron Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 10:40:04 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I guess we can't read Pauls columns on this site now. The neo cons have managed to stop this also. What a bummer. Do we have to pay now to read his columns? --- Ridiculous statements like this only give ammunition to the other side. The neocons had nothing to do with the Times finally deciding to charge for part of their newspaper's content. They are a business, it was a business decision, and their choice to make. If you don't understand that, you don't understand the democracy that you're trying to defend. There is more than enough to blame on the neocons without fabricating arguments and facts.

Subject: Re: krugman's columns From: Aniruddha G. Kulkarni To: byron Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 23:51:03 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I guess we can't read Pauls columns on this site now. The neo cons have managed to stop this also. What a bummer. Do we have to pay now to read his columns? --- Indeed. I wrote sometime ago on Delong's website that The Economist is jealous of Paul Krugman because his columns are free to read.....I retract it.....

Subject: La folie des grandeurs (Part e^X) From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 18:17:23 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Costs rising on Bush's plans From Iraq to Katrina, the president's plans are putting strain on the federal budget. By Linda Feldmann WASHINGTON – Former President Clinton grumbles that he governed in 'small times.' The nation wasn't at war, and the economy roared ahead. President Bush has no such complaint. This weekend alone was all about 'big-time' events: the second massive storm in a month to hit the Gulf Coast, and the largest demonstration against the Iraq war since the US-led invasion 2-1/2 years ago. Mr. Bush missed seeing tens of thousands of protesters streaming past the White House because he was positioned at the US Northern Command headquarters in Colorado, from which he monitored the federal response to hurricane Rita. If nothing else, Bush's nearly five years in office have been marked by 'bigness.' A stream of historic events - some of the president's own making, some not - have resulted in massive federal spending. On top of that, add the agenda he brought to the table on that first Inauguration Day that seems to be growing only larger. Some items, like Social Security and tax reform, have been delayed, but nothing has been removed from the wish list altogether. Even immigration reform, controversial within Bush's own party, is still on the table. 'He is trying to have a very significant presidency at virtually any cost,' says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. 'The cost includes the Republicans' reputation for fiscal conservatism. That's dead - and it may be dead for a generation.' When hurricane Katrina hit in late August, wreaking devastation along the Gulf Coast, Bush promised to do 'whatever it takes' to rebuild; Congress has obliged by approving all spending proposed thus far. The White House insists that this spending will be paid for by cuts elsewhere in the budget, but officials have yet to suggest specifics. Bush does not have the excuse of a Congress controlled by the opposing party, forcing his hand by passing big-spending legislation, analysts say. When the Republican-controlled Congress passed a massive highway bill this summer that will cost $286 billion over six years - at many billions of dollars over Bush's stated limit - he signed the legislation anyway. Now suggestions that the bill's 'pork' - such as a $223 million bridge in Alaska connecting two isolated areas - be sliced out have been rejected by the Republican congressional leadership. The White House, too, has rejected a proposal to delay implementation of the extensive new prescription0drug plan for seniors that will take effect in January. Deficit hawks have begun filling the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal with Katrina-induced outrage over Bush and other elected Republicans' spending habits. 'George W. Bush is a big spender,' wrote Peggy Noonan, President Reagan's former speechwriter, on Sept. 22. 'He has never vetoed a spending bill. When Congress serves up a big slab of fat, crackling pork, Mr. Bush responds with one big question: Got any barbecue sauce?' Former Club for Growth head Stephen Moore, in a Sept. 19 column called 'Welcome to the GOP's New Deal,' complains that 'both parties are now willing and eager to spend tax dollars as if they were passing out goody-bags to grabby four-year-olds at a birthday party.' Mr. Moore also refers to an 'enraged' grass roots of the party over the ballooning deficit. But as long as the president's job approval rating hovers in the low 40s, his political advisers can argue that he has preserved the support of his base, at least. Historically, the image of Republicans as the party of small government has not tended to play out in practice. 'Republicans rhetorically oppose big spending, but have seldom opposed it in practice,' says Jack Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College in California formerly involved in Republican politics. 'Ronald Reagan came to office hinting he might eliminate cabinet departments and ended up adding one: the Department of Veterans Affairs. Republicans are no strangers to big government.' Eventually, politicians will feel some pressure to address the deficit because the economic consequences will be painful, but in the short run there will be more pressure to spend on disaster relief, Professor Pitney adds. At heart, Bush's pledge to do 'whatever it takes' in the wake of Katrina may be linked to his party's broader goal of expanding outreach to minorities. In Louisiana, poor African-Americans who did not evacuate were particularly hard hit by the storm. Since becoming chairman of the Republican Party in February, Ken Mehlman had been traveling the country, addressing black and Hispanic audiences. This represents a continuation of a longstanding plan to boost the party's minority ranks, an effort that bore some fruit in the 2004 elections. Karl Rove, Bush's top political adviser, has also kept his eye on minority politics, even amid the latest crises. He has been bringing groups of lawmakers into the White House to promote the administration's proposal for a temporary guest worker program. The plan is controversial, because it would grant temporary legal status to illegal workers. But the White House reportedly argues that such a program could build support among Hispanics in this country, now the largest minority group. http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0926/p01s01-usec.html

Subject: Re: La folie des grandeurs (Part e^X) From: Pete Weis To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 08:59:31 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: ''George W. Bush is a big spender,' wrote Peggy Noonan, President Reagan's former speechwriter, on Sept. 22. 'He has never vetoed a spending bill. When Congress serves up a big slab of fat, crackling pork, Mr. Bush responds with one big question: Got any barbecue sauce?'' George W is merely carrying on the Reagan tradition - I believe the federal deficit increased something like 8 fold during the Reagan years. Even with the large payroll tax hikes under Reagan, much of which were spent on defense (the 600 ship Navy, etc.), the deficit soared!! Reagan had a love affair with Congress and gave them all their 'pork' as long as they gave him all of his defense spending. George W is a big spender without question, but to hear Reagan administration folks try to label him such is a bit ironic.

Subject: Re: La folie des grandeurs (Part e^X) From: Emma To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 09:39:28 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Agreed. We are in deficit trouble, but there is no reason the trouble will appear for years to come. We cannot know about timing.

Subject: CASINO GAMBLING : CLICK HERE From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 18:05:31 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: PHILIP VERLEGER America surfers as Bush's gamble fails to pay off After his 1964 landslide election, President Lyndon Johnson gambled that the US economy could support a war and his Great Society programme. He lost. The expenditures exceeded economic capacity. Shortages occurred, prices rose, and a 15-year inflationary spiral began. Within two years, the Federal Reserve had to intervene by raising interest rates. Economic growth stopped and harsh economic conditions brought an end to Johnson's dreams. Forty years later, another president from Texas made another wager: betting the US could fight a war, reduce taxes and avoid conserving energy. He also lost. Over the next two years, President George W. Bush will see inflation return and the Federal Reserve Board act to offset his profligate energy and fiscal policies. Johnson's hope that the US economy could sustain the Vietnam war and domestic economic expansion ended when US industry failed to meet military and civilian demands. Unfinished aeroplanes sat waiting for galleys and other gear needed to complete them. Homes stood unfinished as builders waited for lumber, plumbing and other finishings. Prices rose. The Federal Reserve took matters into its own hands when Congress refused to reduce the growing deficit. In 1969, as they made way for the incoming Nixon administration, Johnson's departing economic advisers noted ruefully: 'In the absence of a full measure of timely fiscal restraint, an undue share of the burden of dampening the excessive expansion fell on monetary policy.' Today, President Bush is in a similar situation. He and his advisers also gambled, although in a different game. Johnson tried to provide guns and butter without raising taxes. George Bush tried to serve up large tax cuts without reducing spending or addressing the nation's rapacious thirst for motor fuels, particularly gasoline. The Bush wager failed when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed a large part of the US Gulf coast. The storm put additional strain on an economy operating near capacity, while simultaneously closing part of the nation's petroleum refining and natural gas industries. The extensive damage has forced the government to enact large spending increases to rebuild communities and support displaced individuals. This is a classic Keynesian stimulus package. Given the state of the business cycle, inflation can be expected to rise even without offsetting reductions in government outlays. The huge rebuilding requirements will send prices up and create shortages for materials, capital equipment and critical labour resources. Home builders already report a wide scarcity of plywood. The loss of natural gas supplies adds to inflationary pressures. Katrina and Rita destroyed perhaps 5 per cent of the nation's natural gas supply, causing large price increases. Heating bills could double this winter. Furthermore, the cost of goods manufactured using natural gas, such as PVC pipe, will climb sharply even before rebuilding efforts boost demand. The economic stimulus will also put pressure on petroleum markets. The economic spur from reconstruction will heighten gasoline and diesel demand. But the increase cannot be met because of storm damage to US refineries. Thus, Katrina and Rita will leave a legacy of much higher gasoline and diesel prices in 2006. These price hikes could have been avoided had we pursued a programme to limit increases in motor fuel consumption. Here, too, George Bush made a bet. Efforts to tighten fuel economy standards for new vehicles were rejected when his energy programme was introduced and Congress refused to change it. The president declined to push a gasoline tax following 9/11. He wagered that an already stretched refining industry could meet mounting gasoline demand, which is largely linked to American affinity for large SUVs and trucks. The president and his advisers understood that the higher demand would require US refineries to operate at maximum capacity. They knew no new refineries were being built. They also knew no new offshore facilities capable of meeting EPA standards had been constructed. Not until this summer, after months of the industry operating flat out, did they realise new capacity was necessary. The president lost this gamble as well when the two hurricanes hit the Gulf coast, taking a severe toll on the refining industry. It may take a year or more to bring it back to its pre-Katrina state. Until then, supply will be lower and prices much higher. Although the calculations are hard to believe, econometric models suggest retail gasoline prices might need to double by next summer to maintain market balance. The price rise will add to inflation. There is only one end to this scenario: higher interest rates. A vigilant Federal Reserve Board will have to boost rates to suppress demand, just as during the Johnson administration. The pressure for higher rates will be even greater given the forthcoming retirement of Alan Greenspan as Fed chairman. His replacement will need to convince financial markets that the Board remains determined to keep inflation in check. The consequences will be a slowdown or worse. As the rebuilding effort slows, high interest rates and high gasoline prices may pull the economy into recession. Like President Johnson, President Bush took a chance and lost. The writer is a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics FT Monday September 26 2005

Subject: Celebrating Shaw, a Serious Optimist From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 14:24:49 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/theater/newsandfeatures/16shaw.html?ex=1284523200&en=4278b5a0c2b56bc7&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 16, 2005 Celebrating Shaw, a Serious Optimist By BEN BRANTLEY THE old man is never going to shut up, so we might as well let him into the conversation once again. After all, it's not as if the subjects that raise middle-class hackles have changed so very much in the 55 years since George Bernard Shaw died, leaving mountains of plays (more than 50, and their prefaces and postscripts) and essays and pamphlets and treatises and letters and reviews to rumble on in an ardent and exasperated eternity. Consider intelligent design, the God-incorporating alternative to Darwinism that is such a hot-button topic among scientists, theologians, educators and anxious parents of schoolchildren these days. Now, the Irish-born Shaw - whose exceptionally long and fecund career as a center of London theatrical and political life is being celebrated beginning tomorrow in a festival of talks, readings and performances at the New York Public Library, titled 'Man or Superman?' - devoted rivers of ink to expounding his personal variation on the theory of natural selection. It was called creative evolution, a name that sounds a lot like intelligent design, don't you think? Still, proponents of that theory probably don't want to hitch their wagons to Shaw's venerable star. While he had some problems with the biological randomness of Darwin, Shaw also pretty much eliminated God from the equation of how human life develops. Creative evolution, put forth in jovial but dead serious dramatic terms in Shaw's play 'Man and Superman' (published in 1903; first performed in 1905), is based on an ever upwardly striving phenomenon called the life force, which propels us away from our inconvenient bodily impulses and toward a state of pure cerebration. The life force, by the way, is transmitted by rare, world-shaking men of genius, 'selected by Nature to carry on the work of building up an intellectual consciousness of her instinctive purpose.' In other words, men like Jesus, Julius Caesar, John Bunyan, Napoleon, Goethe, Wagner and - but, of course - George Bernard Shaw. Shakespeare, by the way, almost doesn't qualify by Shavian standards (too pessimistic), but for a while there it looked as if Hitler and Stalin might. Here is Shaw's alter ego in 'Man and Superman,' an asexual variation on that immortal rake Don Juan, on why he thinks religion is 'a mere excuse for laziness': 'It had set up a God who looked at the world and saw that it was good, against the instinct in me that looked through my eyes at the world and saw that it could be improved.' And improvement of the species - which involved setting fire to rotting, imprisoning conventions and throwing cold water on smug faces - was always the first purpose of Shaw's plays. 'It should be clear now that Shaw is a terrorist,' wrote Bertolt Brecht, who knew from guerrilla theater. The critic Kenneth Tynan described Shaw as 'the demolition expert.' New York City felt its first full blast of Shavian dynamite a century ago, when 'Mrs. Warren's Profession' opened on Oct. 30, 1905, at the Garrick Theater. (Its centenary is the occasion for the festival at the library, which features a reading of the play, starring Dana Ivey, on Oct. 24.) Up to that point, Shaw's plays, which had been seldom staged in London, had been enjoying cautious but intrigued acceptance in the United States. His 'Devil's Disciple' (1897), set during the American Revolution, had been a popular vehicle for the matinee idol Richard Mansfield, affording Shaw his first taste of commercial success. And 'Man and Superman,' which had opened earlier in 1905, aroused enough excitement to have its script placed on the restricted list by the New York Public Library, lest it infect young minds with its unorthodox views of God and matrimony. 'Illuminated Gangrene' But the slings and arrows of Superman were but feathers compared to the full-frontal assault of Mrs. Warren, whose profession was prostitution. Ladies of the evening had walked Broadway's stages before, but they had previously always paid for their trade with either their lives or orgies of Magdalenish repentance. Mrs. Warren made no apology for her métier, which she pragmatically saw as a product and necessity of her time and civilization. Even worse, one of her former clients turned out to be a clergyman, who didn't act very penitent, either, just muddled and embarrassed. And the play dared to flirt with the possibility of incest between Mrs. Warren's daughter and men who may or may not have been her father or brother. Having run for one night in New Haven, where it was immediately banned, 'Mrs. Warren's Profession' opened on Broadway to a sold-out audience (whose members had paid as much as $40 per scalped ticket), with 2,000 to 3,000 people turned away at the door. The police closed down the show, citing the entire cast for 'disorderly conduct.' 'Shaw's Play Unfit; The Critics Unanimous,' announced the headline of an article in The New York Times, which featured the subhead, 'A Performance About as Elevating as a Post-Mortem.' Another newspaper, The American, described the play as 'illuminated gangrene.' As Shaw, with the satisfaction of a man who always understood that no publicity was bad publicity, later wrote of the press coverage, 'They infected each other with their hysteria until they were for all practical purposes indecently mad.' Provocateur Par Excellence Within the sound and fury, though, cooler critical voices were leveling charges that, to an artist, were far more damning: 'Mrs. Warren's Profession' was a bore. 'Little more than a tract on the social evil,' wrote the critic in The New York Sun. When the play was restaged a year later (its producer and cast had been acquitted of disorderly conduct), it came and went quietly, and Theater Magazine dismissed it with a contemptuous yawn as 'a dull, uninteresting play.' This progression from titillated fascination to watch-checking ennui is not entirely atypical of first-time Shaw readers and theatergoers. Shaw was cutting a calculated, irresistibly dangerous figure as a firebrand critic, polemicist and soapbox orator long before his plays were first produced in London. It was a fire-breathing persona, stoked over seven decades, that expected, nay demanded, to be caricatured: 'the Celebrated G.B.S.,' as he put it, 'about as real as a pantomime ostrich.' So fierce and inventive a self-publicist that Donald Trump looks like a piker by comparison, Shaw guaranteed that this zoo creature of a reputation would always precede his actual works. And thus it has been, even to this day. However tame early scandal-making plays like 'Widowers' Houses' (1892), 'The Philanderer' (1893), 'Man and Superman' and 'Mrs. Warren's Profession' may seem today, they still give off a faint whiff of notoriety, like a cloud of dried powder from an ancient courtesan's face. No one expects to be shocked by Shaw anymore, but there's always the hope that he'll once again prove himself the provocateur par excellence, as well as a master practitioner of flashing wit. The opening minutes of any decent Shaw production confirm this promise. The dialogue is so fleet, so barbed, so sure of itself in its rippling musicality; the characters so brisk and ornery. You feel as if you've found yourself in a room with the greatest conversationalist of all time. But then the talk continues, and continues, and continues without cease, demonstrating Shaw's first rule to producers of his plays: 'There must never be a moment of silence from the rise of the curtain to its fall.' And suddenly the experience seems to have become less like having tea with a charming epigrammist than being locked in a padded cell with a mad lecturer. Man Versus His Environment But often, just as you're about to scream for deliverance, you're hooked again by a U-turn in sentiment or argument or character. An animated lecture becomes, if only temporarily, a breathing work of art. It's the exhilarating effect of a writer's own intelligence turning on itself, giving rise, as the Bloomsbury critic Desmond MacCarthy wrote, to the dizzying sensation of witnessing a conflict 'between two religions in one mind.' Shaw, in his preface to 'Mrs. Warren's Profession,' might have stated a bit tediously that drama is 'no mere setting up of the camera to nature,' but 'the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man's will and his environment.' But it's when something like spontaneous nature - dares one call it the life force? - creeps in under the barbed wire of parable that Shaw becomes exciting. That was certainly my impression when I saw 'Mrs. Warren's Profession' in London a few years ago. The director, Sir Peter Hall, had taken pains to remind the audience that this was once a work of scalding relevance, with Shavian quotes and historical notes projected on a drop curtain. Even with a vivacious Brenda Blethyn in the title role, what followed looked like a shooting gallery of corrupt societal archetypes. But in the midst of the painted cardboard was an unmistakably blooming presence, a vibrant, faintly outrageous character. Her name was Vivie Warren, the grown daughter of Mrs. Warren, who abruptly learns of her mother's past and goes through upheavals of moral reckoning. As played by Rebecca Hall, the daughter of Sir Peter, in her professional debut, Vivie pulsed with the sense of a mind discovering its own purpose. As Vivie recoiled from, accepted and finally rejected her mother and all she stood for, she came to seem like a cobweb-clearing breeze in a stale, close room. Embodied by Ms. Hall with both the first-blush freshness and judgmental absolutism of youth, Vivie became Shaw's iconoclastic spirit made formidable but definitely human flesh. Here was a cousin to one of Shaw's literary heroines, the Nora who slammed the door in Ibsen's 'Doll's House.' Woman, Hear Her Roar It is indeed often a woman who provides the oxygen in Shaw's hermetically sealed worlds of words. Shavian heroes tend to be passive prigs, but his Mephistophelean men have been incarnated with deliciously dry elegance by a cavalcade of notable actors: Charles Laughton, Robert Morley, Philip Bosco and David Warren as Andrew Undershaft, the Jesuitical arms merchant in 'Major Barbara'; Maurice Evans and Laurence Olivier as the blissfully cynical General Burgoyne in 'The Devil's Disciple'; and, of course, Leslie Howard, Rex Harrison and Peter O'Toole in 'Pygmalion' and its handsome musical offspring, 'My Fair Lady.' But it is the self-assertive, protofeminist, sexually predatory Woman, who earns her capital W, who is most responsible for wrenching Shaw's plays off the speaker's podium. 'No male writer born in the 19th century outside Norway and Sweden did more to knock Woman off her pedestal and plant her on the solid earth than I,' said Shaw, with a respectful nod to Ibsen and Strindberg. That solid earth, however, is usually on a mountaintop. Shaw regarded the sexual vitality of women - nature's vehicles, after all, for passing on the life force - with a mix of adoration and terror that made them monumental. Like his own Henry Higgins with Eliza Doolittle, Shaw couldn't quite control his female characters once he set them on their paths to glory. Played by the right performers, they vibrate, radiate and crush the mere men in their paths. Hence actresses have gravitated hungrily to Eliza, from Mrs. Patrick Campbell (for whom Shaw wrote the part) to Lynn Fontanne and Wendy Hiller. The serenely, sagely passive-aggressive title character of 'Candida' has been catnip for actresses of a certain age, including Peggy Wood, Katherine Cornell, Olivia de Havilland and Joanne Woodward. Then, of course, there is that paragon of theatrical incandescence, Saint Joan, who has been taken up by Sybil Thorndike, Cornell, Uta Hagen, Siobhan McKenna and Lynn Redgrave. Joan is not, to tell the truth, a favorite of mine. There's not much variety in her, since all she has to do is glow and speak bluntly. A luminous, transcendent rebuke to the worldly, short-sighted figures who debate her fate and condemn her, Joan embodies what G. K. Chesterton saw as Shaw's greatest attribute, 'a serious optimism - even a tragic optimism.' Art as Corrective That willed optimism, in a world that older offered little reason for hope as Shaw grew older, may be endearing. But its corollary was an insistence on art as corrective that limited Shaw even more than his compulsive chattiness. He was impatient with the man who he conceded was the greatest English playwright after himself. 'The truth is,' he wrote, 'the world was to Shakespeare a great 'stage of fools' on which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living.' Shakespeare's pessimism, he concluded disapprovingly, 'is only his wounded humanity.' Yet at the beginning of the 21st century, a time of stunted optimism, the Shaw play that seems to speak most eloquently to audiences is the one he wrote when his faith in humanity was at its lowest. That's 'Heartbreak House' (published, 1919; first produced, 1920), Shaw's despairing account of a suicidal Europe on the brink of World War I. Intended as a homage to Chekhov, it turns into a strangely surreal portrait of a group of illusion-swapping, illusion-shattering aristocrats marking time in a country house on the eve of their own extinction. They do not so much live in their home, as one character says, as haunt it, and what they haunt is 'this soul's prison we call England.' When bombs fall at the play's end, in a ravishing spectacle of light, they are greeted with relief and exultation. The characters in 'Heartbreak House' are typically Shavian in their wit and jeweled speechifying. But for once, there is no redemption in words. And while Shaw wrote brilliantly articulate letters throughout his life, none, perhaps, are as moving as one in which he recognized that there were some subjects that language cannot accommodate. 'I can't be sympathetic; these things simply make me furious,' he wrote to Campbell, on hearing that her son had been killed in 1918 by the last shell from a German battery. 'Oh, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, DAMN DAMN! And oh, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear, dearest!'

Subject: Krugman NYT columns are free legally From: Norman Bauman To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 13:26:43 (EDT) Email Address: nbauman@escape.com Message: If you're in New York City, you can easily read Krugman's columns on-line free. Go to the New York Public Library web site http://www.nypl.org/ Go to the Gale newspaper collection http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itweb/nysl_me_tnypl?db=SP02 Type in the barcode on your library card (you need a library card) Go to the Advanced Search tab (which I prefer) Select 'Krugman' for author and 'New York Times' for newspaper. This will list all of Krugman's columns, although a day or two late. Today (Monday), it listed the Friday column. Click on 'Full Text' and you get: Krugman, Paul. 'The Big Uneasy.(Editorial Desk).' The New York Times (Sept 23, 2005): A19(L). Custom Newspapers. Thomson Gale. New York Public Library. 26 September 2005 . Full Text : COPYRIGHT 2005 The New York Times Company Although Hurricane Katrina drowned much of New Orleans, the damage to America's economic infrastructure actually fell short of early predictions. Of course, Rita may make up for that. But Katrina did more than physical damage; it was a blow to our self-image as a nation. Maybe people will quickly forget the horrible scenes from the Superdome, and the frustration of wondering why no help had arrived, once cable TV returns to nonstop coverage of missing white women. But my guess is that Katrina's shock to our sense of ourselves will persist for years. You should even be able to click on that long url and go directly to the column -- after you type in your NYPL library card bar code. http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&type=retrieve&tabID=T003&prodId=SPN.SP02&docId=A136529155&source=gale&srcprod=SP02&userGroupName=nysl_me_tnypl&version=1.0 Actually it's only 'free' in the sense that libraries are free. You're paying for it, with your tax money, the NYPL is paying for it, New York State is paying for it, and the NYT is getting paid for it, from Gale Thompson, so the NYT has no complaints. Take advantage of it. It's yours. This should also work for library cards from any other cities that subscribe to this standard library package. (The only problem is that I haven't been able to find the NYT Magazine articles in this database.) My apologies if those URLs have glitches. I'll leave it to you to philosophize about the benefits of government. Norman

Subject: Re/ accessing Krugman's columns from library From: Dorian To: Norman Bauman Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 02:06:43 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I have access to the Gale database but I cannot figure out how to use it. I've followed your instructions,i.e, put Krugman in the 'author' search and New York Times in the journal. I've even limited it by 'after August 1st'. But when I check 'full text' I get nothing. When I leave it unchecked, I get a million references but no Krugman columns. Any further advice? Apparently I have access to the same database as you, I just can't seem to get the same results. I suppose I could go to my library and ask the reference librarian to guide me through it. In fact, that's probably the best idea, now that I think of it. Thanks for the suggestion. Dorian PSMP0003844493

Subject: Re: Re/ accessing Krugman's columns from library From: Emma To: Dorian Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 09:36:27 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Once you have traced through the path to TimesSelect through the public library simply log on and all the New York Times and TimesSelect resources are there for us. Bookmark the path and there will be no problem from then.

Subject: Re: Re/ accessing Krugman's columns from library From: Jeff in China To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 11:44:55 (EDT) Email Address: harpedc@hotmail.com Message: I did a search to find you guys, this is my first post but I've been around all week. I live overseas and am not inclined to pay for the NYT Select. Why don't you guys discreetly collect email addresses of people interested in Paul's articles and quietly forward them? I certainly wouldn't mind getting certain spam from this site. I left mine.

Subject: Re: Re/ accessing Krugman's columns from library From: Terri To: Jeff in China Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 14:07:24 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Simply get a library card from your home city, and log on to the NYTimes site from the library access. Ask someone in your family to register you at the library.

Subject: Re: Krugman NYT columns are free legally From: Mik To: Norman Bauman Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 16:24:17 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Oh fudge... and there I was thinking I could get his articles.... uhmm anyone have a NY library card number they'd be prepared to share with a Torontonian?

