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editor
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 Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 9:34 am Post subject: |
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New York Times Magazine
Newspaper Subscription
The 7th Annual Year in Ideas
Prison Poker
By Richard Morgan
Dec. 9/07
| Quote: | In April 2003 the Pentagon created decks of playing cards to be given to soldiers, all featuring wanted members of Saddam Hussein's inner circle. When he heard this, Special Agent Tommy Ray, a state law officer in Polk County, Fla., got inspired. Two years later, he made his own deck of cards, each bearing information about a different local criminal case that had gone cold. He distributed the decks in the Polk County jail. His hunch was that prisoners would gossip about the cases during card games, and somehow clues or breaks would emerge and make their way to the authorities. The plan worked. Two months in, as a result of a tip from a card-playing informant, two men were charged with a 2004 murder in a case that had gone cold.
In July of this year, the idea took off: all state inmates in Flkorida now have access to two different decks of cards, describing a total of 104 cold cases. In mid-October, based on a tip from an informant at the Columbia Correctional Institutional Annex in Lake City, the police arrested a man in connection with a Fort Myers murder in 2004. The informant requested no reward money. Plans are now in the works to make decks of cards for all Florida county jails. And police departments elsewhere in the country are instituting similar programs.
Jack Levin, a sociologist and criminologist at Northeastern University who has written a book on gossip, is cautious about declaring the cards a success. "This is a clever experiment," he says. But to know if it works, he goes on, "you'd need to put some fake cases in there, to know how the inmates respond to those. Right now, this will solve a case here and a case there, but at a huge cost of wild-goose chases, paperwork, false hope and even the possibility of false convictions."
Of the 66 tips he has received, Ray says he is confident about 15 and excited about 4. "These cases are cold," he says. "Any information is better than no information." (-- pgs. 90-92) |
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| Posted: Thu Apr 03, 2008 12:40 pm Post subject: |
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Each Dawn I Die
DVD
Featuring ace reporter Jimmy Cagney,
caught in a frame after pulling the plug
on evil developers and other contruction
criminals the whole world has come to
despise
| Quote: | Inmate: Well, we'll soon find out who wins the blood sweep now.
Another inmate: Wanna' bet on it?
Frank Ross: I don't bet on one guy killing another.
Second inmate: That ain't it. Limpy got a message to Stacey that he'd get 'im before he was out of the hole 24 hours. But you gotta' call the hour. I'll bet two cans of tobacco one of them gets it within seven hours. |
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| Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 12:13 pm Post subject: |
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National Geographic
Adventure
The Next Crusade
The offscreen adventures of an
eco-action figure
By Costa Christ
Magazine Subscription
April, 2008
| Quote: | He flies to the rescue, treks through jungles, dodges snakes, and saves rare treasures - and that's just in his private life. On screen, such pursuits have made Harrison Ford, 65, an adventure icon. (The first Indiana Jones film in almost 20 years, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, opens next month.) But since 1991 the actor, pilot, and environmentalist has been moonlighting as a strategic for Conservation International (conservation.org) - supporting biodiversity research, protecting endangered species, and working to persuade corporations with a history of polluting the planet to become stewards of it instead. In honor of Earth Day, Ford spoke to us about high stakes, hard landings, lost worlds, and why he prefers his adventures unscripted.
A: Is that the future of consdervation, partnering with global corporations? That seems like an uneasy alliance.
HF: I believe that it's the future of conservation in general. One of the tenets of CI has always been to offer economic opportunities in developing countries, where providing for people's basic needs puts a lot of pressure on the environment. By adopting better practices, international corporations can be very important partners in protecting nature.
...
A: Some years ago you said, "The last thing we need is another 100,000 people running around endangered places in Michael Jackson T-shirts." Tourism is now arguably the largest industry on the planet - far larger than Hollywood. Do you think it can be harnessed as an eco-opportunity?
