Bobo is wearing his military strategist hat today.  In “Clear, Hold and Duct Tape” he says President Obama appears to have negotiated constraints to a military strategy for Afghanistan in a serious manner, and improved some of his options.  Mr. Cohen, in “A Jew in England,” says America’s greatest strength is its lack of interest in where you’re from and consuming interest in what you can do.  Mr. Herbert, in “A Tragic Mistake,” says sending additional troops to Afghanistan was a decision that never was much in doubt. It was also the easier option.  Here’s Bobo:

In late 2006, Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. James F. Amos released a brilliant book with a thrilling title. It was called the “Army/Marine Corps Field Manual 3-24.” In its quiet way, this book helped overturn conventional wisdom on modern warfare and gave leaders a new way to see the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It’s a mistake to think you can succeed in conflicts like these by defeating the enemy in battle, the manual said. Instead, these wars are better seen as political arguments for the loyalty of the population. Get villagers to work with you by offering them security. Provide services by building courts and schools and police. Over the long term, transfer authority to legitimate local governments.

This approach, called COIN, has reshaped military thinking, starting with the junior officers who developed it and then spreading simultaneously up and down the chain of command.

When President Obama conducted his first Afghanistan strategic review last winter, he too gravitated toward the COIN mentality, appointing Gen. Stanley McChrystal, one of the chief architects of COIN, to run the war effort there.

This fall, General McChrystal came back with his own report, and made two key recommendations. First, the U.S. should deliver a sharp blow, to regain the initiative and reverse the Taliban’s momentum. Second, he wrote, “Success demands a comprehensive counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign.”

But over the past few months, senior members of the Obama administration have lost some of their enthusiasm for COIN. It may be a good approach in the abstract, they say, but there are problems with applying it in this particular context.

First, they say, COIN is phenomenally expensive. It consists of doing a lot of things at once — from increasing troop levels to nation-building — and doing them over a long period of time. America no longer has that kind of money, and Americans won’t accept a new 10-year commitment having already been there for eight.

Second, it may be possible to clear and hold territory, but it is looking less likely that we will be able to transfer it to any legitimate Afghan authority. The Karzai government is like an organized crime ring. The governing talent is thin. Plans to build a 400,000-man Afghan security force are unrealistic.

Third, they continue, the population in Afghanistan is too dispersed for COIN to work properly. There would be a few bubbles of security, where allied troops are massed, but then vast sanctuaries for the insurgents.

Fourth, COIN is too Afghan-centric and not enough Pakistan-centric. The real threats to U.S. interests are along the Afghan-Pakistani border or involve the destabilization of the Pakistani government. The COIN approach does little to directly address that.

The administration seems to have spent the past few months trying to pare back the COIN strategy and adjust it to real world constraints. As it has done so, there has been less talk in the informed policy community about paving the way for a new, transformed Afghanistan. There has been more talk of finding cheap ways to arrange the current pieces of Afghanistan into a contraption that will stay together and allow us to go home.

What’s emerging appears to be something less than a comprehensive COIN strategy but more than a mere counter-terrorism strategy — shooting at terrorists with drones. It is a hybrid approach, and as we watch the president’s speech Tuesday night, we’ll all get to judge whether he has cut and pasted the different options into a coherent whole. It’s not the troop levels that matter. What matters is how this war will be fought.

Some very smart people say that the administration’s direction is already fatally flawed. There is no such thing as effective COIN-lite, they argue. All the pieces of a comprehensive strategy have to be done patiently and together because success depends on the way they magnify one another.

These experts may be right. But none of us get to have our first choice on this matter. President Obama faces such a devilishly complex set of constraints that the policy he announces will be partially unsatisfying to every American and to every member of his administration. The fights inside have been so brutal that there have been accusations that the Defense and State Departments have withheld documents from the president to bias his thinking.

Nonetheless, my impression, pre-speech, is that Obama has negotiated these constraints in a serious manner, and improved some of his options — for example, by accelerating troop deployments. He has not been enthusiastic about expanding the U.S. role in Afghanistan, but he has not evaded his responsibility as commander in chief, and he’s taking brave political risks.

It may not be the complete COIN strategy, which offers the best chance of success. But it may be the best strategy under the circumstances.

Here’s Mr. Cohen:

When my father was about to emigrate from South Africa to England in the 1950s, a friend of the family suggested that a change of name was in order because it would be unwise to pursue his career in Britain while called “Cohen.”

My Dad, a young doctor, said he would think it over. A few days later he announced to the friend that he had decided to make the change.

“To what?” she asked with satisfaction.

“Einstein,” he deadpanned.

And so Sydney Cohen came to London and in time had the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire (C.B.E.) bestowed upon him by the queen, and was named a fellow of the Royal Society (founded 1660), and, most important to him, became a member of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews.

In all, it can hardly be said that he encountered barriers in the land of Benjamin Disraeli. He embraced his adopted country, my family was assimilated and Jewishness became the minor key of our identity.

That was most of the story but not quite all. A couple of things have recently stirred deep memories of being a Jew in England. The first was Nick Hornby’s screenplay for the movie, “An Education,” set in 1960s London and rendering with acuity a subtle current of prejudice.

It is captured when Emma Thompson, playing the proper headmistress of a girls’ school where a precocious 16-year-old student has taken up with an older man, exclaims “A Jew!” upon discovering the identity of the rake. Her voice quivers with distaste.

The second was reading my colleague Sarah Lyall’s account of the controversy stemming form the Court of Appeal’s decision about the Jewishness (or not) of a boy trying to get into the JFS, or Jews’ Free School, in London. I won’t go into the case here but will say that I found the court’s ruling that the criteria for Jewishness must be “faith, however defined” — rather than family ties — quaint. Nobody I know ever defined a Jew, or persecuted one, on the grounds of whether or not he went to synagogue regularly.

“An Education” put me back in my London complete with Dad’s old Rover model. But it wasn’t just the cars. It was that faint prejudice floating around with its power to generate I’m-not-quite-one-of-them feelings.

In the late 1960’s, I went to Westminster, one of Britain’s top private schools, an inspiring place hard by Westminster Abbey, and was occasionally taunted as a “Yid” — not a bad way to forge a proud Jewish identity in a nonreligious Jew.

The teasing soon ended. But something else happened that was related to the institution rather than adolescent minds. I won a scholarship to Westminster and would have entered College, the scholars’ house, but was told that a Jew could not attend College nor hold a Queen’s Scholarship. I got an Honorary Scholarship instead.

This seemed normal then but appears abnormal in retrospect. So I wrote to the current headmaster, Stephen Spurr, asking what the grounds were back then on which Jews were not admitted to College; whether the same regulation still exists; when the practice was changed (if it was); and how Westminster defines, or defined, Jewishness.