Subject: Re: Krugman NYT columns are free legally From: Norman Bauman To: Mik Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 20:38:13 (EDT) Email Address: nbauman@escape.com Message: The Toronto Public Library has Thompson Gale publications for its patrons on its web site. See if they have the NYT. Ask your librarian. The Kansas City Star has Krugman's columns, but only one a week. I couldn't find any newspaper on Google News that carries every one of Krugman's columns and is free on line.

Subject: Re: Krugman NYT columns are free legally From: Mik To: Norman Bauman Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 12:02:52 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I was just thinking about that. Very good idea. Thanks.

Subject: Loving Libraries From: Emma To: Norman Bauman Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 14:15:28 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Thank you so much. Libraries are truly precious, and being able to access the library from home or office is wonderful. I have our library site bookmarked. NYTimes magazine articles should generally be readable directly from the NYTimes website.

Subject: Integrating Schools by Income From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 12:43:32 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/education/25raleigh.html?ex=1285300800&en=ffa874e3998a590a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 25, 2005 Integrating Schools by Income Is Cited as a Success in Raleigh By ALAN FINDER RALEIGH, N.C. - Over the last decade, black and Hispanic students here in Wake County have made such dramatic strides in standardized reading and math tests that it has caught the attention of education experts around the country. School officials in Wake County, which includes Raleigh and its sprawling suburbs, have tried many tactics to improve student performance. Teachers get state bonuses when their schools make significant progress in standardized tests, and the district uses sophisticated data gathering to identify, and respond to, students' weaknesses. But the prime reason for the students' dramatic improvement, officials and parents say, is that the district has made a concerted effort to integrate the schools economically. Since 2000, school officials have used income as a prime factor in assigning students to schools, with the goal of limiting the proportion of low-income students in any school to no more than 40 percent. The effort is the most ambitious in the country to create economically diverse public schools, and it is the most successful, according to several independent experts. La Crosse, Wis.; St. Lucie County, Fla.; San Francisco; Cambridge, Mass.; and Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., have adopted economic integration plans. In Wake County, only 40 percent of black students in grades three through eight scored at grade level on state tests a decade ago. Last spring, 80 percent did. Hispanic students have made similar strides. Overall, 91 percent of students in those grades scored at grade level in the spring, up from 79 percent 10 years ago. Some of the strategies used in Wake County could be replicated across the country, the experts said, but they also cautioned that unusual circumstances have helped make the politically delicate task of economic integration possible here. The school district is countywide, which makes it far easier to combine students from the city and suburbs. The county has a 30-year history of busing students for racial integration, and many parents and students are accustomed to long bus rides to distant schools. The local economy is robust, and the district is growing rapidly. And corporate leaders and newspaper editorial pages here have firmly supported economic diversity in the schools. Some experts said the academic results in Wake County were particularly significant because they bolstered research that showed low-income students did best when they attended middle-class schools. 'Low-income students who have an opportunity to go to middle-class schools are surrounded by peers who have bigger dreams and who are more academically engaged,' said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has written about economic integration in schools. 'They are surrounded by parents who are more likely to be active in the school. And they are taught by teachers who more likely are highly qualified than the teachers in low-income schools.' To achieve a balance of low- and middle-income children in every school, the Wake County school district encourages and sometimes requires students to attend schools far from home. Suburban students are drawn to magnet schools in the city. Low-income children from the city are bused to middle-class schools in the suburbs. Some parents chafe at the length of their children's bus rides or at what they see as social engineering. But the test results are hard to dispute, proponents of economic integration say, as is the broad appeal of the school district, which has been growing by 5,000 students a year. 'What I say to parents is, 'Here is what you should hold me accountable for: at the end of that bus ride, are we providing a quality education for your child?' ' Bill McNeal, the school superintendent, said. Asked how parents respond, Mr. McNeal said, 'They are coming back, and they are bringing their friends.' Not everyone supports the strategy, of course. Some parents deeply oppose mandatory assignments to schools. Every winter, the district, using a complicated formula, develops a list of students who will be reassigned to new schools for the following academic year, and nearly every year some parents object vehemently. 'Kids are bused all over creation, and they say it's for economic diversity, but really it's a proxy for race,' said Cynthia Matson, who is white and middle class. She is the president and a founder of Assignment By Choice, an advocacy group promoting parental choice. The organization wants parents to be responsible for selecting schools, and it objects to restrictions that, in certain circumstances, make it difficult for some middle-class children to get into magnet schools. 'If a parent wants their kid bused, then let them make the choice,' Mrs. Matson said. 'But don't force parents to have their kids bused across town to go to a school that they don't want to go to.' Supporters of economic integration contend that the county offers parents many choices but that the school district needs the discretion to assign some children to schools to avoid large concentrations of poor children. 'I believe in choice as much as anyone,' Mr. McNeal said. 'However, I can't let choice erode our ability to provide quality programs and quality teaching.' The board of education had two motives when it decided to make economic integration a main element in the district's strategy: board members feared that the county's three-decade effort to integrate public schools racially would be found unconstitutional if challenged in the federal courts, and they took note of numerous studies that showed the academic benefits of economically diversifying schools. 'There is a lot of evidence that it's just sound educational policy, sound public policy, to try to avoid concentrations of low-achieving students,' said John H. Gilbert, a professor emeritus at North Carolina State University in Raleigh who served for 16 years on the county school board and voted for the plan. 'They do much better and advantaged students are not hurt by it if you follow policies that avoid concentrating low-achievement students.' One sign of the success of the Wake County plan, Mr. Gilbert said, is that residential property values in Raleigh have remained high, as have those in the suburbs. 'The economy is really saying something about the effort in the city,' he said. About 27 percent of the county's students are low-income, a proportion that has increased slightly in recent years. While many are black and Hispanic, about 15 percent of the low-income students are white. Moreover, more than 40 percent of the district's black students are working- and middle-class, and not poor. Wake County has used many strategies to limit the proportion of low-income students in schools to 40 percent. For example, magnet schools lure many suburban parents to the city. Betty Trevino lives in Fuquay-Varina, a town in southern Wake County. Ms. Trevino drives her son, Eric, 5, to and from the Joyner Elementary School, where he goes to kindergarten. Students are taught in English and Spanish, and global themes are emphasized at the school, which is north of downtown Raleigh, more than 20 miles from the Trevinos' home. With traffic, the trip takes 45 minutes each way. 'I think it works,' she said of her drive halfway across the county, 'because it's such a good school.' Many low-income children are bused to suburban schools. While some of their parents are unhappy with the length of the rides, some also said they were happy with their child's school. 'I think it's ridiculous,' LaToya Mangum said of the 55 minutes that her son Gabriel, 7, spends riding a bus to the northern reaches of Wake County, where he is in second grade. On the other hand, she said, 'So far, I do like the school.' The neighborhood school has been redefined, with complex logistics and attendance maps that can resemble madly gerrymandered Congressional districts. The Swift Creek Elementary School, in southwest Raleigh near the city line, draws most of its students from within two miles of the school, in both the city and suburbs. But students also come to Swift Creek from four widely scattered areas in low-income sections of south and southeastern Raleigh; some live 6 to 8 miles from the school, while others are as far as 12 miles away. Ela Browder lives in Cary, an affluent, sprawling suburb, but each morning she puts her 6-year-old son, Michael, on a bus for a short ride across the city line to Swift Creek. 'We're very happy with the school,' Ms. Browder said. 'The children are very enriched by it. I think it's the best of both worlds.' Of the county's 139 elementary, middle and high schools, all but 22 are within the 40 percent guideline, according to the district's data. Some are only a few percentage points above the guideline, while others are significantly higher. The overwhelming majority of the 120,000 children in the district go either to a local school or a school of their choice, officials said. Slightly more than 85 percent of students attend a school within five miles of home and another 12 percent or so voluntarily attend magnet or year-round schools. Although the figures can be calculated many ways, Mr. McNeal says about 2.5 percent - or about 3,000 children - are assigned to schools for economic balance or to accommodate the district's growth by filling new schools or easing overcrowding in existing ones. Most of those bused for economic diversity tend to be low-income, he said, mirroring the pattern of busing for racial integration in which black students were sent to white schools. A school board election will take place in October. While the board has continued to endorse economic integration, some supporters worry that that could change one day. 'It's not easy and it can be very contentious in the community,' said Walter C. Sherlin, who retired two years ago as an associate superintendent. 'Is it worth doing? Look at 91 percent at or above grade level. Look at 139 schools, all of them successful. I think the answer is obvious.'

Subject: At Google, Workers Are Placing Bets From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 11:34:23 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/26/business/26google.html?ex=1285387200&en=c171e8934faa7fc1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 26, 2005 At Google, the Workers Are Placing Their Bets By IAN AUSTEN Like all search engines, Google helps people sort through information from the past. But a new service, being used inside the company, tries to forecast the future. Google has created a predictive market system, basically a way for its employees to bet on the likelihood of possible events. Such markets have long been used to predict world events, like election results. Intrade, part of the Trade Exchange Network, allows people to bet on elections, stock market indexes and even the weather, for example. In Google's system, employees can bet on how the company will perform in the future, forecasting things like product introduction dates and new office openings. It was devised under a program that allows engineers to spend one day a week on a project of their choice. To help develop the system, Google consulted Hal R. Varian, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Varian (who also writes the Economic Scene column for The New York Times) said that the final product was not entirely what he anticipated. 'I was a little surprised,' Professor Varian said. 'I expected this to be accurate because there's a lot of literature and experience with these systems. But this has been even better than I expected.' Google has not offered precise data on the system's accuracy, but a chart posted on the company's blog last week showed that, in the words of its accompanying entry, prices set for events through employees' wagering were a 'pretty close' indication of the probability of events. The market is based on the idea that a price established for an event will reflect bettors' consensus of the likelihood that it will happen. Thus, something priced at 20 cents should happen 20 percent of the time. The system accepts bets in 10-cent increments up to a dollar (no actual money is involved). On its blog, Google compares the market to its search engine software. 'Our search engine works well because it aggregates information dispersed across the Web, and our internal predictive markets are based on the same principle: Googlers from across the company contribute knowledge and opinions which are aggregated into a forecast by the market,' the blog said. Professor Varian, who has consulted with Google on other projects, attributes the higher-than-expected levels of accuracy to the large number of employees participating. In general, the higher the number of bettors in such systems, the better the predictions. There is one issue, however, for which Google's market offers no prediction. 'It's a fun thing,' said Professor Varian. 'Now one of the things we're thinking about is what to do with it.'

Subject: Times password From: Tina Eden To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 11:21:55 (EDT) Email Address: tinamh23@hotmail.com Message: Hi Bobby and thanks for doing all you can to keep this site going. Is it possible to simply cut and paste PK's columns in the usual place so we can continue reading and commenting as before? People cut and paste articles for one another all the time and send them via emails...is a website so much different? Tina Eden

Subject: Krugman From: C Selby To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 09:37:07 (EDT) Email Address: wolf10539@netscape.net Message: Well - I guess I'll get my Krugman articles from the newspaper from now on. Can't believe we are supposed to pay to read an article.

Subject: TimesSelect From: Emma To: C Selby Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 10:16:43 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Those who subscribe to the New York Times have free access to all of TimesSelect, otherwise a subscription may well be called for.

Subject: Re: Bobby, there may be another way From: Erica To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 10:30:55 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Bobby, Over at DKos, a diarist took excerts of PK's column (very large passages, almost the whole thing) and made comments on them between the passages. It was all done in the name of blogging. It would seem to me that in your column section, which you could change to blog section, you could almost do the same thing. I mean people use huge chunks of newspaper articles all the time in order to comment on them. So why can't you do the same thing? I mean, you could leave out say a paragraph or two, and technically you wouldn't be posting the whole article. But I would imagine that if you purchase the article, it's yours. And if you wish to blog on it and share it with your readers, who's to say that's wrong? I mean, how can you intelligently discuss something that your readers are unaware of????? If it worked over at Dailykos, why won't that work here?

Subject: Excerpts From: Emma To: Erica Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 11:37:39 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Excerpts from the restricted sections of the Wall Street Journal and Economist and Financial Times and New Yorker and New York Review of Books... are readily used.

Subject: Re: Excerpts From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 16:22:52 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: When you copy from one source it is called plagiarism. When you copy from a few sources it is called research.... go figure. Now for people like me living in Canada... coming across his articles won't be as easy. And I'm not particularly prepared to pay for the entire NY Times just to read his article.

Subject: Re:It's not plagarism From: Erica To: Mik Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 07:52:05 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: It's not plagarism unless you claim the work is yours. You can blog the column by excerpting huge chunks of it.

Subject: Re: Excerpts From: derek To: Mik Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 17:23:07 (EDT) Email Address: zandor2020@yahoo.com Message: I do not have the money to read only krugman so this will be the end. any success with the library access for those who live far away from new york? Krugman has been an oasis of sanity during the last few years of moronic cognitive dissoance supporting the chimp in chief.

Subject: Is It Better to Buy or Rent? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 08:35:36 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/realestate/25cov.html?ex=1285300800&en=64f665177066bc85&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 25, 2005 Is It Better to Buy or Rent? By DAVID LEONHARDT THE thought has occurred to just about everybody who owns a home in a hot housing market: maybe it's time to cash out. The hard part is figuring out how to do so. Only a few families can actually pick up their life in, say, California and move it to Nebraska. The other option - renting - has long been derided as the equivalent of throwing money away. But renting might deserve another look right now. After five years in which rents have barely budged while house prices in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and elsewhere have doubled, renting has become a surprisingly smart option for many people who never would have considered it before. Owning a home often ties up hundreds of thousands of dollars that might be invested more safely and more lucratively elsewhere over the next decade. And while real estate brokers may hate to acknowledge it, home ownership involves its own versions of throwing money away, like property taxes and the costs of borrowing. Add it all up - which The New York Times did, in an analysis of the major costs and benefits of owning and renting, including tax breaks - and owning a home today is more expensive than renting in much of the Northeast, Florida and California. Only if prices rise well above their already lofty levels will home ownership turn out to be the good deal that it is widely assumed to be. In the Bay Area of California, a typical family that buys a $1 million house - which is average in some towns - will spend about $5,000 a month to live there, according to the Times analysis. The family could rent a similar house for about $2,500, real estate records show, and could pay part of that bill with the interest earned by the money that was not used for a down payment. This gaping difference helped persuade Eloise Christensen to sell her century-old Victorian cottage in downtown Larkspur, Calif., for $1.05 million this year. Now she rents a two-story house in Stinson Beach for $2,400 a month. From her living room, she can sip tea and watch the waves from the Pacific Ocean. 'It just seems out of control,' said Ms. Christensen, 43, a massage therapist and graphic designer. 'It didn't seem to me that the market was going to be able to sustain these high prices.' There are obviously benefits to home ownership beyond the financial, like peace of mind and a feeling of stability. Owners cannot have their home yanked away by a landlord who has decided to move back in. Owners can also change the color of their living room walls or fix a draft seeping through their windows without asking permission. Surrounding her Larkspur cottage, Ms. Christensen had built a garden with rosemary, lavender and boxwood hedges to complement the pear and fig trees already there. She is not doing anything like that in Stinson Beach. Combine these benefits with the transaction costs of a house sale, and renting probably does not make sense for most people who already own their home and feel settled in it. But the calculation can look quite different for those who are considering a move anyway or who do not yet own a home. At the very least, renters in boom markets, who often lament that they are wasting money, should know that their choice has as powerful an economic rationale as buying does right now. 'I am a proponent of buying,' said Tchaka Owen, 37, a loan officer and licensed real-estate agent in Miami who is renting a two-bedroom apartment overlooking the bay there. 'But you can get so much more for your money, renting instead of buying. We're paying half the amount we would be paying if we owned this place.' In Manhattan, 1,000-square-foot, two-bedroom apartments on the Upper East Side now rent for about $3,700 a month. Buying a similar apartment costs around $1.1 million, which can translate into monthly payments of $6,000 or so. To determine the cost of renting, the Times analysis added monthly rent and renters' insurance. For owning, the analysis included typical costs for home insurance, major repairs, property taxes and mortgage payments, as well as the tax deductions they create. Renters were given credit for a small return - about 4 percent, after taxes - on the money they could have invested in bonds or stocks instead of spending it on a down payment and closing costs. Buyers received credit for the portion of the mortgage they were paying off, as opposed to the interest costs. When the net costs of owning are less than those of renting, as is the case in Chicago, Dallas, St. Louis and much of the middle of the country, the argument for buying becomes overwhelming. So long as home prices do not fall sharply, home buyers in these places will do much better than renters. But when owning is more expensive every month, buyers are betting entirely on price appreciation. For new home buyers, prices in New York would need to rise roughly another 13 percent over the next five years for the average buyer to do better than the average renter over that span. In Northern California, where the gap between house prices and rents is largest, home values would need to go up about 19 percent by 2010. Over the next decade, the break-even increase is about 25 percent in New York and 40 percent in California. Such increases have been easily achieved in the recent past. But even economists who do not consider the real estate market to be in a bubble predict that price gains will slow. Other forecasters argue that values will fall, as they did on the coasts in the early 1990's, or be stuck near their current levels for years to come. No matter who is right, the buy-versus-rent debate is a closer call than it has been in years. 'If you believe you'll be moving in the next four or five years, I'd rent,' said Thomas Z. Lys, an accounting professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University . 'If you're a long-termer, I still would buy.' The single biggest misconception about home ownership, some brokers and economists say, might revolve around tax deductions. Many people seem to believe that buying a home can actually save them money because the interest on their mortgage is tax deductible. But all that deduction does is reduce the cost of borrowing the money - a cost that would not exist if the family were not buying the home. Families spend about six years in a house, on average, according to the National Association of Realtors. In that time, the interest on a $600,000 mortgage would add up to about $120,000, even at today's low rates and even after the tax deduction, according to National City Corporation, a large lender. 'Don't be buying a house because you think you're saving on the taxes,' said Frank Borges LLosa, owner of FranklyRealty.com, a brokerage in Arlington, Va. 'You'll save even more by not buying and renting.' Mr. LLosa added: 'I'm not saying not to buy. I'm saying don't buy just for the tax reasons.' Many homeowners also do not receive the full deductions from home ownership. In the Northeast and California, homeowners now have so many deductions that some must pay the alternative minimum tax. This tax effectively wipes out part of their property-tax deduction, further cutting into the benefits of home ownership. Other homeowners do not itemize their deductions or, if they do so, end up with total deductions only a little larger than the standard deduction that the government offers to all taxpayers, even renters. 'A lot of people hugely overvalue the mortgage deduction,' said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal group in Washington, 'because they compare it to no deduction instead of comparing it to the standard deduction.' Mr. Baker is one of the avant garde renters. He and his wife sold their condominium in Washington last year for $445,000 and now rent a similar one nearby for $2,200 a month. The Times analysis made a number of assumptions favorable to buyers, like giving them full credit for the deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes, noted Mark Zandi, chief economist of Economy .com, a research company. Still, the monthly costs of buying were more expensive than those for renting in any market where the price of a typical house was more than 20 times larger than the annual rent to live in it. In the Bay Area, this 'rent ratio' exceeds 33. In New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Miami, it is just above 25. A typical four-bedroom house in Brookline, Mass., for example, costs about $1.2 million to buy and $4,500 a month to rent, according to Chobee Hoy Associates Real Estate, a brokerage there. At 20, Washington is right near the cutoff. But renters who live in apartment buildings, like Mr. Baker, often get an extra benefit: some portion of their utilities bill is typically covered by the building's owner. Mr. Owen, the loan officer in Miami, and his girlfriend, Polly Thompson, pay $1,700 a month for a top-floor apartment that has views of both the city's skyline and the Atlantic Ocean. After talking to brokers, he said he thought that the apartment would sell for close to $650,000, giving it a rent ratio of more than 30. 'It's obvious,' he said, 'that renting is such a better deal.' But to many people, the psychological benefits of buying are almost impossible to overcome. Owning makes them feel that they have achieved the American dream, or it gives them the secure sense that, if nothing else, they have a tangible asset where they can sleep at night. Those are nice feelings, indeed. The question is how much they are worth to you.

Subject: Re: Is It Better to Buy or Rent? From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 16:41:05 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Fantastic article... thanks. Say uhmm.. you wouldn't by any slight chance be able to post Krugman's articles (from the NY libary) in the future?

Subject: Many More People Are House Poor From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 06:42:29 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/realestate/25sacrifice.html September 25, 2005 With Higher Prices, Many More People Are House Poor By PATRICK O'GILFOIL HEALY BECAUSE of the nationwide surge in housing prices, many middle-income families just can't afford the average house price anymore. But they are buying anyway, and making due by cutting household budgets and tightening belts in myriad ways. They are forgoing that long-planned vacation to Europe. They are bypassing their favorite Thai restaurant and cooking dinner at home. People are clipping coupons, shopping at discount supermarkets and pulling their children out of private schools. 'It's stressful,' said David Gentry, a pharmaceutical salesman who recently obtained a loan to buy a $695,000 town house near San Francisco. 'I wonder, How do I qualify for this money? Are they stupid? It's not like I'm the president of Hewlett Packard. We're just trying to make ends meet.' The family had been renting an apartment from Mr. Gentry's father-in-law, paying a pittance in rent, before they bought. Now, Mr. Gentry said, housing costs eat up about half his take-home pay, meaning he and his wife can no longer afford a $600-a-month preschool for their 17-month-old and 4-year-old sons. The family moved into their town house condo overlooking the Pacific this May, and began paying a $4,100 monthly mortgage. To cover it, Mr. Gentry pared down contributions to his 401(k) account, and his wife, who now stays home with the children, is planning to return to work.'It's out of control,' Mr. Gentry said. 'We're penny-pinching things we would have normally not thought twice about. We're making it happen, but for how long?' Bankers suggest that families spend 25 to 30 percent of their gross income on housing, but many people, especially on the coasts, easily exceed that level. The burden of housing prices is the most pronounced in California, where 40 percent of homeowners spend more than 30 percent of their income to cover their mortgage costs, according to 2003 census data, the most recent numbers available. About 30 percent of all Americans spend that much. In the 1970's, an average family spent half its income on its mortgage, health care, insurance, taxes and car payments, according to Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor who writes about consumer spending. Today, families spend about 75 percent of their incomes on those essentials, largely because of higher housing costs. One in 10 Americans spends more than half their income on housing costs, and those rates are higher in hot markets. Across the country, the median price of a single-family home has climbed 29 percent in two years, rising to $218,600 this year from $170,000 in 2003, according to the National Association of Realtors. At the same time, median family incomes rose 8 percent. The association's Housing Affordability Index dropped over the same time period, falling 15 percent in the last two years. Right now, it ranks the Midwest as the most affordable part of the country, and the West as the least. In the expensive markets, some people spend 50 to 75 percent of their monthly salaries on home payments. 'Most people out there would say they spent too much, across the board,' said Rick Harper, a credit counselor in San Francisco. For now, Americans seem to be staying aloft, spending less elsewhere and making the mortgage their first priority. Though foreclosures have jumped recently in areas like Massachusetts, Philadelphia and Chicago, a June survey by the Mortgage Bankers Association, the most recent available, found that foreclosure and delinquency rates had actually dropped 7 percentage points from 2004. But Ms. Warren, the Harvard author, said Americans have put themselves in a precarious spot. They have overspent and taken out adjustable-rate and interest-only mortgages, gambling that housing values will rise while interest rates and the job market hold steady. 'People think homeownership is the ultimate stability,' Ms. Warren said. 'Today, it has become the cement life raft. The home itself is sinking the family.' The surge in prices is not limited to hot zones like California, where the median home price is $540,900, or New York City, where the median price is $700,000. It has struck people in Pasadena, Md. (median home value: about $170,000), where Julie Judy's family recently bought a $275,000 home. They now scrape by on a budget that leaves them $100 to spare each month. Ms. Judy and her husband, Michael, both in their early 30's, began looking for a new home big enough to give their 3-year-old son space to play and grow. They hoped for something in the $150,000 range, but quickly learned that even wrecks cost $200,000. 'When they said the payment's going to be $1,800, I said, 'Oh my God,' ' Ms. Judy said. 'It kills me. It kills me.' The family cut out some comforts, forgoing a pool table, big-screen television and new furniture for their basement. They opted not to install a telephone line, and only use cellphones. They traded their Ford Expedition for a Dodge Caravan for a net savings of eight miles per gallon and $120 in monthly gasoline costs. And they cut up their credit cards. 'If we can't pay cash for it,' Ms. Judy wrote in an e-mail message, 'we won't buy it.' In San Mateo, Calif., the burdens of first-time homeownership have plucked Chris Cavigioli right out of the sky. Last November, Mr. Cavigioli, 43, who markets semiconductors, and his new wife, Kari, began searching for a $600,000 house where they would have enough room to start a family. They found nothing that even came close. So the couple raised their price ceiling beyond San Mateo's median of $656,095, then raised it again, and settled on a home for around $875,000. In a standard 30-year mortgage, the $875,000 house would cost an additional $1,445 every month, or an extra $17,340 a year, when compared with what their payments would have been for a $600,000 house. For the Cavigiolis, the pricier house has meant more dinners at home, where Mr. Cavigioli exposes his carnivorous wife to his vegetarian cooking. There have been fewer trips to see relatives living in Asia and Boston. And Mr. Cavigioli, who flies Cessna Skyhawks in his free time, had to give up lessons and put off pursuing his pilot's license. 'That's something that's going to have to wait for a rainy day,' he said. For now, 'We're living on faith.' One hundred miles away, in a rough-edged Sacramento neighborhood, Yaseen Nazir and his wife are dealing with the consequences of waiting too long to join the parade. The couple, who are technology consultants, stayed in their $900 rental while prices soared, then this year decided to buy a home. 'I thought, realistically, it would have been nice to get something for around $100,000, but you can't even buy a trailer for $100,000,' Mr. Nazir said. 'We were hoping for around $300,000, but there's nothing to find. We tried everything. We just said, It's now or never. It just keeps going up.' Eventually, the couple bought a four-bedroom house for $445,000. Most mortgage experts recommend that people's homes cost no more than three times their annual salary. By that standard, the Nazirs were $100,000 over budget. They had signed up to spend more than half their monthly income on their home. So now, they are cutting costs everywhere they can. They endured the summer without air-conditioning. They eat at their parents' houses. They read books beneath Wal-Mart lamps and lounge on 'pleather' couches left over from Mr. Nazir's days as a computer-science major at the University of California, Davis. The couple have moved in, but they cannot afford to make the newly built house feel like their own. They have yet to put up a fence in their backyard or pour concrete for the patio. And they gave up their weekends skiing and jettisoned the overnight trips to Lake Tahoe and Los Angeles. They gave up going to their favorite $25-a-plate Persian and Moroccan restaurants. For lunch, Mr. Nazir forgoes trips out with co-workers and eats 'cans of tuna and microwaveable stuff' at his desk. 'We basically decided, How many days can we starve?' Mr. Nazir said. 'When can we go to the thrift store? It's tough times.' In markets where house prices have risen rapidly, they are not unusual. 'They're overbuying, and there are extreme choices that need to be made,' said Patricia Lynch, a credit counselor with ClearPoint Financial Solutions in Baltimore. 'People can get very creative.' A 58-year-old woman in Fresno, Calif., said she is dedicating more than half her teacher's salary to the mortgage on her $230,000 house, and is so financially strapped that she has cut back on tithes to her Catholic parish. Credit counselors say their clients are piling their day-to-day debts onto credit cards, draining their contributions to retirement accounts and selling their housewares at resale shops to make their mortgages. One of Ms. Lynch's clients cut her phone lines and Internet access. Another sold off $300,000 in antiques, rugs and crystal baubles. 'She's liquidating,' Ms. Lynch said. 'She's using that money to pay off debt.'