HF: Well, I still have trepidation about bringing all these people to untrammelled wilderness. But it's proven to be an educational tool that's affected the people who've made those trips. They come away as more critical partners in conservation. My concern wasn't the tourists in Michael Jackson T-shirts, but the indigenous people who would end up wearing them. (-- pgs. 17-18) |
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| Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 1:11 pm Post subject: |
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Homage to Robert Frost
Hardcover
By Joseph Brodsky Ио́сиф Алекса́ндрович Бро́дский,
Seamus Heaney and
Derek Walcott
| Quote: | ... Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man's recognition of his own negative potential - with his sense of what he is capable of. And it is the latter that was Frost's forte, not the former. In other words, his posture is radically different from the Continental tradition of the poet as tragic hero. And that difference alone makes him - for want of a better term - American.
On the surface, he looks very positively predisposed toward his surroundings - particularly toward nature. His fluency, indeed, his "being versed in country things" alone can produce this impression. However, there is a difference between the way a European perceives nature and the way an American does. Addressing this difference, W.H. Auden, in his short essay on the poet), suggests something to the effect that when a European conceives of confronting nature, he walks out of his cottage or a little inn, filled with either friends or family, and goes for an evening stroll. If he encounters a tree, it's a tree made familiar by history, to which it's been a witness. This or that king sat underneath it, laying down this or that law - something of that sort. A tree stands there rustling, as it were, with allusions. Pleased and somewhat pensive, our man, refreshed but unchanged by that encounter, returns to his inn or cottage, finds his friends or family absolutely intact, and proceeds to have a good, merry time. Whereas when an American walks out of his house and encounters a tree it is a meeting of equals. Man and tree face each other in their respective primal power, free of references: neither has a past, and as to whose future is greater, it is a toss-up. Basically, it's epidermis meeting bark. Our man returns to his cabin in a state of bewilderment, to say the least, if not in actual shock or terror.
Now, this is obviously a romantic caricature, but it accentuates the features, and that's what I am after here. In any case, the second point could be safely billed as the gist of Robert Frost's nature poetry. Nature for this poet is neither friend nor foe, nor is it the backdrop for human drama; it is the poet's terrifying self-portrait. ... (On Grief and Reason, by Joseph Brodsky, pgs. 7-9) |
Literary heavyweights converge on one of America's best-loved poet laureates. The student's best guide to writing an essay on an individual poet or poem.
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| Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2008 2:46 pm Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
TimesOnline
Fleet Street's Finest
Call that a special relationship? They
wouldn't bet on it
America's pursuit of British businessmen
who have broken no law is absurd
By Mishcon de Reya lawyer, Anthony Julius
June 17/08
| Quote: | With George W. Bush in London, it is a good time to reflect on the “special relationship”. According to received opinion, this consists of no more than Britain's special culpability for colluding in American crimes. This is mistaken and derives from a European anti-Americanism at least as old as the American Republic itself.
But does this mean that there is no cause at all for concern about the special relationship? Barack Obama has conceded that the relationship must be somewhat “recalibrated”. An Obama adviser added: “Full partners not only listen to each other, they also occasionally follow each other.” He was right to identify an inequality that urgently needs remedying.
The “special relationship”, a phrase coined by Winston Churchill after the Second World War, is predicated on shared language and history, and a commitment to representative democracy and the political freedoms that sustain it. It has the character of a family relationship in two critical respects. It is permanent and open to particular abuse. Although the abuse has been sharpest in recent years, it derives from a longer-term problem - best identified as a peculiarly American extraterritorialism.
“Extraterritorialism” is either when a state gives up some sovereignty to another body, or when it asserts authority over a foreign nation. It can cut both ways. According to the liberal version, individual states should subordinate their sovereign desires to common interests, submitting to authorities such as the UN. According to the imperial version, one state has the right to assert its sovereignty over others, requiring them to submit to its interests.
Liberal extraterritorialism is now identified with Europe; imperial extraterritorialism is taken to be the US default position in both trade and warfare. America is, as the historian Niall Ferguson has approvingly pointed out, an empire. It should therefore surprise no one that it behaves like one.
But the distinction between liberal and imperial does not quite capture the paradox of America's stance. It has been liberal at times and imperial at other times. But it has also been a third, uniquely American thing. This amounts to an interventionism that is genuinely self-sacrificing - acting not merely in its own selfish interests, while also acting without the consent of bodies, such as the UN. It is not submitting to American self-delusion to acknowledge this.