Spurr e-mailed answers. “I am afraid I do not know” was his response to my query on why Jews were barred from College; “Absolutely not” on whether the regulation still exists; no idea on when it was changed (if it ever existed); and, on the definition question, “We do not try to determine Jewishness.”

That piqued rather than satisfied my curiosity so I wrote to my old English teacher, John Field, who inspired my lifelong love of literature, and he was far more forthcoming:

“The demography of London began to change markedly in the 1930s with refugees from mainland Europe, and when the school returned to London after five years’ evacuation, the number of Jewish applicants slowly began to increase. The bursar and registrar was an ex-Indian Army colonel with the kind of views you would expect such a background to provide. I recall archiving his notes on Nigel Lawson” — later Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer — “when his parents brought him for interview in 1945 or 46. On the lines of ‘Undoubtedly a bright and clever child. Very Jewish of course.’”

Field continued: “Colonel Carruthers (his real name!) almost certainly operated with a Jewish quota in his mind when admitting people to the school, and at some point in the early 1960s got the Governing Body to agree to a new condition of entry to College: the candidate should ‘profess the Christian faith.’”

He added: “So in the 1960’s Westminster acquired a reputation for being unwelcoming to Jewish families. Maybe the examples of yourself and John Marenbon” — a brilliant Jewish classmate of mine, now a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge — “prompted John Rae to persuade the governors to scrap the condition of entry to College.” Rae was headmaster from 1970 to 1986.

Westminster, like Britain, has changed. Openness has grown. Bigotry’s faint refrain has grown fainter still. But I think my old school should throw more light on this episode. And I still believe the greatest strength of America, its core advantage over the old world, is its lack of interest in where you’re from and consuming interest in what you can do.

Now here’s Mr. Herbert:

“I hate war,” said Dwight Eisenhower, “as only a soldier who has lived it can, as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

He also said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”

I suppose we’ll never learn. President Obama will go on TV Tuesday night to announce that he plans to send tens of thousands of additional American troops to Afghanistan to fight in a war that has lasted most of the decade and has long since failed.

After going through an extended period of highly ritualized consultations and deliberations, the president has arrived at a decision that never was much in doubt, and that will prove to be a tragic mistake. It was also, for the president, the easier option.

It would have been much more difficult for Mr. Obama to look this troubled nation in the eye and explain why it is in our best interest to begin winding down the permanent state of warfare left to us by the Bush and Cheney regime. It would have taken real courage for the commander in chief to stop feeding our young troops into the relentless meat grinder of Afghanistan, to face up to the terrible toll the war is taking — on the troops themselves and in very insidious ways on the nation as a whole.

More soldiers committed suicide this year than in any year for which we have complete records. But the military is now able to meet its recruitment goals because the young men and women who are signing up can’t find jobs in civilian life. The United States is broken — school systems are deteriorating, the economy is in shambles, homelessness and poverty rates are expanding — yet we’re nation-building in Afghanistan, sending economically distressed young people over there by the tens of thousands at an annual cost of a million dollars each.

I keep hearing that Americans are concerned about gargantuan budget deficits. Well, the idea that you can control mounting deficits while engaged in two wars that you refuse to raise taxes to pay for is a patent absurdity. Small children might believe something along those lines. Rational adults should not.

Politicians are seldom honest when they talk publicly about warfare. Lyndon Johnson knew in the spring of 1965, as he made plans for the first big expansion of U.S. forces in Vietnam, that there was no upside to the war.

A recent Bill Moyers program on PBS played audio tapes of Johnson on which he could be heard telling Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, “Not a damn human thinks that 50,000 or 100,000 or 150,000 [American troops] are going to end that war.”

McNamara replies, “That’s right.”

Nothing like those sentiments were conveyed to the public as Johnson and McNamara jacked up the draft and started feeding young American boys and men into the Vietnam meat grinder.

Afghanistan is not Vietnam. There was every reason for American forces to invade Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. But that war was botched and lost by the Bush crowd, and Barack Obama does not have a magic wand now to make it all better.

The word is that Mr. Obama will tell the public Tuesday that he is sending another 30,000 or so troops to Afghanistan. And while it is reported that he has some strategy in mind for eventually turning the fight over to the ragtag and less-than-energetic Afghan military, it’s clear that U.S. forces will be engaged for years to come, perhaps many years.

The tougher choice for the president would have been to tell the public that the U.S. is a nation faced with terrible troubles here at home and that it is time to begin winding down a war that veered wildly off track years ago. But that would have taken great political courage. It would have left Mr. Obama vulnerable to the charge of being weak, of cutting and running, of betraying the troops who have already served. The Republicans would have a field day with that scenario.

Lyndon Johnson is heard on the tapes telling Senator Richard Russell, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, about a comment made by a Texas rancher in the days leading up to the buildup in Vietnam. The rancher had told Johnson that the public would forgive the president “for everything except being weak.”

Russell said: “Well, there’s a lot in that. There’s a whole lot in that.”

We still haven’t learned to recognize real strength, which is why it so often seems that the easier choice for a president is to keep the troops marching off to war.

SUN WU-KUNG
AUDIO / VIDEO COLLECTIVE
10th ANNIVERSARY
10/12/2009
H 22:30
BITTE via Watt 37, Milano

Från den tyska hemsidan transfermarkt.de

Pos/Spelare/Klubb/Värde

1 – Arda Turan , Galatasaray 15 000 000 €

2 – Daniel Güiza, Fenerbahce 12 500 000 €

3 – Elano, Galatasaray 12 500 000 €

4 – Alex, Fenerbahce 12 000 000 €

5 – Diego Lugano, Fenerbahce 10 500 000 €

6 – Servet Cetin, Galatasaray 9 000 000 €

7 – Milan Baros, Galatasaray 8 500 000 €

8 – Fabian Ernst, Besiktas 8 000 000 €

9 – Bobo, Besiktas 8 000 000 €

10 – Keita, Galatasaray 8 000 000 €

11 – Harry Kewell, Galatasaray 7 500 000 €

12 – Gökhan Gönul, Fenerbahce 7 500 000 €

13- Rodrigo Tello, Besiktas 7 500 000 €

14 – Semih Sentürk, Fenerbahce 7 500 000 €

15 – Mehmet Topal, Galatasaray 7 500 000 €

16 – Mehmet Topuz, Fenerbahce 7 500 000 €

17 – Filip Holosko, Besiktas 7 000 000 €

18 – Nihat Kahveci, Besiktas 7 000 000 €

19 – Hakan Balta, Galatasaray 6 500 000 €

20 – Cristian Baroni, Fenerbahce 6 000 000 €

Noterbart är att alla på den här listan är från Istanbuls klubbarna Fenerbahce, Besiktas och Galatasaray.