Subject: Miami's Model for Condo Sales Spreads From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 06:40:43 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/realestate/25miami.html September 25, 2005 Miami's Model for Condo Sales Spreads to Las Vegas and New York By ANNA BAHNEY MIAMI has long been known for models of the lean and leggy variety, but more recently, with the appearance of tall, slender buildings along Biscayne Bay, yet another model is emerging from the backdrop of pink sunsets and blue water. The so-called Miami Model describes the way some of these apartments are being sold, a method that is changing the way real estate development is done in Florida and beyond. It results in churning apartments more often and more quickly and giving more of the transaction fees to developers. With an in-house sales team that charges a fee, a developer sells a unit to an investor who in turn sells to a buyer who may or may not ultimately use the condo. This flip before closing has become an integral part of the condo market in places like South Florida and Las Vegas. Now developers and marketers in New York - who never like to think they follow any other city's lead - are flirting with the model. 'It is a market that is more evolved than our market here in the city,' said Christopher Mathieson, a managing partner at JC DeNiro and Associates, a real estate agency in Manhattan. 'They are selling like crazy in Miami. Las Vegas has taken the Miami Model and run with it.' Mr. Mathieson has three projects in Manhattan that are going to use this model; two will be coming to market in the spring and he will be doing some sales in the fall for the third. Many real estate professionals don't think this sales model can work in Manhattan because the price to invest in New York is so high, but Mr. Mathieson said he is convinced it can. In Miami, which has led the country in sales of preconstruction condos, 60,000 units are planned in the next five years and about 19,700 are under construction in Dade County right now. While 'flipping' has become a dirty word in Florida, developers find it appealing, and profitable, to control the flip, rather than to leave all those profits to others. For buyers - investors or users - it may help to protect the flow of properties to the market. One Miami, an 896-unit condominium developed by the Related Companies, is nearing the end of its resale program, in which about half of the buyers are reselling, through the developer, apartments that don't yet exist. 'The first person purchased two and half years ago,' said Valeria Lugo, a sales associate with Related Cervera Realty Services, who works at the building. 'Then eight months to a year later, we offer the option to sell their unit and they can assign the contract to another buyer.' The percentages vary depending on the developer, but at One Miami there is a 6 percent commission to the sales agent and a 0.25 percent fee for the transfer, which goes to the developer. Developer's fees can range from 0.25 to 10 percent. 'They don't have to do the resale through us,' Ms. Lugo said. 'But we do a lot of advertising and marketing.' Before developers decided to be the focus for resales, speculators would close on a condo and sell it immediately, or before closing, flip the contract with the help of an outside broker. Alicia Cervera Lamadrid, the president of Related Cervera Realty Services, said that she had been using this model for about seven years. 'In the old days it would take a couple of years to sell all the units,' Mrs. Cervera Lamadrid said. 'But now it can take a couple of weeks or a couple of months.' Jack Winston, an analyst with Goodkin Consulting, a real estate consulting firm in South Florida, said that the Miami Model works best when a developer has several parts to its organization, including a sales arm, and when there are multiple projects at various stages. 'Related is the best example in the country,' Mr. Winston said. 'With Related Cervera Realty there is an in-house sales office. They are constantly opening new projects, so they can move buyers to another project that is coming out of the ground. They also create a reputation and a following with buyers because each time they have done this - with the combination of Related and Related Cervera - the investors have made money.' Mr. Winston sees the long-term effect of this kind of sales strategy by developers as a bit of a Ponzi scheme, though. People coming in on the preconstruction phase are making money so long as other people are coming in. 'The scheme falls apart when you don't have enough people to get the money to pay to the last guy back,' Mr. Winston said. 'What happens when you don't get enough investors to come in and play? There certainly aren't enough real buyers.' Ms. Lugo said the resale apartments at One Miami are being sold at a 35 to 40 percent increase over the preconstruction price, with two-bedroom apartments now between $450,000 and $600,000 and three-bedrooms from $650,000 to $1.2 million. At another Related building, Plaza on Brickell, resales began on July 1 after it sold out in the summer of 2004, and about 200 of the 1,000 units are currently available again. Ms. Lugo said she expected another 10 percent of the units to come into the resale program before the sales are closed. 'There is no one taking a loss from doing resales,' said Carlo Gambino, a managing partner of Carson Realty Group in Miami. For the developers, Mr. Gambino said, instead of losing out on an opportunity to generate more revenue, they are taking part in it. The initial buyer is making a profit on the value of the full price of the property based on a 20 percent investment. Even the second buyer, he said, will get a better price than if the first buyer had to account for closing costs. 'I don't see any party that will suffer from it,' he said. He hasn't: Mr. Gambino made a 300 percent profit on his 20 percent down payment at One Miami through the resale program. A similar scenario is playing out in Las Vegas, where more than 90 condo projects with about 67,000 units are in the planning stages and at least 19 are under construction. At the Panorama Towers, developed by Sasson Hallier Properties, resales on the first of three towers will begin in December. Prices for that are not determined yet, but pre-construction condos in the third tower are $450,000 to $1.5 million. 'We went down to Miami and saw that this is a great way to protect the value of the building,' said Paul Scaringe, the vice president of sales for Panorama Towers. 'With this program you can control the amount of inventory that is out there at any given time, supply and demand will dictate the pricing.' Bradley F. Hunter, director of the South Florida region for Metrostudy, a residential real estate market research firm in West Palm Beach, said this model began when investors increased the price gain in new construction by paying any price, figuring it would go up. Developers began to restrict investors from flipping the contracts, only to find the day after closing that high numbers of units were on the market, with the investor rather than the developer making the profit. 'That pushed this resale activity,' Mr. Hunter said. 'Then developers said, why should we leave that money sitting on the table? And they started their own resale programs.' Developers in South Florida are typically expected to sell half the units in a development before receiving financing for the project. With preconstruction buyers putting 10 percent down to reserve a condo and another 10 percent down, which can be used for construction costs, about the time building starts, it might seem that the Florida market is insulated from froth because projects have buyers before they are built. Mr. Hunter disagreed. 'Those 50 percent who have bought preconstruction are investors,' he said. 'They are perpetuating the froth and in a way disguising it. The developer can say, 'I'm sold out.' Really? Are you sold out to people who are going to move in? Or people who are going to immediately put those on the market?' 'There is phantom supply,' Mr. Hunter added. 'It is not visible to the naked eye. That is why developers have to be very cautious.' In New York they often are. Real estate developers and marketers have their own established methods and ideas about the way real estate development is done in other parts of the country. 'In Miami you can do what you want,' said Michael Shvo, president of Shvo Marketing, a real estate firm in Manhattan. 'It's the Wild West. So is Las Vegas.' Elan Padeh, the chief executive and president of the Developers Group, a Brooklyn-based real estate firm, said that developers would love to move buyers' contracts with the fluidity of those in Miami. 'If they were doing this much development in New York, there would be even more if they could do that,' he said. Both marketers sang the praises of the New York State attorney general, Eliot Spitzer - whose office must examine all condo offering plans - as well as state regulations that keep buyers' down payments in escrow, rather than allowing developers to use them for construction costs. But with the distinctly Miami-influenced financing plan by Frank J. Sciame, the developer behind the Santiago Calatrava building planned at 80 South Street, in which he is taking down-payments starting at $7 million before securing financing for 10 town houses ranging from $29 million to $59 million each, there are indications that the approach to new development in New York may be changing. With regard to the Miami Model of controlled resales, Bruce D. Friedberg, a lawyer specializing in real estate, said he was surprised it was not done more often in New York, explaining that usually the opposite is the rule, with developers strongly restricting resales of the condos until as much as a year after closing. Mr. Friedberg saw the effects of a resale program when he had some 35 clients who were among the initial purchasers at the Chelsea Mercantile, a renovated warehouse condominium on the West Side of Manhattan developed by Rockrose Developments, in 1999. The initial offering plan, dated May 20, 1999, said that the 354 units would sell out at $251.45 million. By the time the 11th amendment was submitted to the attorney general's office that November, the sell-out price was $307.61 million. 'The demand was unbelievable,' Kevin P. Singleton, senior vice president at Rockrose Development, said of the Chelsea Mercantile project. In one of the amendments, the developer offered to take back the contract and split the market price with the initial buyer. For example, a buyer who had purchased for $1 million could, through this amendment, assign the contract to the developer and split the profit on the apartment, which was going for $1.5 million, leaving $250,000 each for the developer and the first buyer. By keeping an ear to the track, Mr. Singleton said, his firm knew even a year after initial sales that they would still have a line around the block if units were available. 'We could have sold 10 times the number of units we had,' he said. 'Filing an amendment is the only requirement. There is a limited downside for the developer.' Brad Maione, the spokesman for the attorney general's office, said in an e-mail message that the office takes no official position on the merits of particular provisions in an offering plan. Assigning the contract can be beneficial, he said, because it allows buyers who are unable to close or no longer interested in buying to find a substitute purchaser and not loose their down payments. It is certainly not as easy to institute a resale program as in other cities, but with large-scale condo development planned for West Chelsea, and areas like the Williamsburg/Greenpoint waterfront in Brooklyn, investors moving from one preconstruction project to another could become more common in New York. It will if Mr. Mathieson has anything to do with it. 'You're inviting more people, including investors, to take on the risk until the end user gets to the building,' he said. 'The end user wants a product they can look at. The investor is there to take the risk.'

Subject: times select From: tom To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 04:22:33 (EDT) Email Address: tom@tom.com Message: it's possible to complain. write to the public editor at the times (public@nytimes.com), saying that it's short-sighted and narrow minded, at least in this country) to severely restrict the audience for well-informed left-wing voices. the paper has some public responsibility as well as one to its shareholders -

Subject: Hard Bigotry of No Expectations From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 14:58:10 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/opinion/25sun1.html September 25, 2005 Hard Bigotry of No Expectations Throughout his campaigns in 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush talked about 'the soft bigotry of low expectations': the mind-set that tolerates poor school performance and dead-end careers for minority students on the presumption that they are incapable of doing better. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said recently that this phrase attracted her to Mr. Bush more than anything else. It was, indeed, a brilliant encapsulation of so much of what is wrong with American education. But while Mr. Bush has been worrying about low expectations in schools, he's been ratcheting the bar downward himself on almost everything else. The president's recent schedule of nonstop disaster-scene photo-ops is reminiscent of the principal of a failing school who believes he's doing a great job because he makes it a point to drop in on every class play and teacher retirement party. And if there ever was an exhibit of the misguided conviction that for some people very little is good enough, it's the current administration spin that the proposed Iraqi constitution is fine because the founding fathers didn't give women equal rights either. The lack of expectations is evident even in areas where the president is supposed to be deeply engaged. The Treasury Department's hollowed-out leadership structure suggests an administration that is happy to coast along with a gentleman's C for handling the nation's finances. But it has been most graphically, and tragically, on display in Iraq and in the response to Hurricane Katrina. Four years after 9/11, Katrina showed the world that performance standards for the Department of Homeland Security were so low that it was not required to create real plans to respond to real disasters. Only a president with no expectation that the federal government should step up after a crisis could have stripped the Federal Emergency Management Agency bare, appointed as its director a political crony who could not even adequately represent the breeders of Arabian horses, and announced that the director was doing a splendid job while bodies floated in the floodwaters. Only a president who does not expect the government to help provide decent housing for the truly needy in normal times could leave seven of the top jobs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development vacant and then, after disaster struck, offer small-bore solutions to enormous problems. Substandard wages, an easing of affirmative action regulation and a housing lottery that will help a tiny sliver of people apparently are considered good enough for poor families along the Gulf Coast left homeless by Katrina. In Iraq, the elimination of expectations is on display in the disastrous political process. Among other things, the constitution drafted under American supervision does not provide for the rights of women and minorities and enshrines one religion as the fundamental source of law. Administration officials excuse this poor excuse for a constitution by saying it also refers to democratic values. But it makes them secondary to Islamic law and never actually defines them. Our founding fathers had higher expectations: they made the split of church and state fundamental, and spelled out what they meant by democracy and the rule of law. It's true that the United States Constitution once allowed slavery, denied women the right to vote and granted property rights only to white men. But it's offensive for the administration to use that as an excuse for the failings of the Iraqi constitution. The bar on democracy has been raised since 1787. We don't agree that the 218-year-old standard is good enough for Iraq. Since his failure to notice the Katrina disaster, Mr. Bush has stopped bragging that he doesn't read or watch the news. If he's paying attention now, he should get a message from the outrage over Katrina and shrinking support for his policies in Iraq: The American public has much higher expectations than he does for the president and his government.

Subject: Many More People Are House Poor From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 14:04:25 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/realestate/25sacrifice.html September 25, 2005 With Higher Prices, Many More People Are House Poor By PATRICK O'GILFOIL HEALY BECAUSE of the nationwide surge in housing prices, many middle-income families just can't afford the average house price anymore. But they are buying anyway, and making due by cutting household budgets and tightening belts in myriad ways. They are forgoing that long-planned vacation to Europe. They are bypassing their favorite Thai restaurant and cooking dinner at home. People are clipping coupons, shopping at discount supermarkets and pulling their children out of private schools. 'It's stressful,' said David Gentry, a pharmaceutical salesman who recently obtained a loan to buy a $695,000 town house near San Francisco. 'I wonder, How do I qualify for this money? Are they stupid? It's not like I'm the president of Hewlett Packard. We're just trying to make ends meet.' The family had been renting an apartment from Mr. Gentry's father-in-law, paying a pittance in rent, before they bought. Now, Mr. Gentry said, housing costs eat up about half his take-home pay, meaning he and his wife can no longer afford a $600-a-month preschool for their 17-month-old and 4-year-old sons. The family moved into their town house condo overlooking the Pacific this May, and began paying a $4,100 monthly mortgage. To cover it, Mr. Gentry pared down contributions to his 401(k) account, and his wife, who now stays home with the children, is planning to return to work.'It's out of control,' Mr. Gentry said. 'We're penny-pinching things we would have normally not thought twice about. We're making it happen, but for how long?' Bankers suggest that families spend 25 to 30 percent of their gross income on housing, but many people, especially on the coasts, easily exceed that level. The burden of housing prices is the most pronounced in California, where 40 percent of homeowners spend more than 30 percent of their income to cover their mortgage costs, according to 2003 census data, the most recent numbers available. About 30 percent of all Americans spend that much. In the 1970's, an average family spent half its income on its mortgage, health care, insurance, taxes and car payments, according to Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor who writes about consumer spending. Today, families spend about 75 percent of their incomes on those essentials, largely because of higher housing costs. One in 10 Americans spends more than half their income on housing costs, and those rates are higher in hot markets. Across the country, the median price of a single-family home has climbed 29 percent in two years, rising to $218,600 this year from $170,000 in 2003, according to the National Association of Realtors. At the same time, median family incomes rose 8 percent. The association's Housing Affordability Index dropped over the same time period, falling 15 percent in the last two years. Right now, it ranks the Midwest as the most affordable part of the country, and the West as the least. In the expensive markets, some people spend 50 to 75 percent of their monthly salaries on home payments. 'Most people out there would say they spent too much, across the board,' said Rick Harper, a credit counselor in San Francisco. For now, Americans seem to be staying aloft, spending less elsewhere and making the mortgage their first priority. Though foreclosures have jumped recently in areas like Massachusetts, Philadelphia and Chicago, a June survey by the Mortgage Bankers Association, the most recent available, found that foreclosure and delinquency rates had actually dropped 7 percentage points from 2004. But Ms. Warren, the Harvard author, said Americans have put themselves in a precarious spot. They have overspent and taken out adjustable-rate and interest-only mortgages, gambling that housing values will rise while interest rates and the job market hold steady. 'People think homeownership is the ultimate stability,' Ms. Warren said. 'Today, it has become the cement life raft. The home itself is sinking the family.' The surge in prices is not limited to hot zones like California, where the median home price is $540,900, or New York City, where the median price is $700,000. It has struck people in Pasadena, Md. (median home value: about $170,000), where Julie Judy's family recently bought a $275,000 home. They now scrape by on a budget that leaves them $100 to spare each month. Ms. Judy and her husband, Michael, both in their early 30's, began looking for a new home big enough to give their 3-year-old son space to play and grow. They hoped for something in the $150,000 range, but quickly learned that even wrecks cost $200,000. 'When they said the payment's going to be $1,800, I said, 'Oh my God,' ' Ms. Judy said. 'It kills me. It kills me.' The family cut out some comforts, forgoing a pool table, big-screen television and new furniture for their basement. They opted not to install a telephone line, and only use cellphones. They traded their Ford Expedition for a Dodge Caravan for a net savings of eight miles per gallon and $120 in monthly gasoline costs. And they cut up their credit cards. 'If we can't pay cash for it,' Ms. Judy wrote in an e-mail message, 'we won't buy it.' In San Mateo, Calif., the burdens of first-time homeownership have plucked Chris Cavigioli right out of the sky. Last November, Mr. Cavigioli, 43, who markets semiconductors, and his new wife, Kari, began searching for a $600,000 house where they would have enough room to start a family. They found nothing that even came close. So the couple raised their price ceiling beyond San Mateo's median of $656,095, then raised it again, and settled on a home for around $875,000. In a standard 30-year mortgage, the $875,000 house would cost an additional $1,445 every month, or an extra $17,340 a year, when compared with what their payments would have been for a $600,000 house. For the Cavigiolis, the pricier house has meant more dinners at home, where Mr. Cavigioli exposes his carnivorous wife to his vegetarian cooking. There have been fewer trips to see relatives living in Asia and Boston. And Mr. Cavigioli, who flies Cessna Skyhawks in his free time, had to give up lessons and put off pursuing his pilot's license. 'That's something that's going to have to wait for a rainy day,' he said. For now, 'We're living on faith.' One hundred miles away, in a rough-edged Sacramento neighborhood, Yaseen Nazir and his wife are dealing with the consequences of waiting too long to join the parade. The couple, who are technology consultants, stayed in their $900 rental while prices soared, then this year decided to buy a home. 'I thought, realistically, it would have been nice to get something for around $100,000, but you can't even buy a trailer for $100,000,' Mr. Nazir said. 'We were hoping for around $300,000, but there's nothing to find. We tried everything. We just said, It's now or never. It just keeps going up.' Eventually, the couple bought a four-bedroom house for $445,000. Most mortgage experts recommend that people's homes cost no more than three times their annual salary. By that standard, the Nazirs were $100,000 over budget. They had signed up to spend more than half their monthly income on their home. So now, they are cutting costs everywhere they can. They endured the summer without air-conditioning. They eat at their parents' houses. They read books beneath Wal-Mart lamps and lounge on 'pleather' couches left over from Mr. Nazir's days as a computer-science major at the University of California, Davis. The couple have moved in, but they cannot afford to make the newly built house feel like their own. They have yet to put up a fence in their backyard or pour concrete for the patio. And they gave up their weekends skiing and jettisoned the overnight trips to Lake Tahoe and Los Angeles. They gave up going to their favorite $25-a-plate Persian and Moroccan restaurants. For lunch, Mr. Nazir forgoes trips out with co-workers and eats 'cans of tuna and microwaveable stuff' at his desk. 'We basically decided, How many days can we starve?' Mr. Nazir said. 'When can we go to the thrift store? It's tough times.' In markets where house prices have risen rapidly, they are not unusual. 'They're overbuying, and there are extreme choices that need to be made,' said Patricia Lynch, a credit counselor with ClearPoint Financial Solutions in Baltimore. 'People can get very creative.' A 58-year-old woman in Fresno, Calif., said she is dedicating more than half her teacher's salary to the mortgage on her $230,000 house, and is so financially strapped that she has cut back on tithes to her Catholic parish. Credit counselors say their clients are piling their day-to-day debts onto credit cards, draining their contributions to retirement accounts and selling their housewares at resale shops to make their mortgages. One of Ms. Lynch's clients cut her phone lines and Internet access. Another sold off $300,000 in antiques, rugs and crystal baubles. 'She's liquidating,' Ms. Lynch said. 'She's using that money to pay off debt.'