Such an acknowledgement is needed to put into perspective criticisms of US imperial extraterritorialism (to declare an interest, I write as a member of a law firm representing victims of one especially egregious US assertion of extraterritorial authority).
Among deplorable instances of this invasiveness are the Helms-Burton Act 1996, which extends the US embargo against Cuban goods to foreign companies trading with Cuba and provisions of the Patriot Act 2001 that treat foreign bank deposits as if held in the foreign bank's US Interbank account.
And there is the Extradition Act 2003, which reflected an inequality between Britain and the US, making it easier for US prosecuting authorities to extradite from Britain than for British prosecuting authorities to extradite from the US.
The tendency to ignore international obligations and substitute aggressive unilateral, protectionist policies is hardly a vice limited to the US. But the extent of US power and influence means that when the US misbehaves that misbehaviour has the greatest impact. In March 2003, Antigua and Barbuda complained to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) about US laws that prohibited foreign access to the highly lucrative US internet gambling market. The WTO ruled that these US laws violated America's international obligations. The US should have legislated to comply with its international commitments, helping to safeguard the WTO's integrity. Instead, it announced that it would withdraw from its treaty commitments.
Meanwhile, in October 2006, Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Act (UIGEA). The publicly listed and most responsible (mainly UK-listed) operators leading the industry immediately stopped taking US customers, at the cost of billions of dollars. These losses were not just to the few individuals most rewarded by the industry's success, but to all the institutional and individual investors in the companies and the other industries benefiting from WTO-sanctioned business in a multi-billion dollar industry.
The US nevertheless continues to act against those who withdrew from the market in 2006, while US businesses still operate in America free of interference or the risk of prosecution. The US seems untroubled by WTO findings. Nor is it deterred by an EU investigation into its discriminatory legislation and its violation of international trade principles. Remarkably, US companies are developing equivalent businesses in the UK and elsewhere in Europe on equal terms with UK and European businesses. (emphasis added)
Many believe that American prosecutors will not rest until those associated with British online gaming are in jail or parties to multimillion-pound “settlements”. Among the UK companies, banks and businessmen threatened with prosecution for activities that were lawful when undertaken, David Carruthers, the Scottish former chief executive of BetOnSports, is under house arrest in St Louis on racketeering and conspiracy charges. And six weeks after that arrest, Peter Dicks, the chief executive of Sportingbet, was detained on entering the US. These British businessmen, who were acting completely lawfully, are being persecuted by retrospective American law.
There is a tendency among commentators to ignore international trade and business relations in favour of broader political and geopolitical concerns. But we should not need Adam Smith to remind us that it is in the fairness of everyday commercial dealings between nations that peace and harmony lie. America is in danger of overlooking this truth, when it acts unjustly and overlooks the interests of its allies and friends.
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| Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2009 12:54 pm Post subject: |
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Vanity Fair
Magazine Subscription
Capitalist Fools
Behind the debate over remaking U.S. financial policy will be a debate over who's to blame. It's crucial to get the history right, writes a Nobel-laureate economist, identifying five key mistakes - under Reagan, Clinton and Bush II - and one national delusion
By Joseph E. Stiglitz
January, 2009
| Quote: | No. 1: Firing the Chairman ...
No. 2: Tearing Down the Walls ...
Of course, the current problems with our financial system are not solely the result of bad lending. The banks have made mega-bets with one another through complicated instruments such as derivatives, credit-default swaps, and so forth. With these, one party pays another if certain events happen—for instance, if Bear Stearns goes bankrupt, or if the dollar soars. These instruments were originally created to help manage risk—but they can also be used to gamble. Thus, if you felt confident that the dollar was going to fall, you could make a big bet accordingly, and if the dollar indeed fell, your profits would soar. The problem is that, with this complicated intertwining of bets of great magnitude, no one could be sure of the financial position of anyone else—or even of one’s own position. Not surprisingly, the credit markets froze.