Pegadinha! Não voltamos!

Please see Arise, and Fly Free  and A Tribute to BoBo 

Marion Cotillard reminds us of past icons such as Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Adjani. She looks typically French and very glamorous when she parties out. However, if you want to know what’s hip in France and has been for a while, it is the Bohemian Chic trend that we call bobo. Celebrities such as Vanessa Paradis and Charlotte Gainsbourg are at the fore front of that trend. Charlotte Gainsbourg is the daughter of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin.

Serge Gainsbourg Jane Birkin

Charlotte Gainsbourg Ivan Attal

Wonder Gourdasse Productions présente:

La recette inratable pour se fracasser la tête sans l’aide de personne en pleine nuit.

Le secret de la patronne : surtout, ne pas allumer la lumière si on se relève la nuit. C’est le petit truc qui permet d’être absolument sûr de mal calculer ses distances, de tomber de son lit et de s’assommer en beauté sur le chevet.

Note artistique : Nine point seven.

Note technique : Five point three (aucune goutte de sang, évanouissement seulement partiel, pas de larmes ni de cris). Bonne note donnée à la destruction momentanée des vertèbres cervicales.

Il me faudra probablement quelques jours avant de pouvoir dormir à nouveau sur le dos, car la bosse est énorme. Avec un peu de chance, si je couve correctement cet œuf que j’ai maintenant derrière la tête, il devrait bientôt en sortir une mini-dinde. A temps pour Noël ?

Mais aïe. Très aïe.

Pour me consoler (mais pas seulement), à midi, on m’offre des envies … m’est avis que ça va marcher !

Postescriptoums : J’ai volé une image à l’informaticien cumulant, gloire et remerciements à lui. Si quelqu’un veut inventer un logo pour Wonder Gourdasse, il/elle peut, car je songe sérieusement à déposer un copyright…

Prove tecniche di trasmissione… Da un po’ di tempo Zampetta vocalizza variamente alla ricerca della parola articolata.

Ma nonostante le tante prove e i tanti sforzi per adesso riesce soltanto a sillabare un po’ di ba – bo – ma – me.

Ma già così è riuscita a battezzare il suo orsacchiotto: Bobo!

E’ il suo preferito nonostante non faccia rumori, suoni o luci.

Quanto invece a chiamare il babbo o la mamma… niente ancora, ma siamo sulla buona strada. Per adesso ci fermiamo a Bbbbbbbbbba!

Forza Zampetta!

Sun Wu Kung Temple in Garigliano, porta sul retro.

Bobo is addressing “The Other Education.”  He says while our scholastic education is formal and supervised, our emotional education, the one we glean on our own from artists and musicians, is more important to our long-term happiness.  Mr. Cohen, in “Iranians in Exile,” says President Obama has been too weak on human rights abuses in Iran. He needs to express outrage.  Prof. Krugman, in “Taxing the Speculators,” says while a financial transactions tax would not completely prevent any future crisis, it could generate substantial revenue while providing a useful check on reckless short-term speculation.  Here’s Bobo:

Like many of you, I went to elementary school, high school and college. I took such and such classes, earned such and such grades, and amassed such and such degrees.

But on the night of Feb. 2, 1975, I turned on WMMR in Philadelphia and became mesmerized by a concert the radio station was broadcasting. The concert was by a group I’d never heard of — Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Thus began a part of my second education.

We don’t usually think of this second education. For reasons having to do with the peculiarities of our civilization, we pay a great deal of attention to our scholastic educations, which are formal and supervised, and we devote much less public thought to our emotional educations, which are unsupervised and haphazard. This is odd, since our emotional educations are much more important to our long-term happiness and the quality of our lives.

In any case, over the next few decades Springsteen would become one of the professors in my second education. In album after album he assigned a new course in my emotional curriculum.

This second education doesn’t work the way the scholastic education works. In a normal schoolroom, information walks through the front door and announces itself by light of day. It’s direct. The teacher describes the material to be covered, and then everybody works through it.

The knowledge transmitted in an emotional education, on the other hand, comes indirectly, seeping through the cracks of the windowpanes, from under the floorboards and through the vents. It’s generally a byproduct of the search for pleasure, and the learning is indirect and unconscious.

From that first night in the winter of 1975, I wanted the thrill that Springsteen was offering. His manager, Jon Landau, says that each style of music elicits its own set of responses. Rock, when done right, is jolting and exhilarating.

Once I got a taste of that emotional uplift, I was hooked. The uplifting experiences alone were bound to open the mind for learning.

I followed Springsteen into his world. Once again, it wasn’t the explicit characters that mattered most. Springsteen sings about teenage couples out on a desperate lark, workers struggling as the mills close down, and drifters on the wrong side of the law. These stories don’t directly touch my life, and as far as I know he’s never written a song about a middle-age pundit who interviews politicians by day and makes mind-numbingly repetitive school lunches at night.

What mattered most, as with any artist, were the assumptions behind the stories. His tales take place in a distinct universe, a distinct map of reality. In Springsteen’s universe, life’s “losers” always retain their dignity. Their choices have immense moral consequences, and are seen on an epic and anthemic scale.

There are certain prominent neighborhoods on his map — one called defeat, another called exaltation, another called nostalgia. Certain emotional chords — stoicism, for one — are common, while others are absent. “There is no sarcasm in his writing,” Landau says, “and not a lot of irony.”

I find I can’t really describe what this landscape feels like, especially in newspaper prose. But I do believe his narrative tone, the mental map, has worked its way into my head, influencing the way I organize the buzzing confusion of reality, shaping the unconscious categories through which I perceive events. Just as being from New York or rural Georgia gives you a perspective from which to see the world, so spending time in Springsteen’s universe inculcates its own preconscious viewpoint.

Then there is the man himself. Like other parts of the emotional education, it is hard to bring the knowledge to consciousness, but I do think important lessons are communicated by that embarrassed half-giggle he falls into when talking about himself. I do think a message is conveyed in the way he continually situates himself within a tradition — de-emphasizing his own individual contributions, stressing instead the R&B groups, the gospel and folk singers whose work comes out through him.

I’m not claiming my second education has been exemplary or advanced. I’m describing it because I have only become aware of it retrospectively, and society pays too much attention to the first education and not enough to the second.

In fact, we all gather our own emotional faculty — artists, friends, family and teams. Each refines and develops the inner instrument with a million strings.

Last week, my kids attended their first Springsteen concert in Baltimore. At one point, I looked over at my 15-year-old daughter. She had her hands clapped to her cheeks and a look of slack-jawed, joyous astonishment on her face. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing — 10,000 people in a state of utter abandon, with Springsteen surrendering himself to them in the center of the arena.