Subject: Miami's Model for Condo Sales Spreads From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 14:01:10 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/realestate/25miami.html September 25, 2005 Miami's Model for Condo Sales Spreads to Las Vegas and New York By ANNA BAHNEY MIAMI has long been known for models of the lean and leggy variety, but more recently, with the appearance of tall, slender buildings along Biscayne Bay, yet another model is emerging from the backdrop of pink sunsets and blue water. The so-called Miami Model describes the way some of these apartments are being sold, a method that is changing the way real estate development is done in Florida and beyond. It results in churning apartments more often and more quickly and giving more of the transaction fees to developers. With an in-house sales team that charges a fee, a developer sells a unit to an investor who in turn sells to a buyer who may or may not ultimately use the condo. This flip before closing has become an integral part of the condo market in places like South Florida and Las Vegas. Now developers and marketers in New York - who never like to think they follow any other city's lead - are flirting with the model. 'It is a market that is more evolved than our market here in the city,' said Christopher Mathieson, a managing partner at JC DeNiro and Associates, a real estate agency in Manhattan. 'They are selling like crazy in Miami. Las Vegas has taken the Miami Model and run with it.' Mr. Mathieson has three projects in Manhattan that are going to use this model; two will be coming to market in the spring and he will be doing some sales in the fall for the third. Many real estate professionals don't think this sales model can work in Manhattan because the price to invest in New York is so high, but Mr. Mathieson said he is convinced it can. In Miami, which has led the country in sales of preconstruction condos, 60,000 units are planned in the next five years and about 19,700 are under construction in Dade County right now. While 'flipping' has become a dirty word in Florida, developers find it appealing, and profitable, to control the flip, rather than to leave all those profits to others. For buyers - investors or users - it may help to protect the flow of properties to the market. One Miami, an 896-unit condominium developed by the Related Companies, is nearing the end of its resale program, in which about half of the buyers are reselling, through the developer, apartments that don't yet exist. 'The first person purchased two and half years ago,' said Valeria Lugo, a sales associate with Related Cervera Realty Services, who works at the building. 'Then eight months to a year later, we offer the option to sell their unit and they can assign the contract to another buyer.' The percentages vary depending on the developer, but at One Miami there is a 6 percent commission to the sales agent and a 0.25 percent fee for the transfer, which goes to the developer. Developer's fees can range from 0.25 to 10 percent. 'They don't have to do the resale through us,' Ms. Lugo said. 'But we do a lot of advertising and marketing.' Before developers decided to be the focus for resales, speculators would close on a condo and sell it immediately, or before closing, flip the contract with the help of an outside broker. Alicia Cervera Lamadrid, the president of Related Cervera Realty Services, said that she had been using this model for about seven years. 'In the old days it would take a couple of years to sell all the units,' Mrs. Cervera Lamadrid said. 'But now it can take a couple of weeks or a couple of months.' Jack Winston, an analyst with Goodkin Consulting, a real estate consulting firm in South Florida, said that the Miami Model works best when a developer has several parts to its organization, including a sales arm, and when there are multiple projects at various stages. 'Related is the best example in the country,' Mr. Winston said. 'With Related Cervera Realty there is an in-house sales office. They are constantly opening new projects, so they can move buyers to another project that is coming out of the ground. They also create a reputation and a following with buyers because each time they have done this - with the combination of Related and Related Cervera - the investors have made money.' Mr. Winston sees the long-term effect of this kind of sales strategy by developers as a bit of a Ponzi scheme, though. People coming in on the preconstruction phase are making money so long as other people are coming in. 'The scheme falls apart when you don't have enough people to get the money to pay to the last guy back,' Mr. Winston said. 'What happens when you don't get enough investors to come in and play? There certainly aren't enough real buyers.' Ms. Lugo said the resale apartments at One Miami are being sold at a 35 to 40 percent increase over the preconstruction price, with two-bedroom apartments now between $450,000 and $600,000 and three-bedrooms from $650,000 to $1.2 million. At another Related building, Plaza on Brickell, resales began on July 1 after it sold out in the summer of 2004, and about 200 of the 1,000 units are currently available again. Ms. Lugo said she expected another 10 percent of the units to come into the resale program before the sales are closed. 'There is no one taking a loss from doing resales,' said Carlo Gambino, a managing partner of Carson Realty Group in Miami. For the developers, Mr. Gambino said, instead of losing out on an opportunity to generate more revenue, they are taking part in it. The initial buyer is making a profit on the value of the full price of the property based on a 20 percent investment. Even the second buyer, he said, will get a better price than if the first buyer had to account for closing costs. 'I don't see any party that will suffer from it,' he said. He hasn't: Mr. Gambino made a 300 percent profit on his 20 percent down payment at One Miami through the resale program. A similar scenario is playing out in Las Vegas, where more than 90 condo projects with about 67,000 units are in the planning stages and at least 19 are under construction. At the Panorama Towers, developed by Sasson Hallier Properties, resales on the first of three towers will begin in December. Prices for that are not determined yet, but pre-construction condos in the third tower are $450,000 to $1.5 million. 'We went down to Miami and saw that this is a great way to protect the value of the building,' said Paul Scaringe, the vice president of sales for Panorama Towers. 'With this program you can control the amount of inventory that is out there at any given time, supply and demand will dictate the pricing.' Bradley F. Hunter, director of the South Florida region for Metrostudy, a residential real estate market research firm in West Palm Beach, said this model began when investors increased the price gain in new construction by paying any price, figuring it would go up. Developers began to restrict investors from flipping the contracts, only to find the day after closing that high numbers of units were on the market, with the investor rather than the developer making the profit. 'That pushed this resale activity,' Mr. Hunter said. 'Then developers said, why should we leave that money sitting on the table? And they started their own resale programs.' Developers in South Florida are typically expected to sell half the units in a development before receiving financing for the project. With preconstruction buyers putting 10 percent down to reserve a condo and another 10 percent down, which can be used for construction costs, about the time building starts, it might seem that the Florida market is insulated from froth because projects have buyers before they are built. Mr. Hunter disagreed. 'Those 50 percent who have bought preconstruction are investors,' he said. 'They are perpetuating the froth and in a way disguising it. The developer can say, 'I'm sold out.' Really? Are you sold out to people who are going to move in? Or people who are going to immediately put those on the market?' 'There is phantom supply,' Mr. Hunter added. 'It is not visible to the naked eye. That is why developers have to be very cautious.' In New York they often are. Real estate developers and marketers have their own established methods and ideas about the way real estate development is done in other parts of the country. 'In Miami you can do what you want,' said Michael Shvo, president of Shvo Marketing, a real estate firm in Manhattan. 'It's the Wild West. So is Las Vegas.' Elan Padeh, the chief executive and president of the Developers Group, a Brooklyn-based real estate firm, said that developers would love to move buyers' contracts with the fluidity of those in Miami. 'If they were doing this much development in New York, there would be even more if they could do that,' he said. Both marketers sang the praises of the New York State attorney general, Eliot Spitzer - whose office must examine all condo offering plans - as well as state regulations that keep buyers' down payments in escrow, rather than allowing developers to use them for construction costs. But with the distinctly Miami-influenced financing plan by Frank J. Sciame, the developer behind the Santiago Calatrava building planned at 80 South Street, in which he is taking down-payments starting at $7 million before securing financing for 10 town houses ranging from $29 million to $59 million each, there are indications that the approach to new development in New York may be changing. With regard to the Miami Model of controlled resales, Bruce D. Friedberg, a lawyer specializing in real estate, said he was surprised it was not done more often in New York, explaining that usually the opposite is the rule, with developers strongly restricting resales of the condos until as much as a year after closing. Mr. Friedberg saw the effects of a resale program when he had some 35 clients who were among the initial purchasers at the Chelsea Mercantile, a renovated warehouse condominium on the West Side of Manhattan developed by Rockrose Developments, in 1999. The initial offering plan, dated May 20, 1999, said that the 354 units would sell out at $251.45 million. By the time the 11th amendment was submitted to the attorney general's office that November, the sell-out price was $307.61 million. 'The demand was unbelievable,' Kevin P. Singleton, senior vice president at Rockrose Development, said of the Chelsea Mercantile project. In one of the amendments, the developer offered to take back the contract and split the market price with the initial buyer. For example, a buyer who had purchased for $1 million could, through this amendment, assign the contract to the developer and split the profit on the apartment, which was going for $1.5 million, leaving $250,000 each for the developer and the first buyer. By keeping an ear to the track, Mr. Singleton said, his firm knew even a year after initial sales that they would still have a line around the block if units were available. 'We could have sold 10 times the number of units we had,' he said. 'Filing an amendment is the only requirement. There is a limited downside for the developer.' Brad Maione, the spokesman for the attorney general's office, said in an e-mail message that the office takes no official position on the merits of particular provisions in an offering plan. Assigning the contract can be beneficial, he said, because it allows buyers who are unable to close or no longer interested in buying to find a substitute purchaser and not loose their down payments. It is certainly not as easy to institute a resale program as in other cities, but with large-scale condo development planned for West Chelsea, and areas like the Williamsburg/Greenpoint waterfront in Brooklyn, investors moving from one preconstruction project to another could become more common in New York. It will if Mr. Mathieson has anything to do with it. 'You're inviting more people, including investors, to take on the risk until the end user gets to the building,' he said. 'The end user wants a product they can look at. The investor is there to take the risk.'

Subject: fees? From: Ron Shawger To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 10:29:37 (EDT) Email Address: RShawger@wi.rr.com Message: In recognizing that the NY Times is instituting a fee to read many of their columnists I only recently discovered that it was the reader who was to pay them, not they who would pay the reader. to read Krugman, the former Enron advisor and actually have to pay for it the 'raping' of Enron seems only to be repeated by the 'raping' of anyone foolish enough to pay fof the priveladge to read an author, supposed economics professor, who spends much of his articles just making things up. He has from time to time had to 'go on the record' correcting his many mistakes about literal numbers but much of the time he writes one set of thoughts only to later write another set of thoughts they totally contradict the former.

Subject: You're hilarious Ron From: Erica To: Ron Shawger Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 10:59:56 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I liked your post. What were you going for? An idiot? A moron? A troll? Anyway, good stuff. I liked the whole I'm pretending I don't like the fees but not for the reasons you think I don't like them. That was just quality posting. Keep them coming!

Subject: Re: You're hilarious Ron From: Mik To: Erica Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 12:02:01 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I love the part about him 'being an Enron advisor'. That's right associate him with the Enron scandal... hahahaha. Erica is right you are hilarious. Maureen you have a partner. And I suppose both you and Maureen still believe in the WMD theory too?

Subject: Krugman Skating on Thin Ice From: Maureen D. To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 09:57:24 (EDT) Email Address: liberties@nytimes.com Message: Our Public Editor, Byron Calame, has called for enforcement of the NYTimes 'corrections policy' by Paul Krugman. Either Kruggy complies, or he's OUT: 'Meanwhile, in the opinion section of The Times, the corrections policy of Gail Collins, the editor of the editorial page, is not being fully enforced. As I have written on my Web journal, Paul Krugman has not been required to correct, in the paper, recent acknowledged factual errors in his column about the 2000 election in Florida. 'The Times has long been a trailblazer in its commitment to correcting errors [which might explain why Judith Miller is still in jail- ED.] . This is no time to let those standards slip – even when well-known critics and columnists are involved.'

Subject: Re: Krugman Skating on Thin Ice From: Anybody To: Maureen D. Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 12:55:21 (EDT) Email Address: anywhere@nytimes.com Message: this message is obviously a fake.

Subject: Re: Krugman Skating on Thin Ice From: Maureen To: Anybody Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 15:44:47 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Go read the Public Editor's column in Sunday's NYT, and you will see that the post is NOT a fake. The Time's own ombudsman basicaaly characterized Krugman as little more than a lying sack of crap.

Subject: Re: Krugman Skating on Thin Ice From: Norman Bauman To: Maureen Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 21:28:36 (EDT) Email Address: nbauman@escape.com Message: Go read the Public Editor's column in Sunday's NYT, and you will see that the post is NOT a fake. The Time's own ombudsman basicaaly characterized Krugman as little more than a lying sack of crap. --- I do not believe that your name actually is Maureen D. liberties@nytimes.com. Furthermore, I do not believe that Krugman will be 'OUT' if he doesn't apologize. I have had several exchanges with the old Public Editor, Daniel Okrent, and the new Public Editor, Byron Calame. Okrent told me, and others, that the columnists in the New York Times, such as Thomas Friedman (and his fake T-shirt story), operate by different rules and could not be held accountable for getting their facts wrong because they were writing opinion. http://www.thismodernworld.com/weblog/mtarchives/week_2004_03_07.html#001384 Now Calame has decided to go after the NYT's most prominent liberal columnist, with what I think is simply his own personal and politically-influenced disagreement with Krugman's conclusions. I wrote to Okrent about a news story (not a column) that violated the NYT's personal attack rules much more clearly than the Geraldo story that Calame used in his last column. Okrent was on his famous long summer vacation, so his assistant handled my complaint. He forwarded it to the responsible editor, and they ignored him. I followed up and they continued to ignore him. That should give you an idea of the Public Editor's power in the NYT hierarchy. If he bugs them, they ignore him, and nothing happens. That's probably what will happen if Krugman continues to ignore Calame, which is probably the best thing for Krugman to do. I met Calame, and he seemed like a reasonable guy, and I thought he would be a great choice for the Public Editor (certainly compared to Okrent, which is a low bar), but apparently he fooled me and underneath he's just a right wing nut. His columns on Geraldo and Krugman were simply repeating the complaints of the well-organized right-wing media attack machine, which is usually picking on trivial objections the way the creationists pick on trivial objections to the theory of evolution. OTOH, I'm beginning to suspect that the NYT appointed a Public Editor not to uphold professional journalistic standards, but as a sop to the right-wing attack squads. There's precedent for that -- during the Vietnam War, the managing editor, A.M. Rosenthal, launched a camaign to get rid of liberal reporters who were reporting bad news (i.e. the truth) about Vietnam (as documented in Gay Talese's book about the NYT, The Kingdom and the Power). OTOH, Krugman is phenominally popular at the NYT, as you could tell from their 'Most-forwarded' list. (Why do you think I paid $50?) They can't get rid of Krugman the way Rosenthal got rid of their anonymous reporters. The NYT readers are quite liberal, and he represents their views, and even in business terms, the NYT is responsible to its readers, not the right-wing blogosphere nuts.

Subject: Re: Krugman Skating on Thin Ice From: Mik To: Maureen Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 16:19:34 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I'm confused. Here is Krugman's correction to that article. What are you refering to? SYNOPSIS: This is a correction from Paul Krugman, published in The New York Times. It is regarding parts of three columns: What They Did Last Fall (8.19.05), Don't Prettify Our History (8.22.05), and Summer of Our Discontent (8.26.05), which discuss the topic of the stolen 2000 election In describing the results of the ballot study by the group led by the Miami Herald, I relied on the Herald’s own report, which listed only three hypothetical statewide recounts, two of which went to Al Gore. There was, however, a fourth recount, which would have gone to George W. Bush. In this case, the two stricter-standard recounts went to Mr. Bush. The later study, by a group including the New York Times, used two methods to count ballots: relying on the judgment of a majority of those examining each ballot, or requiring unanimity. Mr. Gore “won” all six hypothetical recounts on the majority basis. He lost one – in this case, the one using the loosest standard – on the unanimity basis. None of this has any bearing on my original point, which was not that the outcome would have been different if the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened - the Florida Supreme Court had not, in fact, called for a full statewide manual recount - but that the recorded vote was so close that, when you combine that fact with the effects of vote suppression and ballot design, it becomes reasonably clear that the voters of Florida, as well as those of the United States as a whole, tried to choose Mr. Gore. Originally published in The New York Times, 9.2.05

Subject: There is Much More to Come From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 17:02:06 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Though we cannot use the text of the New York Times Select articles, we can use the rest of the New York Times for discussion as always. The loss is regretted, but there is much much more left.

Subject: Inflation From: Pete Weis To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 09:02:19 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: From 'A Nasty Whiff of Inflation' 9/22/05 in The Economist: 'Stephen Roach, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley, worked at the Fed in the 1970s under the then chairman, Arthur Burns. He remembers the dangers of core inflation. When oil prices surged in 1973-74, Burns asked the Fed's economists to strip out energy from the consumer-price index (CPI) to get a less distorted measure. When food prices then rose sharply, they stripped those out too—followed by used cars, children's toys, jewellery, housing and so on, until around half the CPI basket was excluded because it was supposedly “distorted” by exogenous forces. As a result, the Fed failed to spot the breadth of emerging inflationary pressures throughout the economy.'

Subject: Exclusions- From: d To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 11:57:26 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The biggest exclusion of all is the price of homes. I own TIPS, they are a partial defense against inflation, not a complete one. What a conundrum, how to protect against inflation.

Subject: Re: Exclusions- From: Terri To: d Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 14:55:40 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Should the need be to protect against inflation, and I can understand that it may be, then stocks will be the preferred protection. I would much prefer Vanguard's value stock index to any sort of bonds if significant inflation is to recur. There are several Vanguard stock fund as well that I much prefer and would prefer if inflation is to be an issue.

Subject: Re: Exclusions- From: David E.. To: Terri Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 01:41:20 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: But that is too easy. They protect against inflation, but don't protect during deflation. During deflation a bond is the thing to have. You have to decide how much of each you need.

Subject: Re: Exclusions- From: Pete Weis To: David E.. Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 08:47:42 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Deflation is possible if the US consumer really starts to fade. But with the flood of dollars worldwide and increasing fiscal deficits in the US can the dollar hold up? The current account would begin to disappear with the fading consumer, but the US government will become the borrower and spender of last resort even as tax revenues decline and the fiscal deficit gets larger. I like to view inflation as a declining dollar, so it's a matter of deciding what does well relative to a declining dollar. Stocks and bond funds (which trade bonds) do poorly, in general, during economic slowdowns and a declining dollar.

Subject: Down then up From: David E.. To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 11:53:16 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: There could be a yo-yo effect. First big time inflation, dollar drops like a yo-yo. Then deflation, dollar pops back up. Get ready for the two step. Planning a portfolio to provide deflation and inflation insurance is tough. Especially if the insurance is only planned to cost less than 20% of returns. Luck is required.

Subject: Re: Down then up From: Pete Weis To: David E.. Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 11:17:19 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Could be a wild ride!!! These are definitely different times than almost any of us have experienced in our lifetimes!!!!

Subject: Re: Pete's whereabouts From: Dorian To: David E.. Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 05:43:17 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Hi Pete, Nice to see you here. You should keep us posted occasionally on your whereabouts. Regards, Dorian

Subject: Re: Pete's whereabouts From: Pete Weis To: Dorian Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 10:31:36 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: New England. Looking for a boat. While the housing market is still holding up, the boating market (atleast relatively large sailboats) seems to be slumping. I see the same boats on the market month after month and the prices dropping - the weird part of it - it makes me want to hold off to see how low they might go. If the housing market begins to slump will potential home buyers end up with the same buying hesitation? Then again maybe I'm just a weird contrarian. It probably has something to do with all the fascination with the housing markets and vacation homes as opposed to boats. Presently, I'm in a buyers market and boat brokers are calling me and telling me how frustrated their sellers are and asking what needs to be added or improved on their boat to get it sold. Anyway, when it comes to boats, I'm more of a 'Chevy' guy but my wife is more of a 'Mercedes' person and so I think we'll wait a little and see what happens.

Subject: Re: Inflation From: Terri To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 09:28:02 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Interesting, but there is no evidence now that general inflation is becoming a problem. The Federal Reserve is tightening short term interest rates and labor costs are all too contained. The problem may be that some of the price increases that are present are effecting classes of households differently, but the bond market is telling us that general inflation is not a problem.

Subject: The Big Uneasy From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 17:39:24 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://select.nytimes.com/2005/09/23/opinion/23krugman.html September 23, 2005 The Big Uneasy By PAUL KRUGMAN Although Hurricane Katrina drowned much of New Orleans, the damage to America's economic infrastructure actually fell short of early predictions. Of course, Rita may make up for that. But Katrina did more than physical damage; it was a blow to our self-image as a nation. Maybe people will quickly forget the horrible scenes from the Superdome, and the frustration of wondering why no help had arrived, once cable TV returns to nonstop coverage of missing white women. But my guess is that Katrina's shock to our sense of ourselves will persist for years. America's current state of mind reminds me of the demoralized mood of late 1979, when a confluence of events - double-digit inflation, gas lines and the Iranian hostage crisis - led to a national crisis of confidence. Start with economic confidence. The available measures say that consumer confidence, which was already declining before Katrina hit, has now fallen off a cliff. One well-respected survey, from the University of Michigan, says that consumer sentiment is at its lowest level since George Bush the elder was president and 'America: What Went Wrong?' was a national best seller. It's true that gasoline prices have receded from their post-Katrina peaks. But even if Rita spares the refineries, a full recovery of economic confidence seems unlikely. For one thing, it looks as if we're in for a long, cold winter: natural gas and fuel oil are still near their price peaks. And most families were already struggling even before Katrina. A few weeks ago, the Census Bureau reported that in 2004, while Washington and Wall Street were hailing a 'Bush boom,' poverty increased, and median family income failed to keep up with inflation. It's safe to assume that most families did even worse this year. Then there's the war in Iraq, which is rapidly becoming impossible to spin positively: the purple fingers have come and gone, and there are no more corners to turn. As a result, views that people like Howard Dean were once derided for are becoming the majority opinion. Most Americans say the war was a mistake; a majority say the administration deliberately misled the country into war; almost 4 in 10 say Iraq will turn into another Vietnam. And many people are outraged by the war's cost. The general public doesn't closely follow economists' arguments about the risks of budget deficits, or try to decide between competing budget projections. But people do know that there's a big deficit, that politicians keep calling for cuts in spending and that rebuilding after Katrina will cost a lot of money. They resent the idea that large sums are being spent in a faraway country, where we're waging a war whose purpose seems increasingly obscure. Finally, fragmentary evidence - like a sharp drop in the fraction of Americans who approve of President Bush's performance in handling terrorism and the failure of large crowds to show up for the Pentagon's 'America Supports You' march and country music concert - suggests that the confluence of Katrina and the fourth anniversary of 9/11 has caused something to snap in public perceptions about the 'war on terror.' In the early months after 9/11, America's self-confidence actually seemed to have been bolstered by the attack: the Taliban were quickly overthrown, and President Bush looked like an effective leader. The positive perception of what happened after 9/11 has, needless to say, been a mainstay of Mr. Bush's political stature. But now that more time has elapsed since 9/11 than the whole stretch from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, people are losing faith. Osama, it turns out, could both run and hide. It's obvious from the evening news that Al Qaeda and violent Islamic extremism in general are flourishing. And the hapless response to Katrina, which should have been easier to deal with than a terrorist attack, has shown that our leaders have done virtually nothing to make us safer. And here's the important point: these blows to our national self-image are mutually reinforcing. The sense that we're caught in an unwinnable war reinforces the sense that the economy is getting worse, and vice versa. So we're having a crisis of confidence. It's the kind of crisis that opens the door for dramatic political changes - possibly, but not necessarily, in a good direction. But who will provide leadership, now that Mr. Bush is damaged goods?

Subject: Re: The Big Uneasy From: Rich To: Emma Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 12:42:36 (EDT) Email Address: rmynick@comcast.net Message: I'm glad this PK article was posted here. But does anyone know if the PKarchive will no longer be posting Mr. Krugman's articles regularly in the 'Columns' section (now that the NYT is forcing readers to cough up cash for 'Times Select')?

Subject: Re: The Big Uneasy From: bill To: Rich Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 15:41:17 (EDT) Email Address: billcstosine@mchsi.com Message: PKarchive will no longer be posting Mr. Krugman's articles, but they are still easy enough to find elsewhere on the web for free. Just do a google groups search for the title of the latest column (put it in quotes) and the word Krugman (not in quots), i.e. 'The Big Easy' and Krugman - http://groups.google.com/grphp?hl=en&tab=wg&q= and you can come up with pages like this usually sometime during the first day they appear. Someone - usually a different person every time - is always going to be posting columns: http://snipurl.com/hx3v I don't know how The Times is going to force these pages to go away.

Subject: Re: The Big Uneasy From: David E.. To: bill Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 17:42:34 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: It will be easy. The Wall Street Journal does it all the time. Start lawsuits for violation of copyright. The WSJ doesn't sell its opinion columns, only the NYTimes does. The search for profit centers creates strange results. Maybe the library computer will have the columns.

Subject: Re: The Big Uneasy From: Emma To: David E.. Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 17:59:43 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: As long as the New York Times articles and editorials as left for us, all will be well.

Subject: The Desire to Draw From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 14:14:25 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/arts/design/16cott.html?ex=1284523200&en=88b956b56a278f8b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 16, 2005 The Desire to Draw, Sometimes a Compulsion By HOLLAND COTTER Every now and then contemporary art delivers a little surprise, which is why I love it. The American Folk Art Museum just opened an 'emerging talent' show, its first, titled 'Obsessive Drawing.' Frankly, the idea sounded like a sop thrown to a Babes-in-Chelsealand art moment. But 'emerging,' as it turns out, is relative. One of the five artists being introduced, Eugene Andolsek, is 83. A former railroad employee, he lives in a senior citizens' home in Crabtree, Pa., and stopped painting two years ago because of failing eyesight. He has never shown before. He doesn't even consider his sumptuously patterned, labor-intensive colored-ink drawings to be art, and seems to disapprove of anyone who does. The thing is, the work is really good, rich and solid, but also trippy and full of little elegancies, which makes it look very now. But why, if Mr. Andolsek wasn't thinking art, or audience, did he do what he did for so long, drawing thousands of pictures over 50 years? Because he wanted to, and because he had to, which in his case are more or less the same thing. The act of drawing and painting, he has said, helped to ease a debilitating anxiety that had dogged him all his life. Once he started a drawing, the anxiety lifted. Relief arrived as a state of entrancement. One minute he'd be sitting at his kitchen table with sheets of graph paper and a pen filled with ink. The next, he'd be aware that hours had passed, and he'd done a drawing. What was the mechanism responsible? He's not sure, but it worked for a creative half century. The other artists in the exhibition, which has been organized by Brooke Anderson, director and curator of the museum's Contemporary Center, are similarly, if differently, driven to art. So 'obsessive,' too, is relative. It can describe pathological behavior - art as a motor constantly running, a habit, a twitch - or therapy for such behavior. It can indicate an aesthetic style, a 'look,' defined by, say, repetition of forms or motifs, or by excruciatingly micromanaged details. By such standards, all sorts of artists, from the Boucicault Master to Picasso, fall into the obsessive camp. But the show is talking, directly or by implication, about something else: in a word, abnormality, art as a symptom of psychological disorder, the Outsider phenomenon. Debates about the ethics and efficacy of Outsider Art as a category, with an aura of exceptionalism and exoticism, are old by now. For many observers the matter boils down to whether the art in question is interesting to look at and think about even without the support of biographical data. For much of the historical work that now constitutes an Outsider canon, the answer is yes, as it is for the work in this spare, tidy show. The installation actually opens with the canon, or selections from it, in a salon-style hanging of work by figures from the past like Madge Gill, Consuelo González Amezcua, A. G. Rizzoli and Adolph Wolfi, with a few Pennsylvania German Fraktur pictures mixed in to distinguish obsessive from merely intricate or busy. The binding element, though, in old work and new, is drawing itself, expressive or notational. In Mr. Andolsek's abstract pictures, done on sheets of graph paper the size of placemats, lines are so meticulously executed that they look machine-tooled. Often thick and black, they define patterns - baroque swags, space-filling grids, jazzy zigzags - and enclose color. The overall impression of locked-in, airtight harmony brings work of the late Al Held to mind, though certain pictures with compositional asymmetries also resemble cut pieces of printed cloth, swatches from a grand continuous fabric. Abstract drawings by Hiroyuki Doi, a Japanese artist born in 1946, are also products of trancelike concentration, but their method is free-form and incremental. Each design is built up from countless small-to-tiny black ink circles drawn in dense, foamlike clusters, with the clusters coalescing into larger forms that suggest mountains, galactic clouds or fleshy mounds. Mr. Doi's drawings evoke a whole lineage of cumulative circle-intensive art, led by Yayoi Kusama and Atsuko Tanaka. And to this he adds a specific personal motivation. According to a wall text, he regards his pictures as exercises in cosmic and personal rejuvenation that he feels compelled to perform. The work of Martin Thompson, a street artist from Wellington, New Zealand, is based on mathematical calculation. He draws intricate, digital-looking patterns on graph paper by filling in individual squares with colored ink. He then hand-copies the design, square by square, onto a second sheet of paper, but in reverse, from positive to negative. This emphasis on the laborious performances of repetitive sequences is reminiscent of certain conceptual art of the 1960's and 70's. But Mr. Thompson's physical immersion in his work, which extends to making surgically precise cut-and-paste corrections, connects the realm of detached ideas to that of extreme handcrafting. Charles Benefiel, who was born in 1967, and lives in New York and New Mexico, is the only artist in the exhibition to have been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which he controls in part through his art. His Minimalist-looking drawings are, like Mr. Thompson's, grounded in numerical calculation, but have a critical dimension. To Mr. Benefiel, numbers, by which people are routinely identified and tracked, add up to a dehumanizing force. And both to warm up his world view and symbolically dodge computational surveillance, he has invented a mathematically based private language of dots, circles and dashes that correspond to spoken sounds and musical notes. His art consists of strings of these forms written horizontally across sheets of paper, with results that look like Agnes Martin drawings made of fine beadwork. The British-born artist Chris Hipkiss is the show's only figurative artist and contributes its most spectacular work, a 35-foot-long pencil-drawn narrative titled 'Lonely Europe Arm Yourself.' The panorama seems to depict the aftermath of environmental destruction, which has left behind only fortress walls, factory smokestacks, grotesquely sexualized trees and squadrons of transgendered figures in dominatrix attire. The terrain is like a nuked version of Stanley Spencer's Cookham; the figures like Henry Darger's Vivian girls grown up to be avenging punk-Valkyries. And the work, dated 1994-95, is right in synch with a trend for fantasy narrative in the mainstream art world today. At the same time, though, it stands apart from that trend and that world, though in ways hard to define. Maybe it is just that in addition to formal brilliance and conceptual ambition, there is something unguarded about Mr. Hipkiss's art, and that of his 'emerging' colleagues. Much of their work conveys, through content or form, a sense of exposed privacy. This is art that can neither be expressively tempered, nor politically corrected, nor marketably slotted by that great vetting, veneering machine called the art industry. So it stays volatile, radioactive, problematically hot. Is this why our mainstream institutions are so reluctant to exhibit it? Because they're afraid of it, afraid of its unpredictablity, afraid of how its intense singularity will react with, clash with, even infect other art? I don't have an answer, but it is questions like this that keep my passion - crazy, I know - for contemporary art alight.