Here too Greenspan played a role. When I was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, during the Clinton administration, I served on a committee of all the major federal financial regulators, a group that included Greenspan and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Even then, it was clear that derivatives posed a danger. We didn’t put it as memorably as Warren Buffett—who saw derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction”—but we took his point. And yet, for all the risk, the deregulators in charge of the financial system—at the Fed, at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and elsewhere—decided to do nothing, worried that any action might interfere with “innovation” in the financial system. But innovation, like “change,” has no inherent value. It can be bad (the “liar” loans are a good example) as well as good. ...
No. 3: Applying the Leeches ...
No. 4: Faking the Numbers ...
No. 5: Letting It Bleed ...
... There has been much finger-pointing at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two huge mortgage lenders, which were originally government-owned. But in fact they came late to the subprime game, and their problem was similar to that of the private sector: their C.E.O.s had the same perverse incentive to indulge in gambling. (-- pgs. 48-51) |
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| Posted: Sat Mar 21, 2009 12:26 pm Post subject: |
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From Famous Four-Flushers:
Harper's
Magazine Subscription
Notebook
Of Mohawks and Mavericks
By Garret Keizer
December, 2008
| Quote: | I was just your average hockey mom.
—Sarah Palin
I have never gotten over the notion that the history of the United States begins with an act of masquerade. On the night of December 16, 1773, “a number of resolute men (dressed like Mohawks or Indians),” as later reported in the Boston Gazette, managed to dump some 90,000 pounds of East India Company tea into Boston Harbor. They did this, again as reported by the Gazette, “to save their country from the ruin which their enemies had plotted.” From a distance it is hard to say which disguise was the more outlandish, that of the local merchants got up as Hiawatha or that of a beverage tax got up as the tyrant’s scourge. To come even close you would have to dress up a million- dollar-a-month AIG booty bag as a “consulting fee.”
The Tea Party proved catalytic - one book devoted to the episode bears the title The Night the Revolution Began - and prophetic as well. Americans have been dressing up ever since: Ku Klux Klansmen costumed as ghosts, ghost-white college kids posing as homeboys and Rastas, corporate lawyers decked out in Stetsons and cowboy boots, Wall Street sharpies affecting the flabbergasted expressions of sucker-punched rubes. ("That thar" mortgage thingamajig done blew itself up"). Add an extra touch of fantasy to the makeup and you get Ronald Reagan as the savior of democracy and John McCain as the patron saint of reform. J. Edgar Hoover may never have stood so resolutely for the American way as in those legends that have him flinging a boa round his neck and prancing before his full-length mirror in drag.
Numerous studies have been written on the role of masking in traditional cultures, but they throw little light on the false-face societies of the United States. Probably no one theory could account for our every disguised, for Al Jolson in blackface and Rush Limbaugh as the aggrieved common man. I suspect that aside from the obvious explanations - the fun of dressing up, the benefits of anonymity as you hatchet open chests of tea - the main reason we mask ourselves is to hide from the claims of common life, which is to say, the claims that taxation in its purest form attempts to address. The partisan badge, the counterculture face paint, creates the illusion of membership in something less dull and burdensome than the whole human race. ... (-- p. 9) |
Official and Confidential
The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover
Hardcover
By Anthony Summers
| Quote: | Several accounts of Hoover, who was FBI chief from 1924 until his death in 1972, have hinted at his homosexuality but a new biography provides an eyewitness account of him dressed in black and red gowns, false eyelashes and a wig, taking part in orgies in New York's Plaza Hotel. In attendance, according to the account, were blond teenage boys who read the Bible and had sex with Hoover.
According to Anthony Summers, author of the new biography, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J Edgar Hoover, the FBI boss was an active member of a homosexual group that included the lawyer Roy Cohn and the liquor baron Lewis Rosentiel.
Eyewitness of the Plaza orgies is Lewis Rosentiel's then wife, Susan, who claims she saw Hoover 'wearing a fluffy black dress, very fluffy, with flounces, and lace stockings and high heels and a black curly wig'. Cohn introduced him as Mary, she says.