It begins again.

And afterwards he took her for a special outing to the Applebee’s salad bar…   Here’s Mr. Cohen:

There is a Persian saying that goes, “Your coming is in your hands, but your leaving is in the hands of God.”

Shortly before I left Iran on June 24, there was a late-night knock at the door of my hotel room. Alright, I thought, this is it.

By then I was one of the few Western journalists left in Tehran after a savage post-election clampdown and I had been working for more than a week despite the revocation of my press pass.

As I moved, heart thumping, toward the door, I imagined being dragged blindfolded into the hell of Evin prison, built by the shah for the brutalizing of his political prisoners, used for the same purpose by the Islamic Republic.

“Laundry, sir. We forgot these.”

A hotel employee was holding a couple of shirts. I thanked him, tossed them on a sofa, and breathed out: Fear the worst but never bow to it.

I looked down at the lights of Tehran, cradled in its mountainous amphitheater. In 1936, the shah’s father had banned the veil in a furious Ataturk-like push for Westernization. In 1979, the Islamic Republic had re-imposed the hijab on all women. Now, in 2009, a reformist movement trying to chart a middle course — a non-theocratic but also non-secular path — had been bloodied before my eyes. Iran’s tragedy overwhelmed me.

A few days later, I did leave and found my parting in the hands not of God but of the Revolutionary Guards at Imam Khomeini International Airport. The stubble-faced ghouls duly toyed with me, leaving me humiliated, before letting me go.

The last people I saw were Nazila Fathi, long the wonderful New York Times local correspondent in Tehran, her husband Babak Pasha, and their children, Shayan, 5, and Tina, 3. Through 12 tumultuous post-electoral days Nazila was at my side as we were chased and tear-gassed. She never lost her composure.

By then her apartment — seen in paranoid regime eyes as a center for fomenting “velvet revolutions” and “soft overthrows” — was under constant surveillance. Evin, or worse, beckoned.

On July 1, a week after me, Nazila and her family left with a suitcase for a long-planned vacation in Canada. Five months later, they have been unable to return. They have followed millions of Iranians — an immense pool of lost talent — into exile. Dual Canadian and Iranian citizens, they have settled for now in Toronto.

That is why I came here. My debt to Nazila is immense.

She calls me — that bright, sing-song voice — and tells me there’s been a murder at the entrance to her Toronto apartment building. I start laughing. But it’s true. Canada has put on a little Iran show for us.

On Nazilia’s table are Iranian pistachios — a taste of the forbidden. She turns on the TV and there, on “60 Minutes,” is another Canadian-Iranian journalist, Maziar Bahari, who was seized in June and held in Evin prison for 118 days. We see images, filmed by Bahari, of the Basiji shooting into the crowd on June 15 and a slain man falling. Nazila and I were 100 yards from the scene.

I shudder. Bahari, a Newsweek correspondent, tells his story (as he does also in the current Newsweek) with a fine lucidity: the slapping, the lashing and death threats, the accusations that he was a velvet revolution “mastermind.”

When Bahari watches himself making a forced “confession” — that the media did give “moral support for the people who took part in those illegal gatherings” — his remorse is almost too much to bear. When you’re “broken under pressure,” he remarks, it’s hard to “gather your pieces.”

Nazila and I give each other a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God look. There are hundreds like Bahari. Iran since June 12 has veered into a paranoid bunker. President Barack Obama has been too weak on human rights abuses in Iran.

To say “the world continues to bear witness” to the “powerful calls for justice” of Iranians, as he did on Nov. 3, is not good enough. He needs to express the outrage of the United States of America.

Sure, Iran sees Evin as the mirror image of Guantánamo. But undoing that U.S. aberration was central to Obama’s message. Speaking out against the abuse of Iranian political prisoners must be equally so. Obama should continue to seek engagement — it’s the only way forward — while denouncing the outrages.

His bedside reading should be Haleh Esfandiari’s brilliant, shattering book “My Prison, My Home,” in which the Wilson Center scholar recounts her own 2007 Evin nightmare.

Hillary Clinton did mention Bahari. That, the Newsweek man says, is the “best thing that can happen to any prisoner, that you know someone cares about you.” Obama has not made it clear enough, name by name, that he cares.

“Fathi” — the name of his beloved, lost, longed-for grandfather — is the word little Shayan has scrawled on his bedroom walls.

Iran is betraying its aching children. There is a middle path, Shiite and democratic, of which Nazila and Babak and countless others could be part. Their country has been hijacked. The waste is immeasurable — and unnecessary.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

Should we use taxes to deter financial speculation? Yes, say top British officials, who oversee the City of London, one of the world’s two great banking centers. Other European governments agree — and they’re right.

Unfortunately, United States officials — especially Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary — are dead set against the proposal. Let’s hope they reconsider: a financial transactions tax is an idea whose time has come.

The dispute began back in August, when Adair Turner, Britain’s top financial regulator, called for a tax on financial transactions as a way to discourage “socially useless” activities. Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, picked up on his proposal, which he presented at the Group of 20 meeting of leading economies this month.

Why is this a good idea? The Turner-Brown proposal is a modern version of an idea originally floated in 1972 by the late James Tobin, the Nobel-winning Yale economist. Tobin argued that currency speculation — money moving internationally to bet on fluctuations in exchange rates — was having a disruptive effect on the world economy. To reduce these disruptions, he called for a small tax on every exchange of currencies.

Such a tax would be a trivial expense for people engaged in foreign trade or long-term investment; but it would be a major disincentive for people trying to make a fast buck (or euro, or yen) by outguessing the markets over the course of a few days or weeks. It would, as Tobin said, “throw some sand in the well-greased wheels” of speculation.

Tobin’s idea went nowhere at the time. Later, much to his dismay, it became a favorite hobbyhorse of the anti-globalization left. But the Turner-Brown proposal, which would apply a “Tobin tax” to all financial transactions — not just those involving foreign currency — is very much in Tobin’s spirit. It would be a trivial expense for long-term investors, but it would deter much of the churning that now takes place in our hyperactive financial markets.

This would be a bad thing if financial hyperactivity were productive. But after the debacle of the past two years, there’s broad agreement — I’m tempted to say, agreement on the part of almost everyone not on the financial industry’s payroll — with Mr. Turner’s assertion that a lot of what Wall Street and the City do is “socially useless.” And a transactions tax could generate substantial revenue, helping alleviate fears about government deficits. What’s not to like?