Subject: In Place Where Hungry Are Fed, Hunger From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 13:48:04 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/22/international/africa/22niger.html?ex=1285041600&en=9be0fc0627db213f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 22, 2005 In Place Where the Hungry Are Fed, Farmers May Starve By NATASHA C. BURLEY NIAMEY, Niger - The images coming out of this impoverished, West African nation have been unrelentingly grim: hungry children with stick-thin arms and swollen bellies, mothers carrying babies hundreds of miles to look for food after a poor harvest and high prices put local staples out of reach. A few months ago, those images prompted a torrent of food aid from Western donors. But now, after a season of good rains, Niger's farmers are producing a bumper crop of millet, the national staple. This should be a cause for rejoicing, yet in one of the twists that mark life in the world's poorest countries, the aid that was intended to save lives could ruin the harvest for many of Niger's farmers by driving down prices. The newly harvested millet and the donated food will reach market stalls at the same time, and with prices depressed, poor farming families may be forced to sell crops normally set aside for their own use and use the money to pay off debts. The effect would be a new cycle of hunger and poverty. Dr. Edward Clay of the Overseas Development Institute, an independent research organization in London, said by e-mail that because the donated food was delayed, 'there is a real risk that late arrival will disrupt recovery in Niger and distort agricultural trade within West Africa.' Millet is grown by almost all of the nation's farmers, but the crop has become one of the factors that work against the people of Niger and in favor of malnutrition and hunger. A distant cousin of corn, it is a hardy crop but provides almost no protein or other nutrients essential for the diets of children, and requires hours of daily pounding to be made edible. Amadou Hassane, a millet farmer north of Niamey, has begun harvesting some of the millet in his fields for his family. 'It is wonderful to be able to give millet to my wife to pound,' he said, proudly fiddling with his tall stalks. 'This year promises to be plentiful, and we're grateful.' But he said he would sell much of his harvest to repay debts incurred to buy seedlings after last year's drought devastated his millet plants and left him with nothing to sell. 'I'll keep no more than half of my harvest as stock for myself, and sell the rest to pay back my debts,' he said. 'I badly need cash.' Since he, and most other farmers in the muddy village of Fala, borrowed money, he will have to sell a greater proportion of his harvest if prices are low. To survive the lean season - the period after household stocks are gone and before the new harvest - Mr. Hassane engaged in a sort of futures market, borrowing against his next harvest so he could buy seed. Sani Laoualy, a researcher with the government program that provides information about agricultural markets, said millet began arriving in markets in noticeable quantities in the first two weeks of September, and prices were beginning to fall. 'Over all, prices fell 14 percent between the 7th of September and the 14th of September,' he said, adding that in some areas in the east of the country, millet prices were nearly on par with normal years. But, he warned, 'prices will fall rapidly over the next six weeks.' The World Food Program in Niamey concluded its first round of food distributions on Thursday, according to Marcus Prior, the West Africa spokesman for the food program. Those areas, however, in the humid southeast of Niger, also have the most promising harvests, and hundreds of acres of millet fields are currently being harvested. Tensions are rising among donors as various officials and organizations have called for distributions to cease, for fear of depressing prices for local farmers. Thirty thousand tons of food, to be trucked up from neighboring Benin and from Togo, has yet to reach Niger, but Gian Carlo Cirri, the World Food Program representative in Niger, insisted that all distribution could be done by Oct. 15. 'Harvests do not happen in one day, and we have time,' he said. If the distribution network, likened by Mr. Cirri to a cruise ship on auto-pilot and difficult to stop, is unable to give out all the food by then, plans are being made by the government of Niger and the United Nations to replenish the national cereal stock. Most international aid organizations have been resisting the World Food Program's decision to continue distributions until mid-October because of the impact on local markets, although Doctors Without Borders wants them to continue because so many people have yet to be fed. 'People responsible for the distributions have a responsibility to monitor prices and be prepared to stop giving out food if prices fall too low,' insisted Jeremy Lester, a senior European Union official in Niger. 'This is an emergency response to a chronic problem,' Mr. Lester said, referring to the distribution of food aid. 'And as these responses go, they often create as many problems as they solve: the poorest will have to continue to sell cheap and buy dear.' Faster U.S. Aid Unlikely A Bush administration proposal that sought to deliver a portion of American food aid more quickly and at lower cost to starving people around the world appears headed for defeat in Congress, though there is still a narrow chance a scaled-down version will survive in the Senate. The administration asked for authority to use a quarter of the $1.2 billion food aid budget provided to the Agency for International Development to buy corn, wheat and other commodities in the developing countries facing hunger crises, or in neighboring countries, rather than from American producers. Now, the government must buy the food in American markets and send most of it on American-flagged ships. Officials at the Agency for International Development said that having the flexibility to buy the food for an African crisis in Africa would make it possible to respond in some cases in weeks instead of months, feed more people with the same amount of money and potentially save thousands of lives. Andrew S. Natsios, administrator of the agency, said the government would be able to buy twice as much food for the same money in some situations because of the savings on transportation. 'You can't eat transportation,' he said. But the change was dropped from the Senate's version of the agriculture appropriations bill expected to be voted on this week, though there is a chance part of the proposal will be restored. The provision was not in the House version, passed in June. The measure ran into fierce opposition from an array of agricultural and shipping interests with stakes in the program. And an alliance of nonprofit groups that receive food aid money also opposed using the program's core financing to buy food in developing countries. Rather, they favored a $100 million pilot program that would only go forward if Congress appropriated extra money for food aid, which they say is indefensibly short of money. A range of agricultural and development economists have long said such a policy option is sensible, so long as it is used wisely. But it is not always the best course, especially where there is a widespread shortage of food and purchasing locally would drive up prices, making food even less affordable. But researchers and aid workers say it can be useful when there is a surplus in a different part of an afflicted nation or in a nearby country.

Subject: Little friday humour From: Setanta To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 12:08:10 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: seeing as its 1704(gmt) on a friday evening, i thought i'd inject a little humour to cheer everyone up for the weekend. for those of you unfortunate to be located 3000-6000 miles west of here, enjoy the next 5-8 hours of your working day! Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing. He concludes by saying: 'Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed in an accident' 'OH NO!' the President exclaims. 'That's terrible!' His staff sits stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the president sits, head in hands Finally, the President looks up and asks.......... 'How many is a Brazillion??!'

Subject: Censored... in the name of the Lord From: Setanta To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 11:39:42 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: What are decent-minded, US Christian conservatives to do if they want to watch a film without upsetting their sensibilities? Now they can watch their favourite movie stripped of any sex and violence, says Andrew Gumbel A few years ago, it dawned on American food manufacturers there was an intriguing hole in the market to fill: vegetarians who wanted to eat hamburgers while remaining vegetarian, or vegans who had a craving for egg salad. Today, the supermarkets are filled with bean curd-based meatless burgers and eggless egg salads, and they are hot sellers. As with food, so it is with films. What are decent-minded middle-American Christian conservatives to do if they abhor sex, bad language, illicit drug use and gut-spilling violence but still have an urge to see Saving Private Ryan? Or Goodfellas? Or The Amityville Horror? The beginnings of an answer came a few years ago with the advent of CleanFlicks, a kitchen-sized Utah company that decided to offer videos and DVD for rental - after they had been edited to remove all content likely to be offensive to the local Mormon population. Today, that kitchen-sized enterprise has turned into a veritable industry, spanning numerous states and attracting the attention of both lawyers and politicians all the way to Washington. CleanFlicks is going from strength to strength, offering its services on a monthly subscription basis much like the wildly successful mainstream company Netflix. And a second, even more sophisticated, company called ClearPlay, also based in Utah, has sprung up. ClearPlay doesn't edit the films as such, but rather offers a series of filters so individual consumers can decide how much sex or violence they want to tolerate. Fancy seeing A Mighty Wind, the gentle Christopher Guest satire spoofing folk music, but without the 'revealing clothing'? No problem. Want to see a gritty urban drama like the recently released Crash, which examines racism in Los Angeles, but without the 'implied premarital sex'? Just press the appropriate button on your DVD menu and you can relax in the knowledge that all suggestions of illicit nookie have been purged ahead of time. The service has not only proved popular in conservative states such as Utah. There is some evidence it appeals to a much broader range of movie consumers, particularly families concerned about the content Hollywood is throwing at their children, even at a tender age. The sanitising companies have even set to work on Shrek and Shrek II, finding the animated smash hits replete with squirm-inducing sexual innuendo and language that may not be cursing as such but is still too salty for their puritan tastes. The film industry, as might be expected, has not reacted well. Starting three years ago, when CleanFlicks started making its first serious commercial inroads, the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild have been railing at what they see as a straightforward infringement of intellectual property. For while their work is modified and edited all the time - for broadcast on television or on commercial plane flights, for example - the difference is that these modifications are done with their permission, through formal licensing agreements. CleanFlicks and ClearPlay don't ask for permission from anyone, arguing instead that their adjustments and amendments fall under the category of 'fair use'. The two sides quickly fell into a predictable legal dispute, which dragged on until earlier this year when the Bush administration itself decided to get involved and passed the Family Movie Act, which sanctioned what the sanitisers were doing and was signed into law explicitly to make the legal challenge from the Hollywood bigwigs - among them Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and a host of other first-rank directors - vanish into the judicial ether. As far as the White House was concerned, the law was an easy way of appealing to the Republican Party's fundamentalist Christian base and bashing one of its favourite targets - Hollywood's free-speech liberals. Quite a few Democrats jumped on board as well, partly because of a perceived need to defer to the conservative 'family values' agenda and partly because the Bill also embraced a handful of anti-piracy provisions that the film industry was keen to see entered into law. From a cultural point of view, though, the debate has left several questions unanswered. One, if people really don't like watching films where characters behave badly, drink alcohol, have sex or slice each other with carving knives, why don't they simply avoid them altogether? Two, aren't they conflating the very different issues of protecting children from Hollywood inanity and mauling the work of genuine film artists who have a specific vision to express, and a specific way to express it? And three, if Christian fundamentalists are really so sensitive about entertainment products featuring distinctly non-Christian behaviour, how come the Bible Belt watches television shows like Desperate Housewives - about a group of bored, drug-addled, adulterous suburban women - more avidly than any other region in the country? The hypocrisies of excessive puritanism have been an irresistible spectator sport for centuries, not just in the United States, and the advent of the DVD profanity police is no exception. Part of the fun of visiting the ClearPlay website, over and above the intriguing categories available for censorship (what, one wonders, qualifies as a 'non-graphic injury/wound'?), is seeing where the content police were forced to give up. The site's listing for Crash, for example, includes this line: 'Filter settings not available: ethnic and social slurs'. In a film preoccupied to the point of obsession with racist attitudes and behaviour, one would think not. But surely someone somewhere will still take offence? The CleanFlicks site is even funnier when it delves into the technical minutiae of censorship. The list of profanities the company says it systematically excises includes 'the B-words, the H-word when not referring to the place, the D-word, the S-word, the F-word etc . . . ' It also includes references to deity (G-word and JC-words etc), only when these words are used in a 'non-religious context'. One could spend an afternoon figuring out what all these forbidden terms are. The criteria for violence are intriguing, not least because the puritan right wing in the US has clearly had much less of a problem over the years with blood and guts than it has, say, with teenage kissing. (Pain being a much less problematic category for them than pleasure.) Sure enough, CleanFlicks tells us it doesn't edit all violence - 'only the graphic depictions of decapitation, impalements, dismemberment, excessive blood, gore etc'. The founder of CleanFlicks, Ray Lines, first had the idea for his business in the late 1990s, when he prepared a sanitised version of Titanic for his Mormon neighbours minus the relatively brief moments of nudity and sex. Soon he was taking it upon himself to decide all kinds of sensitive cultural questions. He once told The New York Times about Schindler's List, the Oscar-winning Holocaust drama: 'Every teenager in America should see it. But I don't think my daughters should see naked old men running around in circles.' ClearPlay, meanwhile, is the brainchild of Lee and Matt Jarman, two brothers from the heavily Mormon town of Orem, who developed the software that enables them to place filters on commercial DVDs. Copyright lawyers and entertainment executives tend to have fewer problems with their operation, because the DVD that arrives in the consumer's hands is intact, and it is up to each individual viewer how to edit the content, much as they might on their own - albeit more crudely - with the fast-forward button on their remote. CleanFlicks, on the other hand, not only modifies the films without permission, but then makes money on the basis of those modifications. Without the Family Movie Act, it seems likely the company would have fallen foul of the law and lost its legal battle with the Directors Guild. Despite the passing of the Act, the judge indicated his displeasure at the video companies' behaviour by ordering them to meet their own costs even as he threw out the case against them. It's 'Kill Bill' without the killing TROY Brad Pitt has been summoned to kill his enemy. He raises his sword, runs towards him, and then . . . er, not much. CleanFlicks cuts away to another shot. 'The point we would make here is that you still see the guy dies, you still see that Brad Pitt killed him, and so you don't really take away from the story of what's going on,' explains company founder Ray Lines. GOSFORD PARK The refined world portrayed in Robert Altman's film is even more buttoned-up after ClearPlay has done its work on Julian Fellowes' screenplay. When one valet, describing his master, says: 'He thinks he's God almighty. They all do,' the first sentence is cut out, leaving: 'They all do.' The result? A rather cryptic comment which makes no sense. BRAVEHEART Foul language is muted rather than skipped in this stirring tale of Scottish nationalism, while close-ups of bodily contact and battle wounds are kept in. But the famous mooning scene, involving Mel Gibson's bottom and the English army, is skipped altogether and most of the battle is cut. William Wallace would be turning in his grave! SAVING PRIVATE RYAN The notorious 24-minute opening scene involving D-Day death and gore on the Normandy beaches is made far more palatable, as is the generally brutal depiction of battle throughout. Despite director Steven Spielberg's insistence that these images are critical in showing the sacrifice of troops and the true nature of warfare, CleanFlicks finds them too much to take. THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS For an action flick, the edited version of The Matrix Revolutions doesn't contain much action. Viewers expecting foul-mouthed threats and a cut-throat fight between good and evil are more likely to be entertained by such dastardly warnings as: 'The only way you're getting through this door is over my big dead (muted word)!' THE GODFATHER In the sanitised version of The Godfather, Sonny Corleone (played by James Caan) does not die in a hail of bullets pounding relentlessly into his car. He just . . . well, he's sort of there one minute and gone the next. And the notoriously gory horse's head bit? Eighteen seconds is cut from one of the most famous scenes in recent cinema history.

Subject: Rita is climate change's smoking gun From: Setanta To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 11:29:10 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: SUPER-POWERFUL hurricanes now hitting the United States are the 'smoking gun' of global warming, one of world's leading scientists believes. The growing violence of storms such as Katrina, which wrecked New Orleans, and Rita, now threatening Texas, is very probably caused by climate change, said Sir John Lawton, chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Hurricanes were getting more intense, just as computer models predicted they would, because of the rising temperature of the sea, he said. 'The increased intensity of these kinds of extreme storms is very likely to be due to global warming.' In a series of outspoken comments - a thinly veiled attack on the Bush administration, Sir John hit out at neoconservatives in the US who still deny the reality of climate change. Referring to the arrival of Hurricane Rita he said: 'If this makes the climate loonies in the States realise we've got a problem, some good will come out of a truly awful situation.' As he spoke, more than a million people were fleeing north away from the coast of Texas as Rita, one of the most intense storms on record, roared through the Gulf of Mexico. It will probably make landfall tonight or early tomorrow near Houston, America's fourth largest city and the centre of its oil industry. Highways leading inland from Houston were clogged with traffic for up to 100 miles north. There are real fears that Houston could suffer as badly from Rita just as New Orleans suffered from Hurricane Katrina less than a month ago. Asked what conclusion the Bush administration should draw from two hurricanes of such high intensity hitting the US in quick succession, Sir John said: 'If what looks like is going to be a horrible mess causes the extreme sceptics about climate change in the US to reconsider their opinion, that would be an extremely valuable outcome.' Asked about characterising them as 'loonies,' he said: 'There are a group of people in various parts of the world . . . who simply don't want to accept human activities can change climate and are changing the climate.' 'I'd liken them to the people who denied that smoking causes lung cancer.' With his comments, Sir John becomes the third of the leaders of Britain's scientific establishment to attack the US over the Bush government's determination to cast doubt on global warming as a real phenomenon. There is a growing international campaign for the Bush administration to recognise the worsening climate change problems now being visited upon the earth. Sir John's comments follow and support recent research, much of it from America itself, showing that hurricanes are getting more violent and suggesting climate change is the cause. A paper by US researchers, last week in the US journal Science, showed that storms of the intensity of Hurricane Katrina have become almost twice as common in the past 35 years. Although the overall frequency of tropical storms worldwide has remained broadly level since 1970, the number of extreme category 4 and 5 events has sharply risen. In the 1970s, there was an average of about 10 category 4 and 5 hurricanes per year but, since 1990, they have nearly doubled to an average of about 18 a year. During the same period, sea surface temperatures, among the key drivers of hurricane intensity, have increased by an average of 0.5C (0.9F). Sir John said: 'Increasingly it looks like a smoking gun. It's a fair conclusion to draw that global warming, caused to a substantial extent by people, is driving increased sea surface temperatures and increasing the violence of hurricanes.' Earlier this year another scientist Sir David King cited the evidence of hurricane Catarina, the first and only hurricane recorded in the South Atlantic, which struck southern Brazil in March 2004, where the textbooks say they should not form as further evidence of climate change. Clearly the Bush administration believes politically these storms can wreak havoc on his second term in office. As a result they have opened the flood gates on Federal funding to head off criticism. When President Bush promised last week that the US would spend hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild the Gulf Coast it was the latest step in the remarkable conversion of the Republican Party from the party of fiscal prudence into the progenitors of the next New Deal and Great Society combined. The rhetoric, it is true, has been all about the virtues of small government. But since 2000 the Republican controlled Congress and White House have been on a spending binge that would make any self-respecting banana republic blush. Stripping out the public spending that is mandated, such as on pensions, in the last four years, federal spending has increased by more than it did in the previous 17 years.

Subject: What is oligarchy? From: HJ To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 08:17:07 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: $200K check most certainly looks like a terrific opportunity for somebody who already has a healthy family, a house and a job. But what about stressed, sick, homeless and jobless refugees? What will happen if they will get such checks as a disaster relief? In fact, this is exactly what neoliberal enthusiast Lansdsburg suggests as an idea of 'small government' hurricane aid effort. The answer is, this approach will turn the refugees into an oligrachy. A tiny majority of well-connected thugs will find ways to pocket almost all the funds and 'globalize' them, export into foreign banks and investments. This will be a perfectly smart way to protect themselves against inflation, law enforcement and curiosity of those who are less lucky. As for the rest, they will remain where they are or worse. Sounds familiar? Yes, this is how poverty is reproduced in the 3rd world 'banana republics'. This is also how Katrina victims are likely to be robbed - although concrete implementation of the scam will be much more sophisticated. 1. Steven E.Landsburg. Hurricane Relief? Or a 200K Check? I'd take the check, and so would most of Katrina's victims: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126715/fr/rss http://inplainview.monitor.us.tt

Subject: Schröder and Germany From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 16:45:34 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://select.nytimes.com/2005/09/21/international/europe/21globalist.html September 21, 2005 Schröder and Germany - Can both prevail? By ROGER COHEN International Herald Tribune BERLIN In politics as in life, it is important to distinguish between a brilliant performance and a victory. But whether Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, is capable of that remains unclear. I'm inclined to indulge Schröder in his giddy swagger after an extraordinary come-from-behind rally in the German election that left his Social Democratic Party, or SPD, less than a percentage point behind Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, or CDU. After suffering the naysayers for months, he felt inclined to gloat. Fair enough. Still, Schröder's televised mocking of Merkel, who did after all stake a claim to succeed him by getting more votes, was something to behold. In a voice laced with contempt, the chancellor tormented his cornered-in-victory rival: 'Do you really, honestly, believe that in the current circumstances my party would accept an offer from Ms. Merkel to hold talks in which she says she wants to become chancellor?' he said, relishing each word as if it were a succulent truffle. 'Come on, we must not take leave of our senses.' If that was remarkable from a man whose party had just seen its vote share plunge to 34.3 percent from 38.5 percent in 2002, so was Merkel's reaction. Or rather, her nonreaction: All Merkel could offer to Germany and the world was the stunned, coy, awkward visage of an amateur politician taken aback by a pro's onslaught. So there you have it - the braggadocio of a chancellor who lost his gamble that an early election would consolidate his power and the bewilderment of an opponent undermined so completely in a Pyrrhic victory that she resembles an emptied vessel. The hanging chads of Palm Beach County are beginning to look quaint compared with Germany's electoral agony. But hold on a second. This is Germany, not Florida. This is the land where bad history dictates that stability, and particularly institutional stability, is prized above all. Is Schröder not playing with fire by insisting he has a mandate to remain chancellor even if his party has fewer seats than Merkel's in the Bundestag? I doubt that the chancellor is putting the Federal Republic at risk. We are a long way from Weimar. The Constitution demands that Schröder stay on until another chancellor is elected, and Merkel does not yet have the parliamentary votes to stake a claim. There's nothing illegal about Schröder's maneuver. What he is doing is playing hardball - and damn the consequences for a stagnant Germany and a Europe in a search of direction. The decent gesture is not part of Schröder's lexicon right now. If precedent suggests that the head of the largest party should form the government, damn precedent! He wants his resurgence to be recognized. With what? The head of Merkel, it seems. Joschka Fischer, the Green foreign minister, said Monday that Merkel 'will not become chancellor.' Fischer knows Schröder's thinking. The current Red-Green government seems to be saying the price of a grand SPD-CDU coalition is Merkel's departure. Fischer and Schröder have been around long enough to know that the young wolves of Merkel's party, not least the rising state premiers Christian Wulff and Roland Koch, would shed no tears if she exited as suddenly as she emerged from East Germany's ruins. But that is not about to happen. For the moment the CDU is rallying around its leader, who has said, quite accurately, that 'We have emerged as the strongest party' and, less accurately, that she has 'a clear mandate to govern.' Merkel, in fact, has no clear mandate, and certainly not for the center-right government of free-market, bureaucracy-slashing reformers she sought. The departure back to university life of Paul Kirchhof, the flat-tax proponent whom she had picked to be her finance minister, symbolized the death of this idea. He went with a whimper. Indeed, the truth is that Germany is leaning left. The SPD, the new Left Party and the Greens have over 50 percent of the vote between them. It is only because the ex-Communists and assorted gauchistes of the Left Party are considered unacceptable by the SPD that Germany is not about to go for a latter-day Popular Front. In short, heady days have descended on Berlin, the headiest since the government moved back here from Bonn six years ago. There is no fever on the capital's leafy streets, but there is anxiety. That anxiety is justified. The institutions of the republic are hardly functioning, and unclear majorities and inertia are the result. Before the election, the paralysis lay in the impasse produced by a lower house, the Bundestag, and an upper house, the Bundesrat, dominated by different parties. Now it lies in an electoral result so little conducive to governance that new elections may prove necessary. 'There is a whiff of the Fourth Republic about Germany today,' said Karl Kaiser, a political scientist. He was referring to the French republic that collapsed in 1958 when its ineffective governments were replaced by the strong presidency conceived by Charles de Gaulle for the Fifth Republic. Institutional reform may well prove necessary in Germany, too, but first the country needs a government. By Oct. 18, Parliament must assemble to pick a chancellor. Merkel is still the marginal favorite - she may be able to cajole Fischer's Greens into joining the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats after all - but Germany's political waters have not been so muddy since the Republic's foundation in 1949. Schröder needs to think hard about that. The country he leads is not Luxembourg, Belgium or even Spain. It's Germany, the continent's mother lode, the nation that still stirs some unease in the collective European subconscious. Prudence and statesmanship are therefore at a premium, the kind that recognize that even a brilliant comeback is still a defeat if more votes and more parliamentary seats go to your opponent. The Berlin Republic, of which Schröder is the first and so far the only chancellor, is not ready for some Germanic rerun of Florida 2000.

Subject: Faulty Levees From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 16:31:20 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/22/opinion/22thur2.html?ex=1285041600&en=68ec75ddeb726e32&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 22, 2005 Faulty Levees The official explanation for the collapse of some of the flood walls protecting New Orleans has been that Hurricane Katrina simply overwhelmed the system. But reports yesterday in both The Washington Post and The New York Times suggested that Katrina might not have been as powerful as advertised and that the real culprit was the system itself - flood walls so poorly constructed that they were easily breached. This points a finger at either the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversaw the design and construction of the flood walls, or Congress, which appears to have underfinanced the projects, or both. Corps officials have said all along that the system was not designed to protect the city from hurricanes larger than Category 3, and corps spokesmen continue to insist that Katrina was a Category 4 hurricane when it hit the Gulf Coast. But federal meteorologists now say that New Orleans did not get the full brunt of the storm, whose strongest winds passed dozens of miles east of the city. What's more, sustained winds over Lake Ponchartrain reached only 95 miles per hour, even less than the winds of 111 to 130 miles per hour in a Category 3 storm. Other research, meanwhile, has turned up serious weaknesses in the thinner and less stable flood walls built along the city's canal system beginning in the 1960's. The failure of these walls - particularly along 17th Street and London Avenue - led to much of the devastation. Here again the research seems to contradict the official version, which is that extraordinary surges reached the top of or even 'overtopped' the flood walls, causing some sections to collapse. Yet Louisiana State University researchers doubt the water ever got that high. Even if it had, they argue, it would have been contained by properly constructed flood walls - essentially concrete slabs that resemble the sound barriers found beside highways. A detailed analysis of the storm and of the city's defenses will take months. It is not clear, for instance, whether the flood walls' weaknesses were the result of faulty engineering and shoddy workmanship on the corps' part or whether they resulted from Congress's unwillingness over the years to provide enough money and leadership to do the job properly. What is clear is that whatever investigation Congress undertakes, either on its own or with outside counsel, it must meet high standards of diligence and spare no one, including those in Congress.