In an excerpt of the biography in next week's Vanity Fair magazine she adds: 'It was obvious it wasn't a woman; you could see where he shaved. It was Hoover. You've never seen anything like it. I couldn't believe it, that I should see the head of the FBI dressed as a woman.' She says Hoover, Cohn and her husband had sex with the boys, one of whom read from the Bible.
Another time at the Plaza, Ms Rosentiel says she saw Hoover in a red dress with a black feather boa around his neck. 'He was dressed like a flapper.'
The wonder is that Hoover, whose stock-in-trade was blackmail, including tracking President John F Kennedy's sexual dalliances - should have risked being blackmailed himself by taking part in orgies at one of New York's most fashionable hotels, which was not exactly a 'safe house'. Also, Nicholas von Hoffman, a biographer of Roy Cohn, points out that Susan Rosentiel, disliked Cohn and other ex-FBI people close to him and one can never be sure of the motives of those in the Hoover-Cohn-Rosentiel group and who may now feel it is safe to speak out. It has long been rumoured that Hoover had an affair with his aide, Clyde Tolson, and all these sexual adventures, if true, put Hoover's FBI stewardship into a new historical perspective. (From FBI chief exposed as a secret transvestite: Peter Pringle reports from New York on new allegations that J Edgar Hoover attended orgies, wearing a fluffy black dress to one, and was blackmailed into protecting the Mafia by Peter Pringle in The Independent, Feb. 6/93) |
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| Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 1:01 pm Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
The Post-American World
Hardcover
By Fareed Zakaria
| Quote: | America's Best Industry
"Ah, yes," say those who are more worried, "but you're looking at a snapshot of today. America's advantages are rapidly eroding as the country loses its scientific and technological base." For some, the decline of science is symptomatic of a larger cultural decay. A country that once adhered to a Puritan ethic of delayed gratification has become one that revels in instant pleasures. We're losing interest in the basics - math, manufacturing, hard work, savings - and becoming a postindustrial society that specializes in consumption and leisure. "More people will graduate in the United States in 2006 with sports-exercise degrees than electrical-engineering degrees," says General Electric's CEO, Jeffrey Immelt. "So, if we want to be the massage capital of the world, we're well on our way." (footnote omitted)
... What hope does the United States have if for every qualified American engineer there are 11 Chinese and Indian ones? For the cost of one chemist or engineer in the United States, the (2005 National Academy of Sciences) report pointed out a company could hire 5 well-trained and eager chemists in China or 11 engineers in India. (-- pgs. 187-188) |
Yes, but get this:
| Quote: | ... A group of professors at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University traveled to China and India to collect data from governmental and nongovernmental sources and interview businessmen and academics. They concluded that eliminating graduates of two-or three-year programs halves the Chinese figure (of engineering grads) ... and even this number is probably significantly inflated by differing definitions of "engineer" that often include auto mechanics and industrial repairmen. ... That means the United States actually trains more engineers per capita than either India or China does. (footnote omitted)
And the numbers don't address the issue of quality. As someone who grew up in India, I have a healthy appreciation for the virtues of its famous engineering academies, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). ... In fact, many of the IITs are decidedly second-rate, with mediocre equipment, indifferent teachers, and unimaginative classwork. Rajiv Sahney, who attended IIT and then went to Caltech, says, "The IITs' core advantage is the entrance exam, which is superbly designed to select extremely intelligent students. In terms of teaching and facilities, they really don't compare with any decent American technical institute." And once you get beyond the IITs and other such elite academies - which graduate under ten thousand students a year - the quality of higher education in and India remains extremely poor, which is why so many students leave those countries to get trained abroad.
... In both India and China, it (McKinsey Global Institute study on emerging global labor market, 2005) noted, beyond the small number of top-tier academies, the quality and quantity of education is low. Only 10 per cent of Indians get any kind of postsecondary education. ... Wages of trained engineers in both countries are rising by 15 per cent a year, a sure sign that demand is outstripping supply. ...