The main argument made by opponents of a financial transactions tax is that it would be unworkable, because traders would find ways to avoid it. Some also argue that it wouldn’t do anything to deter the socially damaging behavior that caused our current crisis. But neither claim stands up to scrutiny.

On the claim that financial transactions can’t be taxed: modern trading is a highly centralized affair. Take, for example, Tobin’s original proposal to tax foreign exchange trades. How can you do this, when currency traders are located all over the world? The answer is, while traders are all over the place, a majority of their transactions are settled — i.e., payment is made — at a single London-based institution. This centralization keeps the cost of transactions low, which is what makes the huge volume of wheeling and dealing possible. It also, however, makes these transactions relatively easy to identify and tax.

What about the claim that a financial transactions tax doesn’t address the real problem? It’s true that a transactions tax wouldn’t have stopped lenders from making bad loans, or gullible investors from buying toxic waste backed by those loans.

But bad investments aren’t the whole story of the crisis. What turned those bad investments into catastrophe was the financial system’s excessive reliance on short-term money.

As Gary Gorton and Andrew Metrick of Yale have shown, by 2007 the United States banking system had become crucially dependent on “repo” transactions, in which financial institutions sell assets to investors while promising to buy them back after a short period — often a single day. Losses in subprime and other assets triggered a banking crisis because they undermined this system — there was a “run on repo.”

And a financial transactions tax, by discouraging reliance on ultra-short-run financing, would have made such a run much less likely. So contrary to what the skeptics say, such a tax would have helped prevent the current crisis — and could help us avoid a future replay.

Would a Tobin tax solve all our problems? Of course not. But it could be part of the process of shrinking our bloated financial sector. On this, as on other issues, the Obama administration needs to free its mind from Wall Street’s thrall.

Şampiyonlar Ligi B Grubu 5. maçında Beşiktaş, Manchester united’e konuk oldu. Beşiktaş Manchester United karşısında Tello’nun attığı 1 gol ile Şampiyonlar Ligi’nde puanını 4′e çıkardı. İşte Tello’nun muhteşem golü…

Manchester United – Beşiktaş maçının golü – Video

Şampiyonlar Ligi B Grubu 5. maçında Beşiktaş, Manchester united’e konuk oldu. Beşiktaş Manchester United karşısında Tello’nun attığı 1 gol ile Şampiyonlar Ligi’nde puanını 4′e çıkardı. İşte Tello’nun muhteşem golü…

Şampiyonlar Ligi’ndeki temsilcimiz Beşiktaş, Manchester United ile karşı karşıya geldi. Zorlu geçen maç sonucunda Beşiktaş sergilediği güzel oyun sayesinde Tello ile golü buldu. Maçın ilerleyen dakikalarında başka da gol olmayınca Manchester United Beşiktaş maçı Beşiktaş’ın 1-0 üstünlüğü ile sona erdi.

Depois de uma semana com a grande parte dos jogos de futebol sendo disputados pelas seleções nacionais, nesta quarta-feira a situação volta ao normal, e, como sempre, gols brasileiros não faltam ao redor do planeta.

Espanha

Nilmar fez dois contra o Valladolid

Apesar de ser o novo líder do Campeonato Espanhol, o Real Madrid não contou com nenhum tento verde e amarelo nos últimos dias. Situação diferente a do Barcelona, que empatou em 1 a 1 com o Athletic de Bilbao graças ao gol de Daniel Alves. No mesmo dia, Renato garantiu a vitória do Sevilla por 2 a 1 sobre o Tenerife. No domingo, quem se destacou foi Nilmar, que marcou duas vezes no triunfo de 3 a 1 do Villarreal sobre o Valladolid. Diego Costa descontou para os derrotados. Perto dali, o Zaragoza visitou o Málaga e conseguiu um pontinho, o ex-corintiano Éwerthon foi o autor do gol visitante.

Itália

A rodada italiana contou com um jogaço no domingo, a bela vitória do Milan por 4 a 3 sobre o Cagliari. E os três pontos só foram conquistados pelas belas atuações de Ronaldinho e Pato, que marcaram um cada. Do outro lado, o ex-cruzeirense Nenê descontou.

Já  pela Serie C1/A, Emerson tentou, mas não foi o suficiente para o Lumezzane, que saiu derrotado pelo Como, fora de casa, por 2 a 1.

Portugal

O futebol na terra dos nossos colonizadores foi movimentado apenas pela Taça de Portugal, o suficiente para ter seu espaço por aqui. No domingo, o Vitória Guimarães surpreendeu o Benfica, em pleno Estádio da Luz, e venceu por 1 a 0 com gol do zagueiro Gustavo Lazzareti. Outro clube da capital, o Sporting, não decepcionou sua torcida e goleou o Pescadores Costa Caparica por 4 a 1 e, sem dúvida, Liédson deixou o dele. No mesmo dia, outro Sporting se deu bem, mas o de Braga, e venceu o Vitória Setúbal por 3 a 0, com tentos de Moisés e Márcio Mossoró, ex-Internacional e Paulista de Jundiaí.

Alemanha

Naldo comemora com seus companheiros

Pela Bundesliga, o agora vice-líder Werder Bremen deu show, e atropelou o Freiburg por 6 a 0. O zagueirão Naldo deixou o seu de pênalti. Outro que goleou foi o Hoffenheim, que fez 4 a 0 no Colônia, com o jovem Carlos Eduardo vibrando com a galera. Para completar a elite do país, o atacante Grafite converteu sua penalidade  mas o Wolfsburg acabou derrotado pelo Nuremberg por 3 a 2.

Já  na segunda divisão alemã, o Frankfurt não teve problemas para passar pelo Oberhausen, fora de casa, 3 a 1 com dois gols de Cidimar, jogador com passagem pelo Internacional.

Leste Europeu

Wagner com a camisa do Lokomotiv

Uma das regiões mais recheadas de brasileiros no mundo, sempre aparece por aqui. Começando pela Rússia, dois clássicos movimentaram o o final de semana. No primeiro, o Lokomotiv Moscow venceu o Dinamo por 2 a 0, e o ex-cruzeireinse Wagner foi autor de um dos gols. No segundo, o Spartak foi derrotado por 3 a 2 pelo CSKA, com seus dois gols sendo marcador por Welliton e Alex.
Uma das surpresas positivas da área foi o futebol búlgaro. Por lá, seis brasucas balançaram as redes nos últimos sete dias. No 5 a 0 do Litex sobre o Lokomotiv Plovdiv, Tom, ex-Portuguesa, Sandrinho, ex-Juventude, e Doka Madureira, ex-Goiás, colocaram seus nomes no placar. No 3 a 0 do Levski sobre o Cherno More Varna, outro ex-lusitano marcou, o meia Joãozinho. Ainda no sábado, Michel Platini, que não é aquele, contribuiu com CSKA Sofia no empate por 2 a 2 no clássico contra o Lokomotiv. Já no domingo, a estrela foi José Júnior, que simplesmente fez três na vitória de 3 a 2 do Slavia Sofia sobre o Chernomorets Burgas.
Na Croácia, o atacante Dodô foi o responsável pelos três pontos do Inter sobre o Lokomotiva, enquanto Rafael Paraíba apenas foi mais um a marcar no massacre de 6 a 0 do Hajduk Split sobre o Croatia Sasvete. O jogador está emprestado pelo Grêmio para ganhar maior experiência.
Para fechar a região, um jogador que sempre coloca seu nome nesta coluna, Jajá. O atacante, que já teve passagem pelo Flamengo, fez mais um com a camisa do Metalist Kharkiv, desta vez na vitória do clube sobre o Zorya, pelo Campeonato Ucraniano.