Subject: Re: Faulty Levees From: Aeneas To: Emma Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 15:55:14 (EDT) Email Address: aeneas_50@yahoo.com Message: It isinteresting to write about engineering handbooks and standards. They are meaningless unless you review the actual design of the levies. The designer needed to know what category storm to build toward then the designer would have used the handbook and some sense to design the levies. If the design were 'good' which is a big 'if' and a degree of freedom which creates risk the levie would break then the design has to be build with sufficient materials and workmanship to achieve the design. Another degree of risk introduced and looking at the pork nature of the Corps of Engineers looms pretty large. Then the levies have to be 'maintained'. Another root cause of failure. But, if all the causes of engineering implementation were covered for a cat 3; a cat 4 would very likely over come the levies. The big issue is why were there no plans to react forcefully and quickly with materials on hand for a levie breech? If you design something with faiulure risk there must be a plan and assets to overcome the failure with minimum damage to the poor black neighborhood the levies were protecting. Massive failure of the Corps!

Subject: The World is Round From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 14:27:53 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18154 August 11, 2005 The World is Round By John Gray - New York Review of Books The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century By Thomas L. Friedman 1. The belief that a process of globalization is underway which is bringing about a fundamental change in human affairs is not new. Marx and Engels expressed it in 1848, when they wrote in a justly celebrated passage in The Communist Manifesto: All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with his sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.... It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. Marx and Engels had no doubt that they were witnessing the emergence of a global market—a worldwide system of production and consumption that disregarded national and cultural boundaries. They welcomed this development, not only for the increasing wealth it produced but also because they believed it enabled humanity to overcome the divisions of the past. In the global marketplace nationalism and religion were destined to be dwindling forces. There would be many convulsions—wars, revolutions, and counterrevolutions—before the Communist order was securely established; but when global capitalism had completed its work a new era in the life of humankind would begin. The centrally planned economies that were constructed to embody Marx's vision of communism have nearly all been swept away, and the mass political movements that Marxism once inspired are no more. Yet Marx's view of globalization lives on, and nowhere more vigorously than in the writings of Thomas Friedman. Like Marx, Friedman believes that globalization is in the end compatible with only one economic system; and like Marx he believes that this sys-tem enables humanity to leave war, tyranny, and poverty behind. To his credit Friedman recognizes the parallels between his view and that of Marx. He cites an illuminating conversation at Harvard in which the communitarian political theorist Michael Sandel alerted him to the fact that the process of global 'flattening' he examines in his new book was first identified by Marx, quoting at length from The Communist Manifesto—including the passage cited above—and praising Marx for his prescience. This acknowledgment of the parallels between his view of globalization and Marx's theory of history is welcome and useful. Friedman has emerged as the most powerful contemporary publicist of neoliberal ideas. Neoliberals have a wide variety of views on political and social matters, ranging from the highly conservative standpoint of Friedrich Hayek to the more rigorously libertarian position of Milton Friedman; but they are at one in seeing the free market as the fountainhead of human freedom. Though in some of his writings he shows a concern for the casualties of deregulated markets, Thomas Friedman is a passionate missionary for this neoliberal faith. In his view the free market brings with it most of the ingredients that make for a free and humanly fulfilling society, and he has propagated this creed indefatigably in his books and in columns in The New York Times. Friedman's views have been highly influential, shaping the thinking of presidents and informing American policy on a number of issues, and it may be instructive to note the matters in which he shares Marx's blind spots. Because they were on opposite sides of the cold war it is often assumed that neoliberalism and Marxism are fundamentally antagonistic systems of ideas. In fact they belong to the same style of thinking, and share many of the same disabling limitations. For Marxists and neoliberals alike it is technological advance that fuels economic development, and economic forces that shape society. Politics and culture are secondary phenomena, sometimes capable of retarding human progress; but in the last analysis they cannot prevail against advancing technology and growing productivity. Friedman is unequivocal in endorsing this reductive philosophy. He writes that he is often asked if he is a technological determinist, and with the innocent enthusiasm that is a redeeming feature of his prose style he declares resoundingly: 'This is a legitimate question, so let me try to answer it directly: I am a technological determinist! Guilty as charged.' (The italics are Friedman's.) Technological determinism may contain a kernel of truth but it suggests a misleadingly simple view of history. This is well illustrated in Friedman's account of the demise of the Soviet Union. Acknowledging that there 'was no single cause,' he goes on: To some degree the termites just ate away at the foundations of the Soviet Union, which were already weakened by the system's own internal contradictions and inefficiencies; to some degree the Reagan administration's military buildup in Europe forced the Kremlin to bankrupt itself paying for warheads; and to some degree Mikhail Gorbachev's hapless efforts to reform something that was unreformable brought communism to an end. But if I had to point to one factor as first among equals, it was the information revolution that began in the early- to mid-1980s. Totalitarian systems depend on a monopoly of information and force, and too much information started to slip through the Iron Curtain, thanks to the spread of fax machines, telephones, and other modern tools of communication. What is striking in this otherwise unexceptionable list is what it leaves out. There is no mention of the role of Solidarity and the Catholic Church in making Poland the first post-Communist country, or of the powerful independence movements that developed in the Baltic nations during the Eighties. Most strikingly, there is no mention of the war in Afghanistan. By any account strategic defeat at the hands of Western-armed Islamist forces in that country (including some that formed the organization which was later to become al-Qaeda) was a defining moment in the decline of Soviet power. If Friedman ignores these events, it may be because they attest to the persistent power of religion and nationalism— forces that in his simple, deterministic worldview should be withering away. It is an irony of history that a view of the world falsified by the Communist collapse should have been adopted, in some of its most misleading aspects, by the victors in the cold war. Neoliberals, such as Friedman, have reproduced the weakest features of Marx's thought—its consistent underestimation of nationalist and religious movements and its unidirectional view of history. They have failed to absorb Marx's insights into the anarchic and self-destructive qualities of capitalism. Marx viewed the unfettered market as a revolutionary force, and understood that its expansion throughout the world was bound to be disruptive and violent. As capitalism spreads, it turns society upside down, destroying entire industries, ways of life, and regimes. This can hardly be expected to be a peaceful process, and in fact it has been accompanied by major conflicts and social upheavals. The expansion of European capitalism in the nineteenth century involved the Opium Wars, genocide in the Belgian Congo, the Great Game in Central Asia, and many other forms of imperial conquest and rivalry. The seeming triumph of global capitalism at the end of the twentieth century followed two world wars, the cold war, and savage neocolonial conflicts. Over the past two hundred years, the spread of capitalism and industrialization has gone hand in hand with war and revolution. It is a fact that would not have surprised Marx. Why do Friedman and other neoliberals believe things will be any different in the twenty-first century? Part of the answer lies in an ambiguity in the idea of globalization. In current discussion two different notions are commonly conflated: the belief that we are living in a period of rapid and continuous technological innovation, which has the effect of linking up events and activities throughout the world more widely and quickly than before; and the belief that this process is leading to a single worldwide economic system. The first is an empirical proposition and plainly true, the second a groundless ideological assertion. Like Marx, Friedman elides the two. 2. In The World Is Flat, Friedman tells us that globalization has three phases: the first from 1492 to around 1800, in which countries and governments opened up trade with the New World and which was driven by military expansion and the amount of horse-power and wind power countries could employ; the second from 1800 to 2000, in which global integration was driven by multinational companies, steam engines, and railways; and the third, in which individuals are the driving force and the defining technology is a worldwide fiber-optic network. In each of these phases, he tells us, technology is the driving force: globalization is a byproduct of technologi-cal development. Here Friedman deviates from the standard view among contemporary economists, who see globalization largely as the result of policies of deregulation. Here he is closer to Marx—and to the realities of history. In any longer perspective what we are witnessing today is only the most recent phase of worldwide industrialization. In the nineteenth century the world was shrunk by the advent of the telegraph; today it is shrinking again as a consequence of the Internet. Contrary to Friedman, however, the increasing facility of communication does not signify a quantum shift in human affairs. The uses of petroleum and electricity changed human life more deeply than any of the new information technologies have done. Even so, they did not end war and tyranny and usher in a new era of peace and plenty. Like other technological innovations, they were used for a variety of purposes, and became part of the normal conflicts of history. It is necessary to distinguish between globalization—the ongoing process of worldwide industrialization—and the various economic systems in which this process has occurred. Globalization did not stop when Lenin came to power in Russia. It went on—actively accelerated by Stalin's policies of agricultural collectivization. Nor was globalization in any way slowed by the dirigiste regimes that developed in Asia —first in Japan in the Meiji era and later in the militarist period, then after World War II in Korea and Taiwan. All these regimes were vehicles through which globalization continued its advance. Worldwide industrialization continued when the liberal international economic order fell apart after World War I, and it will carry on if the global economic regime that was established after the fall of communism falls apart in its turn. There is no systematic connection between globalization and the free market. It is no more essentially friendly to liberal capitalism than to central planning or East Asian dirigisme. Driven by technological changes that occur in many regimes, the process of globalization is more powerful than any of them. This is a truth that Friedman—as an avowed technological determinist—should accept readily enough. If he does not, it is because it shows how baseless are the utopian hopes he attaches to a process that abounds in conflicts and contradictions. Globalization makes the world smaller. It may also make it—or sections of it—richer. It does not make it more peaceful, or more liberal. Least of all does it make it flat. Friedman's by now famous discovery of the world's flatness came to him when he was talking to Nandan Nilekani, CEO of one of India's leading new high-technology companies, Infosys Technologies, at its campus in Bangalore. The Indian entrepreneur remarked to Friedman: 'Tom, the playing field is being leveled.' The observation is commonplace, but it hit Friedman with the force of a revelation. 'What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened.... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!' Five hundred years ago, Columbus 'returned safely to prove definitively that the world was round.' As a matter of fact it was not Columbus who provided the proof but the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, whose ship circled the globe in a three-year voyage from 1519 to 1522. Regardless, Friedman sees himself as a latter-day Columbus who has discovered that the world is no longer round: 'I scribbled four words down in my notebook: 'The world is flat.'' The metaphor of a flat world is worked relentlessly throughout this overlong book, but it is not its incessant repetition that is most troublesome. It is Friedman's failure to recognize that in many ways, some of them not difficult to observe, the world is becoming distinctly less flat. While he acknowledges the existence of an 'unflat' world composed of people without access to the benefits of new technology, he never connects the growth of this netherworld of the relatively poor with the advance of globalization. At times his failure to connect is almost comic. Recalling his visit to the Infosys headquarters in Bangalore, Friedman writes: The Infosys campus is reached by a pockmarked road, with sacred cows, horse-drawn carts, and motorized rickshaws all jostling alongside our vans. Once you enter the gates of Infosys, though, you are in a different world. A massive resort-size swimming pool nests amid boulders and manicured lawns, adjacent to a huge putting green. There are multiple restaurants and a fabulous health club. Friedman notes in passing that the Infosys campus has its own power supply. He does not ask why this is necessary, or comment on the widening difference in standards of life in the region that it represents. Yet it is only by decoupling itself from its local environment that Infosys is able to compete effectively in global markets. Infosys demonstrates that globalization does have the effect of leveling some inequalities in world markets, but the success of the company has been achieved by using services and infrastructure that the society around it lacks. As it levels some inequalities, globalization raises others. Friedman tells us that he is in favor of what he calls 'compassionate flatism,' which seems to mean a range of centrist or social-democratic policies designed to enhance job mobility while preserving economic security, such as portable personal pensions. In an American setting these may be useful proposals, and it is strange that in the countries that have been most exposed to the disruptive effects of globalization Friedman appears to favor neoliberal policies of the most conventional kind. He describes the fall of the Berlin Wall as a 'world-flattening event,' and cites Russia as one of the countries that has most benefited from the new flat world. There can be no doubt that the Soviet collapse represented an advance for human freedom. Yet since then Russia has suffered rising levels of absolute poverty and large increases in inequality of wealth, and it seems clear that the economic 'shock therapy' administered on Western advice just after the Communist collapse contributed to these developments. Price decontrol wiped out small family savings, and by limiting the benefits of privatizing government industries to a small number of insiders produced a marked concentration of wealth. As a result, large parts of the Russian population have been excluded from the benefits of the global market. Other policies could likely have avoided or mitigated this outcome. In view of the Soviet inheritance, the process of transition was bound to be prolonged and difficult. Attempting it in the space of a few years was folly, and shock therapy resulted in the impoverishment of many millions of people. It also fueled a backlash against the West. Socioeconomic change on the scale that occurred in post-Communist Russia tends to produce a political aftershock, and the emergence of Vladimir Putin can be seen as an unintended consequence of Western-sponsored free market policies. In some contexts free market policies continue, but Putin has reasserted political control of the economy as a whole, reined in the political activities of the oligarchs, and demonstrated a degree of independence from Western influences. As a result his quasi-authoritarian regime seems to possess a popular legitimacy that Yeltsin's lacked, and there is no discernible prospect of Western-style 'democratic capitalism.' Globalization has no inherent tendency to promote the free market or liberal democracy. Neither does it augur an end to nationalism or great-power rivalries. Describing a long conversation with the CEO of a small Indian game company in Bangalore, Friedman recounts the entrepreneur concluding: 'India is going to be a superpower and we are going to rule.' Friedman replies: 'Rule whom?' Friedman's response suggests that the present phase of globalization is tending to make imbalances of power between states irrelevant. In fact what it is doing is creating new great powers, and this is one of the reasons it has been embraced in China and India. Neoliberals interpret globalization as being driven by a search for greater productivity, and view nationalism as a kind of cultural backwardness that acts mainly to slow this process. Yet the economic takeoff in both England and the US occurred against the background of a strong sense of nationality, and nationalist resistance to Western power was a powerful stimulus of economic development in Meiji Japan. Nationalism fueled the rapid growth of capitalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is doing the same in China and India at the present time. In both countries globalization is being embraced not only because of the prosperity it makes possible, but also for the opportunity it creates to challenge Western hegemony. As China and India become great powers they will demand recognition of their distinctive cultures and values, and international institutions will have to be reshaped to reflect the legitimacy of a variety of economic and political models. At that point the universal claims of the United States and other Western nations will be fundamentally challenged, and the global balance of power will shift. 3. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), Friedman focused on the tension between the 'Lexus' forces of global economic integration and the 'Olive Tree' forces of cultural identity, and in The World Is Flat he tells us that after September 11 he spent much of his time traveling in the Arab and Muslim worlds and lost track of globalization. Actually it was not globalization he lost sight of but rather the forces of identity that shape it. Friedman writes that the nation-state is 'the biggest source of friction' in global markets. In fact nationalist resistance to globalization is more prominent in advanced countries such as France, Holland, and the US than in emerging economies. Friedman himself expresses concern about the impact of outsourcing on American employment, and there has been a steady drift toward greater protectionism in the Bush administration's trade policies. American nationalism may already be acting as a brake on globalization. In the fast-industrializing countries of Asia, nationalism is one of globalization's driving forces. Rising nationalism is part of the process of globalization, and so too are intensifying geopolitical rivalries. Just as it did when the Great Game was played out in the decades leading up to the First World War, ongoing industrialization is setting off a scramble for natural resources. The US, Russia, China, India, Japan, and the countries of the European Union are all of them involved in attempts to secure energy supplies, and their field of competition ranges from Central Asia through the Persian Gulf to Africa and parts of Latin America. The coming century could be marked by recurrent resource wars, as the great powers struggle for control of the planet's hydrocarbons. Moreover, worldwide industrialization appears to be coming up against serious environmental limits. An increasing number of expert observers believe global oil reserves may be peaking, and there is a consensus among climate scientists that the worldwide shift to an energy-intensive industrial lifestyle is contributing to global warming. If these fears are well founded the next phase of globalization could encompass upheavals as large as any in the twentieth century. It would be wrong to suggest that Friedman is oblivious of these risks. In an interesting aside, he writes: Islamo-Leninism, in many ways, emerged from the same historical context as the European radical ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Fascism and Marxism-Leninism grew out of the rapid industrialization and modernization of Germany and Central Europe, where communities living in tightly bonded villages and extended families suddenly got shattered. Again, Friedman recognizes that many of the innovations of the current phase of globalization are reproduced in al-Qaeda. In the past two decades some of the most advanced global corporations have ceased to be top-heavy bureaucracies, and become streamlined networks of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Al-Qaeda has emulated this change, operating as a network of autonomous cells rather than the highly centralized organizations of revolutionary parties in the past. Perhaps most interestingly, Friedman acknowledges that America's dependency on imported oil exposes it to attack, and urges American energy independence: If President Bush made energy independence his moon shot, in one fell swoop he would dry up revenue for terrorism, force Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia on the path of reform—which they will never do with $50-a-barrel oil—strengthen the dollar, and improve his own standing in Europe by doing something huge to reduce global warming. Friedman's advocacy of American energy independence illustrates the error of a unidirectional view of history. Energy autarchy may be a sensible policy, but it signifies a retreat from globalization. The Lexus and the Olive Tree trumpeted the arrival of a harmoniously integrated world. Since then the US has suffered terrorist attack and become mired in an intractable insurgency in Iraq. Against this background the prospect of severing one of the crucial supply chains that link the US with the world is beginning to look extremely tempting. As he has done in previous books Friedman has expressed a powerful larger mood, and in this respect The World Is Flat may prove a prescient guide to future American policy. Yet while greater energy independence may be an American national interest the notion that it would force recalcitrant countries onto a path of neoliberal reform is wishful thinking. A large drop in the oil price would surely destabilize the rentier economies of the Gulf and Central Asia, from Saudi Arabia to Turkmenistan, and in some countries could lead to the establishment of democratic rule. However, in a number of cases the chief beneficiary would likely be fundamentalism. Does Friedman really believe that democracy in Saudi Arabia would produce a liberal, pro-Western regime? In this and other countries, American energy independence could well further the advance of radical Islam. As it has done in the past, globalization is throwing up dilemmas that have no satisfactory solution. That does not mean they cannot be more or less intelligently managed, but what is needed is the opposite of the utopian imagination. In a curious twist, the utopian mind has migrated from left to right, and from the academy to the airport bookshop. In the nineteenth century it was political activists and radical social theorists such as Marx who held out the promise that new technology was creating a new world. Today some business gurus have a similar message. There are many books announcing a global economic transformation and suggesting that governments can be reengineered to adapt to it in much the same way as corporations. The World Is Flat is an outstanding example of this genre. Unfortunately the problems of globalization are more intractable than those of corporate life. States cannot be phased out like bankrupt firms, and large shifts in wealth and power tend to be fiercely contested. Globalization is a revolutionary change, but it is also a continuation of the conflicts of the past. In some important respects it is leveling the playing field, as Friedman's Indian interlocutor noted, and to that extent it is a force for human advance. At the same time it is inflaming nationalist and religious passions and triggering a struggle for natural resources. In Friedman's sub-Marxian, neoliberal worldview these conflicts are recognized only as forms of friction —grit in the workings of an unstoppable machine. In truth they are integral to the process itself, whose future course cannot be known. We would be better off accepting this fact, and doing what we can to cope with it.

Subject: Zadie Smith's Culture Warriors From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 14:06:12 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/books/review/18rich.html?ex=1284696000&en=36254e1e1bfd021c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 18, 2005 Zadie Smith's Culture Warriors By FRANK RICH SOME fearless outside referee had to barge in and try to adjudicate the culture wars, so let us rejoice that it's Zadie Smith. She brings almost everything you want to the task: humor, brains, objectivity, equanimity, empathy, a pitch-perfect ear for smugness and cant, and then still more humor. Born in 1975 - safely past the 1960's, the birth of our blues - she's not much burdened by heavy dogmatic baggage of her own. Being from England, she is one wry remove from the ground zero of these battles, America. She can't reconcile the warring camps - no one can - but 'On Beauty' is that rare comic novel about the divisive cultural politics of the new century likely to amuse readers on the right as much as those on the left. (Not that they'll necessarily be laughing in the same places.) Yet Smith is up to more as well: she wants to rise above the fray even as she wallows in it, to hit a high note of idealism rather than sink into the general despair. How radical can you be? Blame it on her youth. Those who were enraptured by Smith's startling 2000 debut, 'White Teeth,' will find that 'On Beauty' is almost literally a return to form. Here again, we have a baggy, garrulous account of two contrasting, haplessly interconnected families in an urban setting teeming with ethnic, racial and economic diversity. This time the city is not Smith's native London but Boston, or, more specifically, the mythical outlying town of Wellington, home of a college of the same name. We are pointedly told that Wellington is not in the Ivy League, but you can herewith banish all thoughts of Brandeis and Tufts. The school's exasperating culture of entitlement, arrogance and raw ambition, as well as a character or two, will be recognizable to anyone with a passing acquaintance with Harvard, where Smith did time as a Radcliffe fellow after 'White Teeth' put her on America's map. (She is kind enough to spare us a Larry Summers clone, however.) Clearly her stay in our Cambridge, like her years as a student in the other Cambridge back home, was fruitful, especially in this case outside the classroom. You'd never guess she wasn't to the Adams House manner born. 'One may as well begin with Jerome's e-mails to his father' is the first sentence of the book, a blunt declaration of Smith's intention to pay homage to 'Howards End.' In E. M. Forster's masterpiece of pre-World War I England, the collision of two antithetical families is set off by the infatuation of the young, art-worshiping Helen Schlegel with a scion of the profoundly prosaic businessman Henry Wilcox. Smith baits her own narrative mousetrap by propelling Jerome, an altruistic teenage son of Howard Belsey, a left-wing Rembrandt scholar at Wellington, into a live-in internship in London with his father's archnemesis, a reactionary and thoroughly Anglicized Trinidadian scholar of Rembrandt and much else named Monty Kipps. Much as Forster's turn-of-the-20th-century heroine finds to her astonishment that she likes it when the Wilcoxes dismiss socialism, women's suffrage, art and literature as sheer nonsense, so Jerome Belsey discovers in the Kippses' household that he 'liked to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth, and Multiculturalism a fatuous dream' and 'thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies.' What's more, Monty Kipps has a very hot daughter who doesn't necessarily abide by her famous father's publicly disseminated moral code. The many delicious complications that ensue, not to be divulged here, compound by the page once Monty Kipps, along with his wife, Carlene, and that daughter, Victoria, move to Wellington for a visiting professorship, thus allowing Kipps and Howard Belsey to square off in ideological and personal combat against the backdrop of the continuing fratricides of a liberal university and its only slightly less liberal environs. What keeps the political conflicts from becoming didactic and predictable is, for starters, the principal characters, the Belseys and Kippses themselves. Only one of them, Howard, is white, and even he's not an American-born white man but a refugee from working-class London (humble roots he has tried to escape as surely as Monty Kipps has distanced himself from his own island origins). Howard's Florida-born wife of 30 years, Kiki Simmonds Belsey, is African-American, and thus the three more-or-less college-age Belsey children are black, though not in all cases as black as they'd like to be. Among the novel's several contrapuntal subplots is the continuing effort of the Belsey and Kipps offspring alike to gain the friendship (platonic and not) of Carl Thomas, a Roxbury hip-hop wiz whom they worship as a fount of the 'street' authenticity denied them in the hopelessly bourgeois hood of Wellington. (As a plaything for the higher classes, Carl is to Wellington's aesthetes what the lowly clerk Leonard Bast was to the Londoners of 'Howards End.') Because Smith's antagonists are in their different ways outsiders of a sort in white America, even at an institution as ostentatiously all-embracing as Wellington, they allow us to view the wildly overplowed comic terrain of the university from a slightly askew angle. The boilerplate political battles that buffet the campus, whether over affirmative action or the grievances of the local Haitian community, are not as one-dimensional when both sides of the argument are taken by those who have more than a theoretical stake in the outcome. Here, as in 'White Teeth,' Smith further lightens the load by exulting in the multicultural stew of her milieu without turning it into course work in Multiculturalism. In her Wellington and Boston, as in her London, the racial melting pot is an established fact, to be savored and explored rather than mined for sociological morals. In 'On Beauty,' anyone who is still arguing over it all at this late date is a bit of a dolt, oh so last-century and a ripe target for farce. That's the case with both Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps, both nearing 60, both handicapped by their own ideological blinders. In life, neither of them connects much to anything, including their infinitely wiser if long-suffering wives, their precocious nearly grown kids and the art that is the platform for their careers as scholars. Howard's yearly seminar is a tendentious running argument against 'the redemptive humanity of what is commonly called 'Art,' ' in which Rembrandt is seen as 'neither a rule breaker nor an original' but as 'a merely competent artisan who painted whatever his wealthy patrons requested.' Howard's own taste runs to conceptual pieces too transgressive to be displayed in his own home. Monty, who announces his arrival at Wellington by arguing in the local paper for 'taking the 'liberal' out of the Liberal Arts,' reserves his greatest passion for punditry, not art, which he mainly seems to care about as a commodity. He is fond of boasting that he owns 'the largest collection of Haitian art in private hands outside of that unfortunate island.' Eventually one valuable piece in that collection, a Hyppolite painting of the voodoo goddess Erzulie treasured mainly by his wife, will become as symbolic a pawn in the two families' lives as the charismatic young interloper from Roxbury. Smith is merciless about both Howard and Monty, the fatuous postmodernist and the self-satisfied capitalist alike, and it's hard to say which is more ridiculous or reprehensible. Howard has become the kind of academic who 'could identify 30 different ideological trends in the social sciences, but did not really know what a software engineer was.' For him a rose has long since stopped being a rose but is instead 'an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.' That he has 'almost no personal experience of pornography' would never stop him from contributing to 'a book denouncing it, edited by Steinem.' So highly developed are his left-wing P.C. sensibilities that in his zeal to smite Monty's challenges to them he becomes the campus's foremost crusader against free speech. But Monty is no less a hypocrite, a rigidly conservative Christian who preaches against homosexuality in public even as his best friend is a gay Baptist minister who delivered the benediction at President Reagan's inauguration. His own brand of pomposity, like Howard's, knows no bounds; he is 'a man constantly on the lookout for the camera he knew must be filming him' and has 'this way of torturing metaphor that the self-consciously conservative occasionally have.' Kiki Belsey in particular has his number: 'Often enough she spotted Monty, leaning against the wainscoting in one of his absurd 19th-century three-piece suits, with his timepiece on a chain, bombastically opinionated, and almost always eating.' Out of both curiosity and sympathy Kiki is soon driven to seek a friendship with Monty's elusive and mysterious wife, apotheosized by one and all from afar as 'the ideal 'stay-at-home' Christian Mom.' The warring academics can be insufferable, but the novel as a whole rarely sinks to their level, thanks to Smith's generous portrayal of the two families' often wounding private dramas. It's Kiki, a majestically overweight earth mother with a feminist's spine, who gives the book its biggest (but not sentimental) heart. A hospital administrator, not an academic, she is in Wellington but not of it, despite her long marriage to Howard. Along with the Belsey children - especially the ever-assertive daughter, Zora, a Wellington undergrad who emulates her father to a fault - she anchors the academic farce to a domestic reality beyond academe. As befits a farce, sex is no small part of that reality in 'On Beauty.' However funny some of the couplings, the human costs of the betrayals pump blood into what might otherwise be an etiolated campus satire. Even so, the satire is not to be sneezed at. Smith has her own droll takes on the familiar targets, whether she is dryly delineating the silken bureaucratic maneuvers of Howard's best friend, Dr. Erskine Jegede, Soyinka professor of African literature and assistant director of the black studies department, or describing faculty meetings at which the priority 'is to try to get a chair as near the exit as possible, so as to enable discreet departure halfway through.' Though Smith quite rightly puts greater faith in the students than the adults who have already mucked things up, she hardly gives them a free pass. These are kids all too visibly angling for the fast track to 'an internship at The New Yorker or in the Pentagon or in Clinton's Harlem offices or at French Vogue.' The vestigial preppies make a brief appearance too. In one set piece, Howard eviscerates the singers in a Wellington glee club (with their 'F. Scott Fitzgerald heritage haircuts' and voices redolent of 'Old Boston money') with such misanthropic precision that he almost (but not quite) makes you like him. Smith is after so much in 'On Beauty' that, as with 'White Teeth,' not quite all of it comes together at the end. And sometimes in the later pages the stage management is all too visible, as in a climactic scene in which a political demonstration in the Wellington streets brushes against a particularly tawdry extramarital assignation for diagrammatic effect. Nor does every character have the weight of the Belseys; they intermingle with some cartoons. In her failings as in her strengths, Smith often seems more reminiscent of the sprawling 19th-century comic novelists who preceded Forster than her idol himself. But that's not always the case. What finally makes 'On Beauty' affecting as well as comic is Smith's own earnest enactment of Forster's dictum to 'only connect' her passions with the prose of the world as she finds it. For all the petty politics, domestic battles and cheesy adulteries of 'On Beauty,' she never loses her own serious moral compass or forsakes her pursuit of the transcendent. By not taking sides in the Belsey-versus-Kipps debate, she wants to lift us to the higher view not dreamt of in their philosophies. It's too late for burnt-out cases like Howard and Monty, who are both far too jaded and cynical to see past the culture wars to the beauty of culture itself. But Smith and many of her other characters do, especially the young ones, even those who are for now held captive by their iPods. Not for nothing does 'On Beauty' progress from an enraptured account of an open-air performance of Mozart's Requiem early on to a radiant literary tour of the wonders of Hampstead Heath to the crowning image of a Rembrandt portrait being projected larger and larger in a lecture hall until the 'ever present human hint of yellow' becomes an enveloping balm, however temporary, for all wounds. Smith is roughly the same age as Forster at the time he published 'Howards End.' No one will confuse her voice with his, but her authorial presence is at the very least a channeling of the searching heroine of that novel. Margaret Schlegel, Forster wrote, was 'not beautiful, not supremely brilliant, but filled with something that took the place of both qualities - something best described as a profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to all that she encountered in her path through life.' For all Zadie Smith's other talents, it is this quality that makes you want to follow her every step on that path.