Higher education is America's best industry. There are two rankings of universities worldwide. In one of them, a purely quantitative study done by Chinese researchers, eight of the top ten universities in the world are in the United States. In the other, more qualitative one by London's Times Higher Educational Supplement, it's seven. The numbers flatten out somewhat after that. Of the top twenty, seventeen or eleven are in America; of the top fifty, thirty-eight or twenty-one. Still, the basic story does not change. With 5 per cent of the world's population, the United States absolutely dominates higher education, ...
... In India, universities graduate between 35 and 50 Ph.D.s in computer science each year; in America, the figure is 1,000. ...
I went to elementary, middle and high school in Mumbai, at an excellent institution, the Cathedral and John Connon School. Its approach (30 years ago) reflected the teaching methods often described as "Asian," in which the premium is placed on memorization and constant testing. This is actually the old British, and European, pedagogical method, one that now gets described as Asian. I recall memorizing vast quantities of material, regurgitating it for exams, and then promptly forgetting it. When I went to college in the United States, I encountered a different world. While the American system is too lax on rigor and memorization - whether in math or poetry - it is much better at developing the critical faculties of the mind, which is what you need to succeed in life. Other educational systems teach you to take tests; the American system teaches you to think.
It is surely this quality that goes some way in explaining why America produces so many entrepreneurs, inventors, and risk takers. In America, people are allowed to be bold, challenge authority, fail, and pick themselves up. It's America, not Japan, that produces dozens of Nobel Prize winners. Tharman Shanmugaratnam, until recently Singapore's minister of education, explains the difference between his country's system and America's. "We both have meritocracies," Shanmurgaratnam says. "Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. We know how to train people to take exams. You know how to use people's talents to the fullest. ..." (-- pgs. 188-193) |
Why America and Europe both need LOTS of immigrants:
| Quote: | The native-born, white American population has the same low fertility rates as Europe's. Without immigration, U.S. GDP growth over the last quarter century would have been the same as Europe's. America's edge in innovation is overwhelmingly a product of immigration. Foreign students and immigrants account for 50 per cent of the science researchers in the country and, in 2006, received 40 per cent of the doctorates in science and engineering and 65 per cent of the doctorates in computer science. By 2010, foreign students will get more than 50 per cent of all Ph.D.s awarded in every subject in the United States. In the sciences, that figure will be closer to 75 per cent. Half of all Silicon Valley start-ups have one founder who is an immigrant or first-generation American. America's potential new burst of pruductivity, its edge in nanotechnology, biotechnology, its ability to invent the future - all rest on its immigration policies. If America can keep the people it educates in the country, the innovation will happen here. If they go back home, the innovation will travel with them.
Immigration also gives America a quality rare for a rich country - hunger and energy. As countries become wealthy, the drive to move up and succeed weakens. But America has found a way to keep itself constantly revitalized by streams of people who are looking to make a new life in a new world. These are the people who work long hours picking fruit in searing heat, washing dishes, building houses, working night shifts, and cleaning waste dumps. They come to the United States under terrible conditions, leave family and community, only because they want to work and get ahead in life. Americans have almost always worried about such immigrants - whether from Ireland or Italy, China or Mexico. But these immigrants have gone on to become the backbone of the American working class, and their children or grandchildren have entered the American mainstream. America has been able to tap this energy, manage diversity, assimilate newcomers,a dn move ahead economically. Ultimately, this is what sets the country apart from the experience of Britain and all other historical examples of great economic powers that grow fat and lazy and slip behind as they face the rise of leaner, hungrier nations. (-- pgs. 198-199) |
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editor
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| Posted: Thu Apr 23, 2009 11:05 am Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
New York Times Magazine
Magazine Subscription
Questions for Felix Rohatyn
The Builder
The former banker talks about how to remake America's infrastructure, why the nation's economy is worse than New York's in the '70s and the appeal of being an engineer.
By Deborah Solomon
Feb. 8/09
| Quote: | We should point out that you’re the investment banker credited with solving New York’s fiscal woes in 1975 and saving the city from bankruptcy. The New York City crisis was less dangerous than the current situation. Maybe for the first time in history, the U.S. is faced with doubts about its destiny. In less than 50 years, we have gone from the American Century to the American Crisis.