Grécia e Inglaterra

Denílson fez a festa dos Gunners

Nas belas terras gregas, o Iraklis não saiu de um empate por 2 a 2 com o Atromitos, diante de sua torcida. Luís Eduardo foi responsável por um dos gols dos visitantes. Já no clássico entre PAOK e Aris, o lateral-direito Neto, que teve passagens por Ituano, Paraná, Santos e Fluminense marcou um dos gols nos 4 a 1 dos donos da casa.
Fora da terra firme, na Inglaterra, apenas uma presença brasileira nas redes, e em partida válida pela Liga dos Campeões da Europa, o jovem Denilson marcou o segundo do Arsenal na vitória por 2 a 0 sobre o Standard de Liège.

Holanda, Dinamarca e Suíça

Direto da base do Cruzeiro para o solo holandês, o garto Jonathas marcou mais um gol com a camisa do AZ Alkmaar, desta vez na goleada por 4 a 2, fora de casa, sobre o Roda. Outro que iniciou em Minas Gerais, mas no rival Atlético Mineiro, foi o atacante Aílton, que anotou dois tentos na vitória do Copenhagen sobre o Randers, pelo Campeonato Dinamarquês. Já pela Copa da Suíça, o Kriens bateu o Solothurn por 4 a 2 e contou com a colaboração do zagueiro Thiago.

Turquia e Chipre

Ex-palmeirense Kahê

A rodada turca teve como grande duelo o Besiktas enfrentando o Fenerbahçe. E os donos da casa conseguiram vencer o rival por 3 a 0, com direito a gol do ex-corintiano Bobô. Outro jogador que saiu de São Paulo para a Turquia e balançou as redes nos últimos dias foi Kahê. O ex-palmeirense participou do placar de 3 a 1 do Genclerbirligi sobre o Istanbul Buyuksehir. Já pela segunda divisão do país, Tiago Bezerra bem que tentou, mas seu Altay saiu de campo derrotado por 2 a 1 pelo Bucaspor.
No rival político Chipre, o veterano Clayton, de 34 anos de idade, marcou um dos gols do AEL Limassol nos 3 a 1 sobre o fraco Nea Salamis.

Oriente Médio

Como os Emirados Árabes Unidos não tiveram jogos nos últimos dias, a região não esteve cheia de gols como de costume. Em Israel, o ex-vascaíno Cadu marcou para o Bnei Sachnin na vitória por 2 a 1, fora de casa, sobre o Maccabi Petah Tikva. No mesmo dia, o Hapoel Raanana fez 2 a 1 no Hapoel Haifa, e Cristiano foi o autor do tento da vitória.
Mais ao Sul, mais precisamento no Qatar, o atacante Júlio César fez o único gol do Al Ahli no empate por 1 a 1 com o Al Khor. Em outro empate, Leandro balançou as redes para o Al Sadd no movimentado 3 a 3 com o Al Arabi.

Japão

Lucas defende as cores do Gamba Osaka

Sem rodada no Campeonato Chinês, o espaço do extremo oriente fica todo para o Japão. Por lá, três atacantes levaram seus times às vitórias no sábado. França para o Kashiwa Reysol, Lucas para o Gamba Osaka, e Edmílson, com incríveis três gols, para o Urawa Red Diamonds.
No domingo, Neto Baiano fez um nos 2 a 1 do JEF United em cima do FC Tokyo, enquanto o meia Fernandinho, que já atuou com as camisas do Vasco e do Figueirense, foi o único a alterar o placar na vitória do Oita Trinita sobre o Kawasaki Frontale.

“I try to construct stories so that several explanations are possible, to give the viewers the freedom to interpret. I do it by everything I don’t show, and through all the questions I raise and don’t answer. That way, the audience doesn’t finish with the film as quickly as if I’d answered everything.” — Michael Haneke

Reviews and Analysis

These reviews and analyses contain spoilers. I’m trying to gather together here some of the better ones. The reviews and academic papers have got a bit jumbled as more and have been added. In time I’ll sort them properly.

Award for the best title for a review of Caché goes to :

The Discreet Masochism of the Bourgeoisie by A O Scott in NYT. Unfortunately the review itself doesn’t stand up to the promise of the title. Scott does mention the bobo business. Info link at the bottom.

Hidden (Caché) by Peter Bradshaw [Guardian, 2006]

Final paragraph succinctness:

Hidden is Michael Haneke’s masterpiece: a compelling politico-psychological essay about the denial and guilt mixed into the foundations of western prosperity, composed and filmed with remarkable technique. It is one of the great films of this decade.

Hidden (Caché) Ben Greener [in MusicOMH]

We love Hidden. But what does it mean? [Jason Solomons, Guardian]

Hidden (Michael Haneke, 2005) Liam O’Brian in Projectorheads in which there are short reviews of other Haneke]

Secrets, Lies & Videotape By Catherine Wheatley (BFI)

Caché (Hidden) A review by Michael Farman.

Family Is Hell and So Is the World :  Talking to Michael Haneke at Cannes 2005 (Bright Lights Film Journal)

Review by Fred Thom in Plume Noir

Hidden in plain sight: Robin Wood on Michael Haneke’s Cache

originally in ArtForum, Jan, 2006.

Michael Haneke’s Caché By Florence Jacobowitz

Originally in CineAction, Winter, 2006.

p. 2 of 4:

‘Caché exposes the extent to which the bourgeois class safeguard the mythologies that empower and conceal its dark side.’

Then follows how Georges puts these into effect in his own life. An important sentence:

‘They have lost their ability to respond to life without the encumberances of first having to protect their reputation and social position.’

There are many things in the film, many strands, personal, sociological and political, but this seems to be key to understanding it. We can examine various elements such as the meaning of the mention of the massacre of 1961, the heavy editing of his TV book programme, which parts of the film are remembered, imagined or dreamed, which are literal, which metaphorical or allegorical, but in the end these two phrases are the heart of the film.