Subject: Mississippi River and Risks of Harvest From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 11:43:32 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/21/opinion/21wed4.html?ex=1284955200&en=003352221d242dfb&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 21, 2005 Katrina, the Mississippi River and the Risks of the Coming Harvest By VERLYN KLINKENBORG In 1953, a young documentary filmmaker named Charles Dee Sharp traveled down the Mississippi River, shooting still photographs for a film he never made. One of Sharp's pictures - recently published by the Center for American Places in a book called 'The Mississippi River in 1953' - is a color shot of rows of new red cornpickers awaiting shipment in Moline, Ill. Behind them the surface of the river looks like a sheet of mercury. Those cornpickers, long since antiquated, could harvest only two rows of corn - in the cob - at a time. They were scaled to much smaller farms and lower yields than you find in the Midwest these days, where fields are now harvested by enormous combines that shell the corn as they pick it. Those old pickers - so bright and new in 1953 - are a visual reminder of the vital, complex connection between America's agricultural heartland and the Mississippi River. In a good year, like 2004, the Mississippi smoothly ferries some 60 percent of the corn and soybeans bound for export downriver to the Port of New Orleans. And in a year like 2005 - well, there has never been a year like 2005. There has been serious drought along the river's tributaries, the Missouri and the Ohio, and that has resulted in low water along the main stem of the river as well. Industrial traffic has been slowed considerably, and portions of the Ohio have been temporarily closed. And then came Katrina, which essentially disabled the Lower Mississippi for shipping, halting the southward movement of grain for export and other farm products and the northward movement of farm inputs like fertilizer and fuel. Last week, the Coast Guard began lifting some restrictions on navigation on the Mississippi well above New Orleans. But navigation aids have been torn out of the river further south, and power has not yet been fully restored to the grain-handling facilities along the river. What this means for farmers is yet another year of crisis, and possibly one of the worst in a long time. In an ordinary year, a drop in corn production - like the 12 percent slump forecast for Illinois this year - would mean better prices in commodity markets, but a real loss on the farm. But farmers in the Midwest, where the harvest is just beginning, are going to be looking at an unexpected glut of grain with nowhere to go. Each week some 35 million bushels of export corn moves through New Orleans. That has come to a complete stop. Americans tend to think of farmers as producers, but they are also enormous consumers of fuel and petroleum-based chemicals. They will be paying much higher prices for those products, like the rest of us, for some time to come. This fall is going to see a big drop in farm revenue and a big increase in farm expenses, at a time when the federal government is trying hard to curb farmers' appetite for subsidies. Once again, any movement toward limiting federal price supports will be overwhelmed by emergency funds needed to cover losses. Katrina has reminded all of us, all too vividly, that the Mississippi is a complex chain of dams, locks, cutoffs, ports, channels, levees and navigational markers, rather than a natural river. And when the river system comes to a halt, compromising the well-being of every farm or business that lies economically upstream of the actual water itself, the only real concern must be to get the system going again. Yet the system is so complex that it is easy to lose sight of the hidden hydraulic system of the river itself. We tend to think of the Mississippi as breadth and depth and flow, the qualities that float those long chains of grain barges downriver. Sometimes - only rarely - the surface traffic stops. But the river never does, and it carries with it, especially in spring, the outwash of all those fields along all those tributaries. The traffic in grain is carefully regulated and monitored. The traffic in topsoil and all the chemicals that have been applied to it on Midwestern farms is not. The result is an oxygen-deficient dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. This year that zone, which can grow to the size of New Jersey, began to appear in March instead of June. There has been some speculation that Katrina's turbulence may have stirred the gulf enough to help break up the dead zone. But in the long run it will make no difference. Beneath the surface economy of the Mississippi River, there is an agricultural economy that is steadily eating away at those same farm fields and steadily killing the gulf.

Subject: this retro site needs an RSS feed From: anon To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 08:00:33 (EDT) Email Address: none@yahoo.com Message: this retro site needs an RSS feed!!!!!!!!!!

Subject: Design Shortcomings Seen in New Orleans From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 07:10:57 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/21/national/nationalspecial/21walls.html?ex=1284955200&en=d49930639f5dde06&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 21, 2005 Design Shortcomings Seen in New Orleans Flood Walls By CHRISTOPHER DREW and ANDREW C. REVKIN NEW ORLEANS - Along the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, great earthen levees were ample to hold off much of the surging water propelled by Hurricane Katrina. But concrete flood walls installed over the last several decades along the drainage and barge canals cutting into New Orleans were built in a way that by Army Corps of Engineers standards left them potentially unstable in a flood, according to government documents and interviews. The walls collapsed in several places during the storm. A corps engineering manual cautions that such flood walls 'rarely exceed' seven feet because they can lose stability as waters rise. But some of the New Orleans canal walls rose as high as 11 feet above dirt berms in which they were anchored. As a result of federal budget constraints, the walls were never tested for their ability to withstand the cascades of lake water that rushed up to, or over, their tops as storm waves pulsed through the canals on Aug. 29, corps and local officials say. Hurricane Katrina was the first serious test of the flood walls, said Stevan Spencer, chief engineer for the Orleans Levee District, and it 'just overwhelmed the system.' Since the storm, corps officials have said that there is a simple explanation for the devastation: Hurricane Katrina was a Category 4 storm and Congress authorized a flood control system to handle only a Category 3 storm. 'Anything above that, all bets are off,' said Al Naomi, a senior project manager in the corps's New Orleans district. But federal meteorologists say that New Orleans did not get the full brunt of the storm, because its strongest winds passed dozens of miles east of the city. While a formal analysis of the storm's strength and surges will take months, the National Hurricane Center said the sustained winds over Lake Pontchartrain reached only 95 miles per hour, while Category 3 storms are defined by sustained winds of 111 to 130 m.p.h. This raises a series of questions about how the walls that failed were designed and constructed, as well as whether the soil in some spots was too weak to hold them. Investigations by federal engineers and outside experts are just now beginning. One factor could be height, said Robert G. Bea, a former corps engineer and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is part of a National Science Foundation inquiry into the flood controls failures. The higher the wall, Professor Bea said, the greater the risk it could tip under the ever greater pressure of rising waters. The 2000 edition of the Army Corps of Engineers manual 'Design and Construction of Levees' says that the height of flood walls built on levees is an important factor in their ability to withstand a flood. For that reason, the manual says walls like those used in New Orleans 'rarely exceed' seven feet. But on two of the three canals where breaks occurred - the 17th Street and London Avenue canals - the concrete sections rise 11 feet above the dirt berms. Each wall resembles a row of teeth set in a jaw. Individual slabs are anchored to a continuous steel sheet buried in the dirt, giving the wall its strength. Above a short foundation, the slabs are linked only by rubbery gaskets that allow the concrete to expand and contract without cracking. Hassan S. Mashriqui, an engineering professor at Louisiana State University and an expert on storm surges, said the segmented nature of the walls could be an additional problem, since any weak point could cause a catastrophic failure. 'Since they're not tied together you get a little bit of a gap and that's what water needs to make it fail,' Dr. Mashriqui said. Other questions surround the walls' design, known as an 'I-wall' for its slim cross section that fits easily into densely developed areas. The corps manual for flood control construction suggests a different design for walls higher than seven feet - walls shaped like an inverted T, with the horizontal section buried in the dirt for extra stability. But that option was never considered, corps engineers said, because 'T walls' were more expensive, required a broad base of dense soil for support and were not necessarily stronger. The corps and local levee authorities also never tested whether the chosen I-wall design could survive if water flowed over the top and cascaded onto dirt embankments below. Corps officials said they were proscribed from considering stronger wall designs for the canals both by the tight quarters and by federal law, which requires that they seek and study only the level of flood control authorized by Congress. 'Our hands are tied as to looking at higher-level events,' Mr. Naomi said. Mr. Naomi said that the recommendations in the flood control engineering manual were 'general guidance,' and that conditions at a particular site could justify deviations. He defended the walls, saying: 'The flood walls have functioned over the years very successfully and without incident. The design works. It has worked in other locales. And will likely continue to be used as long as you do not subject it to pressures that it was not designed to handle.' The broken walls, which were long seen as a second choice to earthen levees, are testament to 40 years of fiscal and political compromises made by elected officials, from local levee boards to Congress and several presidential administrations, as they balanced costs and environmental concerns with the need to protect a city that lies largely below sea level and is still subsiding. Ever since Hurricane Betsy flooded parts of New Orleans in 1965, the federal government has financed a hurricane defense system designed to guard against an equivalent storm. But as the threat of a more intense hurricane became better understood in recent years, government financing for flood prevention in New Orleans did not keep pace with a growing alarm among many local residents, scientists and even the corps's own engineers. Standing next to the shattered remains of one of the concrete walls last week, Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, a New Orleans councilwoman, said, 'In my opinion, they were playing Russian roulette with people's lives.' 'Do you realize that if those walls had held, we'd have just had a little cleaning job?' said Ms. Hedge-Morrell, whose district between downtown and the lakefront was covered with 10 feet of water from the breaks of flood walls. 'We would not have this massive loss of life and destruction.' On Tuesday, streams of dump trucks hurriedly dumped loads of gravel into the breaches in New Orleans's flood defenses, in case Hurricane Rita shifts toward here later this week. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a surge from Lake Pontchartrain poured into the main parts of the city through breaks on the walls lining the 17th Street and London Avenue canals, which normally carry runoff pumped out of the city into the lake. A separate surge from the Gulf of Mexico overwhelmed the walls along the Industrial Canal, inundating the Lower Ninth Ward. Officials say that break may have been caused by a barge that broke loose from its moorings. When the hurricane hit, the only earthen levees that failed in a way that produced substantial flooding were on the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a man-made ship canal east of the city. These levees, which were not as high as those on the river or Lake Pontchartrain, let in the floodwaters that ravaged eastern New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish. A surge from Lake Pontchartrain was the catastrophic situation that the corps had been guarding against since Hurricane Betsy 40 years ago. Initially, the corps wanted to build a giant barrier to keep water from the Gulf of Mexico from reaching Lake Pontchartrain and flooding the canals. That project was delayed by lawsuits from environmental groups that contended the corps had failed to study ecological effects. By the late 1970's, the corps abandoned that approach and began raising levees along the lake and the Mississippi and adding flood walls on the canals. In the mid-1990's, engineering professors at Louisiana State began publicizing computer models that showed how a Category 5 storm could kill tens of thousands of people and flood the French Quarter. Corps officials in Louisiana pushed local officials to help seek more money from Congress, both to finish existing upgrades and to start bolstering the city against bigger threats. Joseph Suhayda, who was one of the Louisiana State professors, said corps officials privately urged him to 'raise the consciousness' about the dire threats. But upgrading the flood control system never became a major priority for corps officials in Washington, local and federal officials say. Corps veterans said it was not surprising that federal engineers did not issue more vocal warnings. 'I don't think it was culturally in the system for the corps to say 'this is crazy,' ' said William F. Marcuson III, the former director of the Waterways Experiment Station for the corps in Vicksburg, Miss., and president-elect of the American Society of Civil Engineers. 'The corps works for Congress,' Mr. Marcuson said, 'and when the boss says design for a Category 3 storm, culturally the corps is not going to go back and say this is wrong.' Investigations into how the walls failed are just now beginning. Col. Richard Wagenaar, commander of the corps district in New Orleans, said the soil behind the flood walls could have been weakened after they were topped by the storm surge, or the walls could have simply given way as the water - and the pressure - mounted against them. Indeed, as several engineers said, while a dirt levee of similar height might eventually be topped as well, and possibly eroded, only the walls were vulnerable to a sudden collapse. The determination of how the walls fell will bear on how officials decide to remake the flood control system. Max Hearn, executive director of the Orleans Levee District, said that if the federal government was now ready to pay for Category 5 protection, it seemed unlikely that the flood wall system could be upgraded to that level. But Mr. Hearn said the only answer might be the construction of flood gates designed to limit a hurricane surge in Lake Pontchartrain - the same idea that was considered and dropped in the 1970's.

Subject: Time to start talking about Global Warming From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 11:46:57 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Considering that the US has been hit by a HUGE hurricane and another HUGE hurricane is on its way, isn't this the time to talk about global warming? We all know that hurricanes are generated by warm water and warm air. Shouldn't we be able to draw a direct line between global warming and the rapid frequency and verocity of the recent hurricanes to global warming? Perhaps not to global warming but at least a link to bubble of heat over the USA caused by the incredible increase in CO2 emmissions. This may be a good time to revisit the Kyoto agreement that the US refuses to acknowledge.

Subject: Re: Time to start talking about Global Warming From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 16:36:21 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Time to start bulding infrastructure, as well as talking seriously about global warming.

Subject: Re: Time to start talking about Global Warming From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 16:56:41 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I read your original posting - ironically enough I do quite a bit of work on infrastructure including flood control. I recently worked on flood control in Jamaica and I worked on the Mozambique floods a few years back and I got a huge lesson on the engineering for freak storms. There is going to be a lot of discussion on whether the infrastructure was good enough to sustain the ravage of the Hurricane. Be careful what you read - some of it may well be true and most will not be accurate. Many engineers who are trying to push their own agendas will come out pointing to all the flaws (looking for more money to do bigger projects). Let me tell you now... ALL infrastructure in the USA and through out the world is not designed to withstand extreme storms which may have already passed over the area in their respective history. Whether is it roads in the mid-west, bridges in California or levees in Florida. All have been under-designed. The reason is simple - what exactly do we design them to withstand and what are the odds of that exact storm coming around? Normally when the odds are more than 1 in 100 years, we don't design to withstand those kinds of events. This is a norm only because it is so much more expensive to justify the cost. Sounds weird I know - especially when we are looking at figures of 200 Billion US$. I don't know all the logic and cost analysis behind the design decisions in the greater Mississippi area but I can well imagine that to really fortify and maintain the entire area would ring up a huge bill. When compared the economic development over a period of more than 100 years, we can see that 200 Billion US$ is a relatively small cost. Also from what I hear, they did already design above the 100 year threshold and it still wasn't good enough. The unfortunate part is that some engineers predicted this situation and are now pointing fingers. In fact many engineers have predicted many disasters all over the world - most of these disasters have not happened. So do we fund every engineers pet project just in case it may happen? Now having said this I chuckle and shake my head thinking 'I must be the fool' as Rita comes barreling in. Now what are the odds or two hurricanes coming around? Geez. Then I ask the next logical question, 'Global Warming?'

Subject: Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 06:31:16 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/science/20curs.html September 20, 2005 Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore By NATALIE ANGIER Incensed by what it sees as a virtual pandemic of verbal vulgarity issuing from the diverse likes of Howard Stern, Bono of U2 and Robert Novak, the United States Senate is poised to consider a bill that would sharply increase the penalty for obscenity on the air. By raising the fines that would be levied against offending broadcasters some fifteenfold, to a fee of about $500,000 per crudity broadcast, and by threatening to revoke the licenses of repeat polluters, the Senate seeks to return to the public square the gentler tenor of yesteryear, when seldom were heard any scurrilous words, and famous guys were not foul mouthed all day. Yet researchers who study the evolution of language and the psychology of swearing say that they have no idea what mystic model of linguistic gentility the critics might have in mind. Cursing, they say, is a human universal. Every language, dialect or patois ever studied, living or dead, spoken by millions or by a small tribe, turns out to have its share of forbidden speech, some variant on comedian George Carlin's famous list of the seven dirty words that are not supposed to be uttered on radio or television. Young children will memorize the illicit inventory long before they can grasp its sense, said John McWhorter, a scholar of linguistics at the Manhattan Institute and the author of 'The Power of Babel,' and literary giants have always constructed their art on its spine. 'The Jacobean dramatist Ben Jonson peppered his plays with fackings and 'peremptorie Asses,' and Shakespeare could hardly quill a stanza without inserting profanities of the day like 'zounds' or 'sblood' - offensive contractions of 'God's wounds' and 'God's blood' - or some wondrous sexual pun. The title 'Much Ado About Nothing,' Dr. McWhorter said, is a word play on 'Much Ado About an O Thing,' the O thing being a reference to female genitalia. Even the quintessential Good Book abounds in naughty passages like the men in II Kings 18:27 who, as the comparatively tame King James translation puts it, 'eat their own dung, and drink their own piss.' In fact, said Guy Deutscher, a linguist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and the author of 'The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention,' the earliest writings, which date from 5,000 years ago, include their share of off-color descriptions of the human form and its ever-colorful functions. And the written record is merely a reflection of an oral tradition that Dr. Deutscher and many other psychologists and evolutionary linguists suspect dates from the rise of the human larynx, if not before. Some researchers are so impressed by the depth and power of strong language that they are using it as a peephole into the architecture of the brain, as a means of probing the tangled, cryptic bonds between the newer, 'higher' regions of the brain in charge of intellect, reason and planning, and the older, more 'bestial' neural neighborhoods that give birth to our emotions. Researchers point out that cursing is often an amalgam of raw, spontaneous feeling and targeted, gimlet-eyed cunning. When one person curses at another, they say, the curser rarely spews obscenities and insults at random, but rather will assess the object of his wrath, and adjust the content of the 'uncontrollable' outburst accordingly. Because cursing calls on the thinking and feeling pathways of the brain in roughly equal measure and with handily assessable fervor, scientists say that by studying the neural circuitry behind it they are gaining new insights into how the different domains of the brain communicate - and all for the sake of a well-venomed retort. Other investigators have examined the physiology of cursing, how our senses and reflexes react to the sound or sight of an obscene word. They have determined that hearing a curse elicits a literal rise out of people. When electrodermal wires are placed on people's arms and fingertips to study their skin conductance patterns and the subjects then hear a few obscenities spoken clearly and firmly, participants show signs of instant arousal. Their skin conductance patterns spike, the hairs on their arms rise, their pulse quickens, and their breathing becomes shallow. Interestingly, said Kate Burridge, a professor of linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, a similar reaction occurs among university students and others who pride themselves on being educated when they listen to bad grammar or slang expressions that they regard as irritating, illiterate or déclassé. 'People can feel very passionate about language,' she said, 'as though it were a cherished artifact that must be protected at all cost against the depravities of barbarians and lexical aliens.' Dr. Burridge and a colleague at Monash, Keith Allan, are the authors of 'Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language,' which will be published early next year by the Cambridge University Press. Researchers have also found that obscenities can get under one's goosebumped skin and then refuse to budge. In one study, scientists started with the familiar Stroop test, in which subjects are flashed a series of words written in different colors and are asked to react by calling out the colors of the words rather than the words themselves. If the subjects see the word 'chair' written in yellow letters, they are supposed to say 'yellow.' The researchers then inserted a number of obscenities and vulgarities in the standard lineup. Charting participants' immediate and delayed responses, the researchers found that, first of all, people needed significantly more time to trill out the colors of the curse words than they did for neutral terms like chair. The experience of seeing titillating text obviously distracted the participants from the color-coding task at hand. Yet those risqué interpolations left their mark. In subsequent memory quizzes, not only were participants much better at recalling the naughty words than they were the neutrals, but that superior recall also applied to the tints of the tainted words, as well as to their sense. Yes, it is tough to toil in the shadow of trash. When researchers in another study asked participants to quickly scan lists of words that included obscenities and then to recall as many of the words as possible, the subjects were, once again, best at rehashing the curses - and worst at summoning up whatever unobjectionable entries happened to precede or follow the bad bits. Yet as much as bad language can deliver a jolt, it can help wash away stress and anger. In some settings, the free flow of foul language may signal not hostility or social pathology, but harmony and tranquillity. 'Studies show that if you're with a group of close friends, the more relaxed you are, the more you swear,' Dr. Burridge said. 'It's a way of saying: 'I'm so comfortable here I can let off steam. I can say whatever I like.' ' Evidence also suggests that cursing can be an effective means of venting aggression and thereby forestalling physical violence. With the help of a small army of students and volunteers, Timothy B. Jay, a professor of psychology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams and the author of 'Cursing in America' and 'Why We Curse,' has explored the dynamics of cursing in great detail. The investigators have found, among other things, that men generally curse more than women, unless said women are in a sorority, and that university provosts swear more than librarians or the staff members of the university day care center. Regardless of who is cursing or what the provocation may be, Dr. Jay said, the rationale for the eruption is often the same. 'Time and again, people have told me that cursing is a coping mechanism for them, a way of reducing stress,' he said in a telephone interview. 'It's a form of anger management that is often underappreciated.' Indeed, chimpanzees engage in what appears to be a kind of cursing match as a means of venting aggression and avoiding a potentially dangerous physical clash. Frans de Waal, a professor of primate behavior at Emory University in Atlanta, said that when chimpanzees were angry 'they will grunt or spit or make an abrupt, upsweeping gesture that, if a human were to do it, you'd recognize it as aggressive.' Such behaviors are threat gestures, Professor de Waal said, and they are all a good sign. 'A chimpanzee who is really gearing up for a fight doesn't waste time with gestures, but just goes ahead and attacks,' he added. By the same token, he said, nothing is more deadly than a person who is too enraged for expletives - who cleanly and quietly picks up a gun and starts shooting. Researchers have also examined how words attain the status of forbidden speech and how the evolution of coarse language affects the smoother sheets of civil discourse stacked above it. They have found that what counts as taboo language in a given culture is often a mirror into that culture's fears and fixations. 'In some cultures, swear words are drawn mainly from sex and bodily functions, whereas in others, they're drawn mainly from the domain of religion,' Dr. Deutscher said. In societies where the purity and honor of women is of paramount importance, he said, 'it's not surprising that many swear words are variations on the 'son of a whore' theme or refer graphically to the genitalia of the person's mother or sisters.' The very concept of a swear word or an oath originates from the profound importance that ancient cultures placed on swearing by the name of a god or gods. In ancient Babylon, swearing by the name of a god was meant to give absolute certainty against lying, Dr. Deutscher said, 'and people believed that swearing falsely by a god would bring the terrible wrath of that god upon them.' A warning against any abuse of the sacred oath is reflected in the biblical commandment that one must not 'take the Lord's name in vain,' and even today courtroom witnesses swear on the Bible that they are telling the whole truth and nothing but. Among Christians, the stricture against taking the Lord's name in vain extended to casual allusions to God's son or the son's corporeal sufferings - no mention of the blood or the wounds or the body, and that goes for clever contractions, too. Nowadays, the phrase, 'Oh, golly!' may be considered almost comically wholesome, but it was not always so. 'Golly' is a compaction of 'God's body' and, thus, was once a profanity. Yet neither biblical commandment nor the most zealous Victorian censor can elide from the human mind its hand-wringing over the unruly human body, its chronic, embarrassing demands and its sad decay. Discomfort over body functions never sleeps, Dr. Burridge said, and the need for an ever-fresh selection of euphemisms about dirty subjects has long served as an impressive engine of linguistic invention. Once a word becomes too closely associated with a specific body function, she said, once it becomes too evocative of what should not be evoked, it starts to enter the realm of the taboo and must be replaced by a new, gauzier euphemism. For example, the word 'toilet' stems from the French word for 'little towel' and was originally a pleasantly indirect way of referring to the place where the chamber pot or its equivalent resides. But toilet has since come to mean the porcelain fixture itself, and so sounds too blunt to use in polite company. Instead, you ask your tuxedoed waiter for directions to the ladies' room or the restroom or, if you must, the bathroom. Similarly, the word 'coffin' originally meant an ordinary box, but once it became associated with death, that was it for a 'shoe coffin' or 'thinking outside the coffin.' The taboo sense of a word, Dr. Burridge said, 'always drives out any other senses it might have had.' Scientists have lately sought to map the neural topography of forbidden speech by studying Tourette's patients who suffer from coprolalia, the pathological and uncontrollable urge to curse. Tourette's syndrome is a neurological disorder of unknown origin characterized predominantly by chronic motor and vocal tics, a constant grimacing or pushing of one's glasses up the bridge of one's nose or emitting a stream of small yips or grunts. Just a small percentage of Tourette's patients have coprolalia - estimates range from 8 to 30 percent - and patient advocates are dismayed by popular portrayals of Tourette's as a humorous and invariably scatological condition. But for those who do have coprolalia, said Dr. Carlos Singer, director of the division of movement disorders at the University of Miami School of Medicine, the symptom is often the most devastating and humiliating aspect of their condition. Not only can it be shocking to people to hear a loud volley of expletives erupt for no apparent reason, sometimes from the mouth of a child or young teenager, but the curses can also be provocative and personal, florid slurs against the race, sexual identity or body size of a passer-by, for example, or deliberate and repeated lewd references to an old lover's name while in the arms of a current partner or spouse. Reporting in The Archives of General Psychiatry, Dr. David A. Silbersweig, a director of neuropsychiatry and neuroimaging at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, and his colleagues described their use of PET scans to measure cerebral blood flow and identify which regions of the brain are galvanized in Tourette's patients during episodes of tics and coprolalia. They found strong activation of the basal ganglia, a quartet of neuron clusters deep in the forebrain at roughly the level of the mid-forehead, that are known to help coordinate body movement along with activation of crucial regions of the left rear forebrain that participate in comprehending and generating speech, most notably Broca's area. The researchers also saw arousal of neural circuits that interact with the limbic system, the wishbone-shape throne of human emotions, and, significantly, of the 'executive' realms of the brain, where decisions to act or desist from acting may be carried out: the neural source, scientists said, of whatever conscience, civility or free will humans can claim. That the brain's executive overseer is ablaze in an outburst of coprolalia, Dr. Silbersweig said, demonstrates how complex an act the urge to speak the unspeakable may be, and not only in the case of Tourette's. The person is gripped by a desire to curse, to voice something wildly inappropriate. Higher-order linguistic circuits are tapped, to contrive the content of the curse. The brain's impulse control center struggles to short-circuit the collusion between limbic system urge and neocortical craft, and it may succeed for a time. Yet the urge mounts, until at last the speech pathways fire, the verboten is spoken, and archaic and refined brains alike must shoulder the blame.