What do you make of President Obama’s $800-billion-plus stimulus package? I totally support Obama, but I would argue in favor of a greater amount of infrastructure investment and probably fewer tax cuts. There should be less concern about rapid liquidation and greater emphasis on long-term investments.
The emphasis now seems to be on shoring up levees and making repairs to crumbling structures instead of building new ones. Repairs are very important, as is new construction, and there should be a mix of both. If we have a major nuclear program in the next 25 years, for instance, then we have to do something about the infrastructure that goes with that, from creating an energy grid to dealing with nuclear-waste disposal.
Are you concerned about the number of students who have forsaken engineering for business school?
They’ll go back to being engineers after they’ve discovered that business school doesn’t make them millions of dollars. They’ll see the stock market doesn’t do them much good, so they might as well do something constructive. (emphasis added)
Which country do you think has the best infrastructure? France has a very good infrastructure. You get on the train in Paris to go to London, and two and half hours later you’re there, and you haven’t even felt a vibration. ... (-- p. 20) |
Bold Endeavors
How Our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now
Hardcover
By Felix Rohatyn
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| Posted: Thu May 28, 2009 2:18 pm Post subject: |
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Stephen Fry in America
Hardcover
| Quote: | New Jersey is, let's be honest, the Essex of America. Jersey girls and Jersey boys will forever be mocked in jokes and songs for their dumbness, illiteracy, vulgarity and sexual availability. The industrial ugliness of much of the state where it borders the Hudson and looks across the river to Manhattan is hard to deny: ...
Best known in the 19th and 20th centuries for its boardwalk, all seven miles of it, Atlantic City on the south Jersey shore was one of the nmost prosperous and successful resort towns in America. After the Second World War it freefell into what seemed irreversible decline, until, as a last-ditch effort in 1976, the citizens voted to allow gambling. Two years later the first casino in the eastern United States opened and ever since Atlantic City has been second only to Las Vegas as a plughole into which high and low rollers from all over the world are irresistibly drained.
And so I find myself driving into hell.
... I must brave the interior of the most tawdry and literally trumpery tower of them all ... The Trump Taj Mahal. ... I can pardon Trump all his vanities and shady junk-bonded dealings and financial brinkmanship, I would even forgive him his hair, were it not that everything he does is done with such poisonously atrocious taste, such false glamour, such shallow grandeur, such cynical vulgarity. At least Las Vegas developments, preposterous as they are have a kind of joy and wit to them. ... Oh well, it is no good putting off the moment, Stephen. In you go. ...
Above my head glitter the chandeliers that for some reason Trump is so proud of. '$14 million worth of German crystal chandeliers, including 245,000 piece chandeliers in the casino alone, each valued at a cost of $250,000 and taking over 20 hours to hang,' trumpets the publicity.
'An entire two-year output of Northern Italy's Carrera marble quarries - the marble of choice for all of Michelangelo's art - adorn the hotel's lobby, guest rooms, casino, hallways and public areas.' Yes, it may well have been the marble of choice for Michelangelo's art. English was the language of choice for Shakespeare's, but that doesn't lift this sentence, for example, out of the ordinary. And believe me the only similarity between Michelangelo and the Trump Taj Mahal that I can spot is that they've both got an M in their names.
'$4 million in uniforms and costumes outfit over 6,000 employees.' Including one butter-coloured shirt as worn by me.
'Four and half times more steel than the Eiffel Tower.'
'If laid end to end, the building support pilings would stretch the 62 miles from Atlantic City to Philadelphia.'
'The Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort can generate enough air conditioning to cool 4,000 homes.'
You see, all this mad boasting says to me is 'Our Casino Makes a Shed Load Of Money'. They can afford to lavish a quarter of a million bucks on each chandelier, can they? And where does this money come from, we wonder? From profits from their 'city within a city' Starbucks concession? From sales of patent leather belts and onyx desk sets? No, from the remorseless mathematical fact that gambling is profitable. The house wins. The punter loses. It is a certainty.
This abbatoir may be made of marble, but it is a place for stunning, plucking, skinning and gutting sad chickens.