Et Alors? Michael Haneke’s Hidden.  A short review by Grahame Hobbs in MovieMail to accompany the advert for the AI DVD.

Caché – A Film Review by James Berardinelli

The Times names Haneke’s ‘Caché’ the decade’s best from In Contention film blog.

An entry in Nationmaster has a suggestion at the end about the meaning of the final scene:

The question of who sent the tapes is open to interpretation. Majid and his son both deny involvement. There is a cryptic last scene (as the credits roll) of Pierrot and Majid’s son interacting in front of Pierrot’s school. Haneke has said in interviews that at first he included the sound of their dialogue, then he removed it. Another interpretation is that the tapes were shot by Haneke himself to confront Georges with his past. The foreshadowing of Majid’s suicide in the drawings delivered to Georges supports this interpretation.

Left Behinds has a post, New movies: Caché? What does it mean? , and a follow up post Update: Caché’s meaning, pretty much enters the territory I am, slowly. He includes a frame grab of Majid’s son and Pierrot that is almost the same as the one I snipped after watching it in the other day. I was looking for any contact and affability between the two, and here he gets that with son touching Pierrot with left hand, facing the camera.

The comment stream in the second post is long, with many suggestions.

A long analysis in Not Coming to a Theatre near You, starts with the TV studio shot, which it claims segues from the traditional, standard pull back shot at the end of studio programmes such as this French TV book show which turns into a tracking shot that is Haneke’s, watching as Georges leaves the set to taka call behind the scenerry of the set. SEE still at head of post.

In the Artifical Eye DVD there is both an interview with Heneke and a short film on the making of the film, in which he talks as well. At one point he mentions having tried in the past to film dreams without success.

Nowhere to hide – Hari Kunzru assesses the films of Michael Haneke
(Guardian, 31 October 2009)

A Cache of Guilt :Michael Haneke turns his camera on the audience in his latest film, Caché. Noy Thrupkaew

Hidden Agenda Jason McBride

Monsters and Critics DVD Review (Frank Dees)

Girish blog post, Caché.

The French Lesson by Stephen Metcalf in Slate.

I have found myself unable to shake Caché. I am still poring over its studied ambiguities, arguing with its facile-fashionable politics, poking its dead zones, to see if it might yield even a modest smile, a drop of social hope. Life is short, and one function of a critic is to grant permission to ignore pretentious bullies like Haneke. In this instance, though, permission denied. Go see Caché.

Film blog post, Films I love #35: Cache (Michael Haneke), has a brief comment but here mostly for the set of clear 16 stills included.

Paul Arthur in a 2-page article, End Game, in the website of The Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Downcast Eyes: Michael Haneke and the Cinema of Intrusion by Asbjorn Gronstad, Nordicom Review 29, pp. 133-144 [pdf]

Ambivalence and Displacement in Michael Haneke’s Caché (Mary Caputi, Cal. State University) [12 pages]

Auteur de force: Michael Haneke’s “cinema of glaciation”. Roy Grundmann reviews DVDs od earlier films (originally in Cineaste).

1 hr. 25 min. YouTube video academic discussion of Caché, from the Philoctetes Center, with Roy Grundsman, Edward Nersessian, Brigitte Peucker, Brian Price and Garrett Stewart.

Profiles/Interviews with Haneke

The Unhappy World of Michael Haneke by Alan Riding [NYT]

De-icing the Emotions -Michael Haneke’s retrospective in London [Kinoeye]

Michael Haneke profile/filmography [at alt-flix]

Austrian Film Commission.

Senses of cinema – Michael Haneke – by Mattiad Frey – before Caché

History/Sociology

A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 by Alistair Horne.  New York Review of Books paperback edition 2006, with new preface together with original preface of  1977 edition.

Wiki: Paris Massacre of 1961
Check out the heading “the Massacre in popular culture – which mentions the first verse of Sticky Little Fingers’, “When The Stars Fall from The Sky”:

Mid-October, sixty one
The French Police were having fun
Cutting down Algerians
Breaking heads all over town
Yet no-one saw and no-one knew
No-one dared to speak the truth
200 dead became just two
Sweep them in the river
The witnesses were run to the ground
Put the bastards underground
Buried every black in town
Who dared to show their face

Mazarine Pingeot (the hidden daughter of Francois Mitterand) – guest in George’s TV book programme. Mitterand himself – where will this end? – was himself a bit of a hider of things such as his role in Vichy. Papon, of ‘61 Massacre fame, was a Vichy functionary. But before that Papon was a Police chief in Algeria at the height of the Algerian War, who rose to become a Minister. If we can say anything, we can say that Hanke has read some stuff! He admitted to having seen the TV documentary on the ‘61 massacre before making Caché.

SEE Maurice Papon, Vichy and Algeria, dissertation by Stepahie Hare-Cumming, L. Sch. of Economics.

Papon ended up as Budget Minister under Barre and Giscard d’Estaing and was buried with the Legion of Honour awarded by De Gaulle in July 1961, a few months before the Paris massacre.

To me the most fascinating caché was Mitterand’s: how he started off under Petain (Vichysto-résistant?) and ended up as socialist president. No one really knows whether he was a Vichyist and changed sides, or was always a Free-French undercover agent. Maybe both. He started off right wing. As a functionary in the Vichy Government, he eventually turned against Vichy because of Prime Minister Lavel’s (started off a socialist and became right wing) decision to send French workers to Germany.

It is now known Mitterand as president ordered the sinking of Rainbow Warrior.

World Reactions to the 1961 Paris Pogrom by Daniel A Gordon, University of Susses Journal of Contemporary History, 1, (2000)

HLM ( habitation à loyer modéré) – wiki on subsidised housing in France.

BoBo [ Bourgeois Bohême ] – definition in Urban Dictionary. Georges Laurent uses the expression.

Policing Paris:Private Publics and Architectural Media in Michael Haneke’s Caché [Michael Gallagher, J. for Cultural rsearch, Volume 12, Issue 1 Janiary 2008, pp. 19-38)

There is a pay-for article. This is just a 7 line abstract, but the gist is there.

Secrets and revelations: Off-screen space in Michael Haneke's cache [Libby Saxton, Studies in French Cinema, Vol 7 Number 1, 2007]. Summary and abstracts. Heavy academic tripe, but enough to tease out a few ideas.