Subject: Message: I Can't From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 05:55:09 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://select.nytimes.com/2005/09/21/opinion/21dowd.html September 21, 2005 Message: I Can't By MAUREEN DOWD WASHINGTON The president won't be happy until he dons a yellow slicker and actually takes the place of Anderson Cooper, violently blown about by Rita as he talks into a camera lens lashed with water, hanging onto a mailbox as he's hit by a flying pig in a squall, sucked up by a waterspout in the eye of the storm over the Dry Tortugas. Then maybe he'll go back to the White House and do his job instead of running down to the Gulf Coast for silly disaster-ops every other day. There's nothing more pathetic than watching someone who's out of touch feign being in touch. On his fifth sodden pilgrimage of penitence to the devastation he took so long to comprehend, W. desperately tried to show concern. He said he had spent some 'quality time' at a Chevron plant in Pascagoula and nattered about trash removal, infrastructure assessment teams and the 'can-do spirit.' 'We look forward to hearing your vision so we can more better do our job,' he said at a briefing in Gulfport, Miss., urging local officials to 'think bold,' while they still need to think mold. Mr. Bush should stop posing in shirtsleeves and get back to the Oval Office. He has more hacks and cronies he's trying to put into important jobs, and he needs to ride herd on that. The announcement that a veterinarian, Norris Alderson, who has no experience on women's health issues, would head the F.D.A.'s Office of Women's Health ran into so much flak from appalled women that the F.D.A. may have already reneged on it. No morning-after pill, thanks to the antediluvian administration, but there may be hope for a morning-after horse pill. Mr. Bush made a frownie over Brownie, but didn't learn much. He's once more trying to appoint a nothingburger to a position of real consequence in homeland security. The choice of Julie Myers, a 36-year-old lawyer with virtually no immigration, customs or law enforcement experience, to head the roiling Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency with its $4 billion budget and 22,000 staffers, has caused some alarm, according to The Washington Post. Ms. Myers's main credentials seem to be that she worked briefly for the semidisgraced homeland security director, Michael Chertoff, when he was at the Justice Department. She just married Mr. Chertoff's chief of staff, John Wood, and she's the niece of Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As a former associate for Ken Starr, the young woman does have impeachment experience, in case the forensic war on terrorism requires the analysis of stains on dresses. Julie makes Brownie look like Giuliani. I'll sleep better tonight, knowing that when she gets back from her honeymoon, Julie will be patrolling the frontier. As if the Veterinarian and the Niece were not bad enough, there was also the Accused. David Safavian, the White House procurement official involved in Katrina relief efforts, was arrested on Monday, accused by the F.B.I. of lying and obstructing a criminal investigation into the seamy case of 'Casino Jack' Abramoff, the Republican operative who has broken new ground in giving lobbying a bad name. Democrats say the fact that Mr. Safavian's wife is a top lawyer for the Republican congressman who's leading the whitewash of the White House blundering on Katrina does not give them confidence. Just as he has stonewalled other inquiries, Mr. Bush is trying to paper over his Katrina mistakes by appointing his homeland security adviser, Frances Townsend, to investigate how the feds fumbled the response. Mr. Bush's 'Who's Your Daddy?' bravura - blowing off the world on global warming and the allies on the Iraq invasion - has been slapped back by Mother Nature, which refuses to be fooled by spin. When Donald Rumsfeld came out yesterday to castigate the gloom-and-doomers and talk about the inroads American forces had made against terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, he could not so easily recast reality. In Afghanistan, the U.S.'s handpicked puppet president is still battling warlords and a revivified Taliban, and the export of poppies for the heroin trade is once more thriving. Iraq is worse, with more than 1,900 American troops killed. Five more died yesterday, as well as four security men connected to the U.S. embassy office in Mosul, all to fashion a theocratic-leaning regime aligned with Iran. In Basra, two journalists who have done work for The Times have been killed in the last two months. The more the president echoes his dad's 'Message: I care,' the more the world hears 'Message: I can't.'

Subject: Thank you! From: xristim To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 19:15:14 (EDT) Email Address: xristim@pacbell.net Message: I'm 71, surviving in 'genteel poverty' on Social Security -- I'm an avid Krugman fan and was distraught to be reduced to choosing: Pay the Times and give up feeding the backyard squirrels, or pay up. I'm am SOOOOOOOO grateful to you! Gadflying gadflying.blog.com

Subject: Re: Thank you! From: Emma To: xristim Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 21:30:45 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: We are indeed fortunate to have this website! Paul Krugman's words will not be lost to any of us.

Subject: Decision Could Be Costly to Germany From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 15:39:34 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://select.nytimes.com/iht/2005/09/19/international/IHT-19globalist.html September 19, 2005 Compromise Decision Could Prove to Be Costly to Germany By ROGER COHEN - International Herald Tribune Germany fudged. Torn between the evident need to revive an economy unable to create employment and a fierce attachment to the welfare system that makes job-creation so difficult, it may choose to give Angela Merkel, the Christian Democratic leader, a limited mandate for reform. That seemed to be the cloudy message contained in an election result so close that both Merkel and Gerhard Schröder, the Social Democratic chancellor, claimed they had enough support to form a government. Just when it can least afford it, Germany has entered a period of muddled political maneuvering. Despite Schröder's claims, Merkel appeared to be the winner, albeit a weak one. She seemed to have edged out Schröder, but so narrowly that the reformist center-right coalition she had hoped for looks unattainable. Instead, her Christian Democratic Partyj, or CDU, may be forced into a 'grand coalition' with the Social Democrats, or SPD, an arrangement she has called a recipe for 'standstill.' With almost five million unemployed and close to zero growth, standstill is the last thing Europe's largest economy needs. But a bitter ideological dispute playing out across Europe, and between Europe and the United States, has taken on a particular virulence here. It pits free-market reformers, or so-called neo-Liberals, against the defenders of Europe's social welfare system. Images from New Orleans of an America divided by class and race have sharpened the debate. Merkel, raised in Communist East Germany, drawn to the United States and a more deregulated economy, campaigned on an explicit free-market platform. Strip away bureaucracy, she said. Lower non-wage labor costs. Make it easier for small companies to hire and fire. Change Germany's risk-shy mentality. 'I learned in the middle of my life that change can also be opportunity,' she said on the eve of the election, referring to the fall of the Berlin Wall and her sudden political emergence. 'Now I would like to give Germans faith in the idea that change can be stimulating and provide new chances.' Germans listened. They seemed intrigued. But when it came to the vote, they hesitated. Merkel seemed too cold, too remote, too extreme, to reassure them. The country was not ready for a woman cast by the left as a latter-day Margaret Thatcher flanked by a flat-tax loony as economic adviser. Nor was it enthused by Merkel's vision of a more Atlanticist Germany, its alliance with the United States invigorated once more. For Merkel, the approximately 35 percent of the vote won by the CDU amounts to a sharp personal setback. Whether she will be able to recover is an open question. Opinion polls had given the CDU over 40 percent. In the end, the party won less than the 38.5 percent it gained in the 2002 election. 'We have not achieved our goal of a conservative-liberal government,' she acknowledged, while insisting she has a mandate to form a coalition. That mandate exists: Hers is almost certainly the largest party, ahead of Schröder's SPD, whose vote share fell sharply to about 34 percent from 38.5 percent. The chancellor called an early election with the professed aim of demonstrating he had the support to govern with vigor. In this aim he was rebuked. But Merkel stumbled in her hour of opportunity. Her failure to garner a center-right majority will feel particularly bitter because the business-friendly Free Democrats, her favored partners, did well, advancing to over 10 percent of the vote, from 7.4 in 2002. The Free Democrats advanced to over 10 percent of the vote, from 7.4 in 2002, a result hailed by its leader, Guido Westerwelle, as the 'big victory of the election.' It was hard to argue with that assessment. The party's performance suggests that a strong reformist current exists in Germany, one that considers Schroder's seven-year failure to dent an unemployment rate of over 11 percent unacceptable. Almost equally strong, however, is the view that any dismantling of the so-called social market economy that has served Germany since World War II would be a disaster. For many Germans, the unemployment benefits that can make it as attractive not to work as to work amount to a constitutionally guaranteed birthright. The roughly 8 percent of the vote gained by the new Left Party, made up of disgruntled former Social Democrats and former East German communists, illustrates how powerful such thinking remains. The idea that the state has to look after people so that they can live decently without working remains entrenched,' said Wolfgang Stock, a political scientist close to the Christian Democrats. So what now? Merkel appears to head the strongest party, but it will be difficult for her to avoid a partnership with the SPD that she disdains. If a grand coalition is formed, any radical reform of the German economy can be safely ruled out. So, too, would any rapid rapprochement with Washington, of the kind Merkel had outlined. A more palatable alternative for Merkel might be to seek to lure the Greens into a coalition with the FDP. That would provide a majority, but the differences of view between the parties - on the environment and the eventual admission of Turkey into the European Union - are probably too large to bridge. Schröder, meanwhile, seems to believe he may yet survive. 'Nobody except me is able to govern this country,' he declared. That seems a far-fetched claim. In theory, a coalition with the Greens and Left Party would give him a majority, but Schröder would have to swallow awfully hard to ally with ex-Communists and Social Democrat renegades whose views he has denounced. The fact is Schröder can scarcely continue with any dignity. As for Merkel, she is a weakened figure within her party. Some of the men frustrated by her rise, like Roland Koch, the state premier of Hesse, may not hesitate to undermine her in the coming months. That she will be chancellor appears likely. But the prospects are remote that the first woman to sit where Bismarck once sat will be able to govern with the decisiveness Germany needs. The great German fudge of Sept. 18 could prove costly.

Subject: Bird and Bees From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 15:36:19 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/science/20obse.html September 20, 2005 Birds and Bees By HENRY FOUNTAIN The Great Chorale of the Avian World The typical songbird is a solo artist, content to warble alone in a tree or on a wire. Some species, however, do the George Jones-Tammy Wynette duet thing, and there are even a few that sing in groups. But nothing quite matches the performance of the plain-tailed wren of Ecuador and Peru, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir of the avian world. Biologists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland report that groups of the birds sing four-part songs, the males and females trading phrases with split-second timing for up to two minutes. 'I think this is the most complex song in a nonhuman animal,' said Peter J. Slater, a professor of natural history and, along with Nigel I. Mann and Kimberly A. Dingess, author of a paper about the bird published in the journal Biology Letters. The plain-tailed wren is one of 28 species of a genus that the researchers are studying as part of a project on the evolution of singing patterns. Some species sing duets, with overlapping parts. 'But we came across this really quite extraordinary one,' Dr. Slater said, on an Ecuadorean volcano. 'You get out of the car in the morning, and the whole hillside is ringing with these birds.' The researchers teased the wrens out of their bamboo thickets and watched and recorded. They sang in groups of up to seven, the songs following an A-B-C-D pattern, with males singing the A and C phrases and females the B and D. The phrases follow in rapid succession with no overlapping, so that in effect it sounds like a single song. (A sample, in wav format.) What makes the performance even more remarkable, Dr. Slater said, is that birds of each sex synchronize their parts. The males, for example, have 15 to 20 different A phrases they can sing. Yet two or more males in a group will sing the same phrase in almost perfect synchrony. Dr. Slater said several reasons were possible for this pattern. One involves reproduction. Since these are tropical birds, they do not use external factors like changing day length to know when to breed. So coordinating song like this may help synchronize reproduction, by stimulating hormones in the birds at the same time. But the birds also probably use their chorusing for defense. 'If you put a loudspeaker in the middle of these birds, they all gather around it and sing like mad,' Dr. Slater said. 'It must be very intimidating for an intruding wren.' All the Buzz Charles Darwin is best known for the theory of evolution, but he did much other scientific work as well. Through repeated observations of bees, for example, he proposed that bees outside the nest learn foraging tips by watching others. Since Darwin's time, scientists have learned that a great deal of information about foraging is communicated within the hive, through a 'waggle dance' in which a bee tells hive mates where to find a food source, and outside the hive through the use of scent marks. But what of Darwin's original hypothesis? Bradley D. Worden and Daniel R. Papaj of the University of Arizona decided to test it, but they took the idea a step further. They wanted to see whether bees could learn about foraging from bees that were not from the same hive. They tested their idea with bumblebees, which have an advantage of having small hives, often with fewer than 100 workers. With so few foraging bees, the scientists thought it might be more likely that the insects would go outside the hive for information and help. Bees that had never fed on flowers were allowed to watch as unrelated bees (and in other experiments, artificial ones) foraged among orange or green flowers. In most cases, they chose the same color flowers that had been picked by the bees they watched. The results were published in the journal Biology Letters. This kind of social learning, the researchers suggest, might be important to bees in one colony by providing them with information about food sources discovered by another.

Subject: Egyptian Comedy Promotes Peace From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 12:47:26 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/international/africa/20movie.html September 20, 2005 No Joke: Egyptian Comedy Promotes Peace With Israel By MICHAEL SLACKMAN CAIRO - Egyptian movie audiences are not accustomed to laughing about the Arab conflict with Israel, or to seeing Israeli diplomats portrayed as regular folks living next door. But in Egypt's box office hit, 'The Embassy Is in the Building,' the director, Amro Arafa, uses comedy to try to get Egyptian audiences to consider a most serious point: that peace with Israel is in Egypt's own interest. 'We have signed peace with this country,' a state security agent says during a pivotal scene in the movie. 'This is our country's policy, and it is for our interest. Do you want to be against the country's interests?' The security man, who spoke about the need for 'peaceful coexistence with them,' was talking to a character played by Adel Imam, Egypt's most famous comic actor, arguably one of the only actors in Egypt who could pull off such a movie and still keep the audience laughing. 'The Embassy Is in the Building,' which is still in theaters, was the second biggest hit at the box office this year among Egyptian-made movies, bringing in nearly $3 million. It is a wry look at Egyptian society with a main character who lives in Dubai and has a taste for beautiful married women. He gets fired after having an affair with his boss's wife, and returns home to Egypt only to find that the Israeli ambassador, David Cohen, has moved into his building. The movie pokes fun at leftists still clinging to pan-Arab nationalism and takes a swipe at a nationalist poet, Amal Donqol, who wrote a poem saying Egypt and Israel could never have normal relations. It spoofs Islamists as goofy men with beards and guns, and it lampoons the Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera. But this is not just a movie aiming to make people laugh - according to critics, political observers and the director - but an effort, however ham-handed, to use the Egyptian cinema to make people at least entertain the notion that peace with Israel is good for Egypt, even while Israel may itself remain an object of hate. 'We do not have a problem with the Israelis or the Jews; we have a problem with the Israeli government,' said Mr. Arafa, the film's director, repeating a semantic distinction that was once popular among Egyptians but was dropped altogether after the second intifada heated up in 2000. 'This is the first time that a movie deals directly with this problem, 'Why we hate the Israeli government.' ' For an outsider, it might be difficult to walk away from this movie with the impression it is any kind of olive branch. Throughout the film, there is strong anti-Israeli language. And it ends with the death of a cute, heroic Palestinian boy at the hands of Israelis and an angry protest outside the Israeli Embassy in Egypt. The protesters are shouting: 'Down with the Israeli occupation! 'Down with murderers of children! 'Down to enemies of peace! 'Down with the settlements!' But consider how the movie is perceived by at least some people who have lived through the chaos and hatred that have consumed the region for so long. 'When I look at it after clearing the dust, I can see a few good things,' said Jacob Setti, press attaché of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo. 'It is the first film I see that deals with the Israeli Embassy as an ordinary thing. It is in Cairo, functioning, working like any other place. Another point is that it deals with the Israeli ambassador as someone who is doing his work and speaking Arabic, as many of them do. The third issue is even the film admits that there is a good level of relationship between both governments, and I think that in the future we will see a development in this relationship.' Tarek el Shenawy, a leading film critic in two popular Egyptian weekly newspapers, said the last protest scene reflected a new perspective, because the protesters neither called for the embassy to leave Cairo nor demanded the end of relations with Israel. 'The film carries a message from the government: Do not hate Israel, do not love Israel, just forget about it,' he said. The two-hour film also stems from a broader change in a society that had long been frozen in economic, political and social terms, analysts said. About a year ago, Egyptians began to hold demonstrations in the street - not focused on Israel, but domestic issues. In the past the government did not allow any demonstrations critical of the president or his policies. The domestic-oriented protest marches may not have sparked a widespread opposition movement, but they have signaled a shift in focus for the minority that does speak out - from foreign affairs to domestic affairs. The first multicandidate campaign for president, which ended earlier this month, was criticized for being brief - only 19 days - but the opposition candidates traveled the country talking about domestic issues, with the topic of Israel rarely coming up during the race. 'The more democratic space we have, the more focused we would be on our domestic problems,' said Wahid Abdel Meguid, a political analyst and deputy director of the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. 'Arab governments used the struggle with Israel as an excuse for political oppression, as an excuse for their failure to run the country.' Whether Mr. Imam can make people laugh is not in doubt. But on the question of whether his comedy can help promote a more moderate view toward relations with Israel, the jury is still out. 'I loved the movie,' said Reem Abdel Nasser, 19, as she left the theater last week. 'It deals with all the problems and issues we are concerned and confused about. And he presents a diplomatic solution for the Israeli-Arab problem which I agree with. We have to live with them. We do not have to be friends, but we do not have to be enemies. We should just live together.' But that is not what her father came away with. 'The movie is a reminder for people to wake up and understand Israel,' said her father, Gamal Abdel Nasser. 'It is a very difficult problem to solve, and the only way to solve it is by force. Whichever was taken by force should be restored only by force.'

Subject: Simon Wiesenthal, Nazi Hunter From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 12:42:17 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/international/europe/20cnd-wiesenthal.html September 20, 2005 Simon Wiesenthal, Nazi Hunter, Dies at 96 By RALPH BLUMENTHAL Simon Wiesenthal, the death camp survivor who dedicated the rest of his life to tracking down fugitive Nazi war criminals, died today at his home in Vienna. He was 96. His death was announced by Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. After hairbreadth escapes from death, two suicide attempts and his liberation by American forces in Austria in 1945, Mr. Wiesenthal abandoned his profession as an architectural engineer and took on a new calling: memorializing the six million of his fellow Jews and perhaps five million other noncombatants who were systematically murdered by the Nazis, and bringing their killers to justice. His results were checkered: claims that he flushed out nearly 1,100 war criminals were sometimes wrong or disputed. But his role as a stubborn sleuth on the trail of history's archfiends helped keep the spotlight on a hideous past that he said too much of the world was disposed to forget. 'To young people here, I am the last,' he told an interviewer in Vienna in 1993. 'I'm the one who can still speak. After me, it's history.' From the cramped three-room office of his Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna, Mr. Wiesenthal spent years collecting and disbursing tips on war criminals through a network of informers, government agents, journalists and even former Nazis. He recounted these efforts in a memoir published in 1967, 'The Murderers Among Us,' and a second volume, 'Justice, Not Vengeance,' in 1989. With a grave and tenacious manner, undercurrents of humor and a flair for gaining attention, he was lionized in 1989 in an HBO movie 'Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story,' based on his memoirs and starring Ben Kingsley. A character modeled on him was played by Sir Laurence Olivier in the 1978 film 'The Boys from Brazil' (though Mr. Wiesenthal was mortified by his depiction as a bumbler). And he served as a consultant for yet another thriller, 'The Odessa File.' Dozens of nations and institutions honored him: the list of his awards, typed single-space, takes up nearly an entire dense page. But one prize that eluded him, to his great disappointment, was the Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Wiesenthal, a bulky figure with a clipped mustache who sometimes laughed that people mistakenly saw him as harmless, pressed his searches despite vilification and threats of death and kidnapping made against him, his wife, Cyla, and their daughter, Pauline. In 1982 his house in Vienna was damaged by a firebomb, but he escaped unharmed. (German and Austrian neo-Nazis were charged, and one went to jail.) Yet he rejected entreaties to move, insisting that there was a symbolic purpose in doing his work from a longtime redoubt of Nazism and anti-Semitism where, he once said, his efforts were 'unhappily tolerated.' Calling himself 'the bad conscience of the Nazis,' he vowed to continue his efforts 'until the day I die.' His goal, he said, was not vengeance but ensuring that Nazi crimes 'are brought to light so the new generation knows about them, so it should not happen again.' It was a matter of pride and satisfaction, he said in 1995, as he approached his 87th birthday, that old Nazis who get into quarrels threaten one another with a vow to go to Simon Wiesenthal. He wrote grippingly of the German killing industry, cataloging a list of property sent to Berlin from the Treblinka death camp between October 1942 and August 1943: 'Twenty-five freight cars of women's hair, 248 freight cars of clothing, 100 freight cars of shoes,' along with 400,000 gold watches, 145,000 kilograms of gold wedding rings and 4,000 karats of diamonds 'over 2 karats.' Of the 700,000 people known to have been taken to Treblinka, he wrote in the 1960's, 'about 40 are now alive.' He suggested that train stations in Europe should get plaques reading: 'Between 1942 and 1945 trains passed through here every day with the sole purpose of taking human beings to their annihilation.' In recent years he also spoke out in favor of war crimes trials for genocide in the former Yugoslavia, and lent his name to a Holocaust study center and Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. 'Survivors should be like seismographs,' Mr. Wiesenthal wrote. 'They should sense danger before others do, identify its outlines and reveal them. They are not entitled to be wrong a second time or regard as harmless something that might lead to catastrophe.' Sometimes he taught his lessons with an acerbic wit. Failing to sway a Jewish lawyer who persisted in defending the right of neo-Nazis to march even through a Jewish neighborhood, Mr. Wiesenthal offered a final rebuke: 'A Jew may be stupid, but it's not obligatory.' Once, in West Germany, he related, he defused a harangue by a speaker who accused him of dining on Nazis for breakfast, lunch and dinner. 'You are mistaken,' he replied. 'I don't eat pork.' He became embroiled in Austrian politics, feuding bitterly with the Socialist chancellor, Bruno Kreisky. He was also assailed for siding with Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations secretary general and Austrian president who concealed his wartime service with a German intelligence unit implicated in atrocities in the Balkans. Critics challenged Mr. Wiesenthal's claims to have played a role in the seizure of Adolf Eichmann, who directed the transport of European Jews to Hitler's death camps and was kidnapped by the Israelis from Argentina in 1960, then tried, convicted and hanged. He also promulgated many false sightings in the bungled hunt for Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz death camp doctor who fled to South America and drowned in Brazil in 1979. Serge Klarsfeld, a Paris lawyer who with his German-born wife, Beate, was instrumental in tracking down the Nazi Gestapo leader Klaus Barbie in Bolivia, called Mr. Wiesenthal an egomaniac and faulted him for not supporting their anti-Nazi demonstrations in South America and Europe. But Mr. Klarsfeld credited him with blazing the trail by his