... Well, perhaps I am a bit of a grumpy guts today. I am treated very well and I do enjoy the dealing part of the game. They players facing me are grown-ups. They know what they are doing. Who am I to pee on their parade?
Still, it is with real pleasure that I leave Atlantic City behind me, certain that I shall never return. (From New England and the East Coast, pgs. 61-65) |
View the series:
Stephen Fry in America
DVD
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Last edited by editor on Sun Jun 14, 2009 2:14 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2009 12:26 pm Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
The Talk of the Town
Hearts and Brains
By Hendrik Herzberg
Nov. 6/06
| Quote: | | In a normal democracy, given the state of public opinion and the record of the incumbent government, it would be taken for granted that come next Tuesday the ruling party would be turned out. But, for reasons that have less to do with the wizardry of Karl Rove than with the structural biases of America's electoral machinery, Democrats enter every race carrying a bag of sand. The Senate's fifty-five Republicans represent fewer Americans than do its forty-five Democrats. On the House side, Democratic candidates have a higher propportion of the average district vote than Republicans in four of the five biennial elections since 1994, but - thanks to a combination of gerrymandering and demographics - Republicans remain in the majority. To win back the House, Democrats need something close to a landslide. Their opponents, to judge from their behavior, seem to think they might get one. (-- pgs. 45-48) |
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editor
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| Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2009 11:34 am Post subject: |
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Harper's
Magazine Subscription
Story
Little Drops of Water
By Kurt Vonnegut
June, 2009
| Quote: | ... There was Edith Vranken, the Schenectady brewer's daughter who wanted to sing; Janice Gurnee, the Indianapolis hardware merchant's daughter who wanted to sing; Beatrix Werner, the Milwaukee consulting engineer's daughter who wanted to sing; and Ellen Sparks, the Buffalo wholesale grocer's daughter who wanted to sing.
I met these attractive young ladies - one by one and in the sequence named - in Larry's (baritone Larry Whiteside's) studio, or what anyone else would call apartment. Larry adds to his revenues as a soloist by giving voice lessons to rich and pretty young women who want to sing. While Larry is soft as a hot fudge sundae, he is big and powerful looking, like a college-bred lumberjack, if there is such a thing, or a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman. His voice, of course, gives the impression that he could powder rocks between his thumb and foreginger. His pupils inevitably fell in love with him. If you ask how they loved him, I can onlyreply with another question: Where in the cycle do you mean? If you mean at the beginning, Larry was loved as a father pro tem. Later he was loved as a benevolent task master, and finally as a lover.
After that came what Larry and his friends came to call graduation, which, in fact, had nothing to do with the pupil's status as a singer, and had everything to do with the cycle of affections. The cue for graduation was the pupil's overt use of the word marriage.
Larry was something of a Bluebeard, and, may I say, a lucky dog while his luck held. |
Previously unpublished fiction, coming October, 2009:
Watch the Birdie
Hardcover
By Kurt Vonnegut
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2009 1:15 pm Post subject: |
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Reinventing Collapse
The Soviet Example and American Prospects
Paperback
By Dmitry Orlov
| Quote: | If you find that you need to switch professions, and want to remain within the official economy, then you may decide to transition into the area of government contracting, availing yourself of the ample opportunities presented by official corruption, graft and politically sanctioned organized crime, which are sure to continue seeing substantial growth. There will be a great deal of government inventory of all sorts - from very expensive weapons systems to very expensive toilet seats - to be sold off, sometimes at a substantial profit. If you have a flair for international deal-making, then finding foreign buyers for liquidated US government assets might be something you could ease your way into.
Although government work may be steady for a time, it also involves following rules and regulations (or at least pretending to), toeing the line, turning a blind eye and playing the politics. Also, it rarely provides the satisfaction of getting something useful accomplished. Finally, unless you manage to position yourself close to the top of the food chain, where billions in public money regularly go missing with hardly any questions asked, it is also not going to be particularly lucrative. Profiting from government corruption is a high-stakes game, with only the extremely well-connected admitted to the table. (From Career Opportunities, pgs. 149-150) |
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