“Cache is preoccupied, literally and metaphorically, with troubled, distorted or blinkered vision – with the mechanisms of secrecy, amnesia and denial that prevent us from taking responsibility for the past and facing the present clear-sightedly. The article argues that Haneke’s images produce meaning as much through what they conceal as through what they reveal, thereby exposing some of the blind spots that structure history, memory and spectatorship. ”

” Defined by Jacques Aumont as `the collection of elements that, while not being included in the image itself, are nonetheless connected to that visible space in an imaginary fashion for the spectator’, off-screen space, or the hors-champ, is a permanent presence in cinema. It also remains one of the most enigmatic and persistently elusive of filmic sites. Michael Haneke’s critically acclaimed film Cache (2005) enlists both its protagonists and its viewers in a quest to make sense of off-screen space. Haneke’s camerawork, montage and mise-en-scene consistently accord priority to sites, events and entities which elude our gaze, yet which we nonetheless experience as irreducibly present, and which invest their visible counterparts with meaning. The film investigates the invisible dimensions not only of cinema, but also of digital video, surveillance footage and the mass media. Secrecy, concealment and blocked or obstructed vision emerge here as central formal and thematic preoccupations. Moreover, as Haneke explores the processes of repression, denial and amnesia involved”

” …..the growing suspicion that, in Cache, it is off-screen space which establishes on-screen space, rather than vice versa. For the contents of the frame is always already subject to the look of another – a look which cannot immediately be attributed to either director or spectator. This enigmatic look is at once the origin and the blind spot of the narrative. The plot turns on a series of attempts to uncover the identity and motives of a hidden presence who observes, films and even, in a certain sense, directs the action from beyond the frame. Cache opens with a prolonged, unbroken, static shot of the facade of a house filmed from a vantage point somewhere in the pointedly named rue des Iris in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris. The scene appears, at first, deceptively normal and tranquil; early morning birdsong and the hum of distant traffic are interrupted only by the passage of the odd pedestrian, cyclist or car. But as the minutes slip by, the image, still unchanged, gradually begins to appear more suspect. Ostensibly devoid of narratively significant action, the scene’s inertia and banality start to unsettle the audience. After a while, the image ceases to hold our attention, which wanders instead – confirming Burch’s observations about the centrifugal force of the `champ vide’ – towards offscreen space, as we wonder who else, besides us, might be looking, and why. This, we begin to realize, is not a conventional establishing shot; the longer “

” The stasis of the camera and image and the deferral of a counter-shot or alternative perspective prevent us from making sense of the space outside the frame. Eventually, nearly two-and-a-half minutes into the film, disembodied voices intrude on the soundtrack discussing an as yet unidentified object that was left in a porch in a plastic bag. Haneke then cuts briefly to a shot of a man and a woman leaving the house, and we watch the man peer in puzzlement up the rue des Iris in the now failing light. As we return to the initial shot, horizontal tracking marks appear on the surface of the image, as if someone has pressed the fast-forward button on a remote control. These visual and aural clues arouse suspicions that are subsequently confirmed by a medium shot of the couple back inside the house in front of a television screen, remote control in hand. The protracted opening sequence is thus retrospectively identified as an excerpt from a videotape sent anonymously to a family whose home appears to be under surveillance. What we at first read as a long shot turns out instead to have been a close-up of the screen on which Georges and Anne Laurent are viewing the tape. Finally regaining our bearings, we realize that we are inside the house we are viewing from the outside. We thus share, at least temporarily, the confusion and disorientation of a couple we encounter in the uncanny situation of watching themselves being watched. What is more, from the very outset of the film, we find ourselves already implicated, as spectators, in an economy of voyeurism and surveillance. “

Azulejo Bobo, reprodução de figura do claustro da Batalha, 15 *15 cm, 2009

Para ver mais, clique em ESCULTURA APLICADA

Jocker Tile, reproduction of figura at the interior courtyard of the Batalha monastery, 15 * 15 cm, 2009

To see more, click ESCULTURA APLICADA

I was praying Bobo would be on vacation, but no joy there.  In “The Values Question” he gurgles that like all great public issues, the health care debate is fundamentally about values, about whether we have a moral preference for vitality or security.  Fuck, Bobo, I have a “moral preference” for staying alive.  Asshole.  Mr. Cohen, in “Obama in His Labyrinth,” says President Obama’s ideas are good, but the warmth, cajoling and craft that make ideas more than that — especially in foreign policy — are lacking.  Mr. Herbert, who is writing from Detroit, sees “Signs of Hope.”  He says the U.S. has the intellectual resources and expertise to lead in the development of clean energy. It just needs the will to make it happen.  Here’s that schmuck Bobo:

It’s easy to get lost in the weeds when talking about health care reform. But, like all great public issues, the health care debate is fundamentally a debate about values. It’s a debate about what kind of country we want America to be.

During the first many decades of this nation’s existence, the United States was a wide-open, dynamic country with a rapidly expanding economy. It was also a country that tolerated a large amount of cruelty and pain — poor people living in misery, workers suffering from exploitation.

Over the years, Americans decided they wanted a little more safety and security. This is what happens as nations grow wealthier; they use money to buy civilization.

Occasionally, our ancestors found themselves in a sweet spot. They could pass legislation that brought security but without a cost to vitality. But adults know that this situation is rare. In the real world, there’s usually a trade-off. The unregulated market wants to direct capital to the productive and the young. Welfare policies usually direct resources to the vulnerable and the elderly. Most social welfare legislation, even successful legislation, siphons money from the former to the latter.

Early in this health care reform process, many of us thought we were in that magical sweet spot. We could extend coverage to the uninsured but also improve the system overall to lower costs. That is, we thought it would be possible to reduce the suffering of the vulnerable while simultaneously squeezing money out of the wasteful system and freeing it up for more productive uses.

That’s what the management gurus call a win-win.

It hasn’t worked out that way. The bills before Congress would almost certainly ease the anxiety of the uninsured, those who watch with terror as their child or spouse grows ill, who face bankruptcy and ruin.

And the bills would probably do it without damaging the care the rest of us receive. In every place where reforms have been tried — from Massachusetts to Switzerland — people come to cherish their new benefits. The new plans become politically untouchable.

But, alas, there would be trade-offs. Instead of reducing costs, the bills in Congress would probably raise them. They would mean that more of the nation’s wealth would be siphoned off from productive uses and shifted into a still wasteful health care system.

The authors of these bills have tried to foster efficiencies. The Senate bill would initiate several interesting experiments designed to make the system more effective — giving doctors incentives to collaborate, rewarding hospitals that provide quality care at lower cost. It’s possible that some of these experiments will bloom into potent systemic reforms.

But the general view among independent health care economists is that these changes will not fundamentally bend the cost curve. The system after reform will look as it does today, only bigger and more expensive.

As Jeffrey S. Flier, dean of the Harvard Medical School, wrote in The Wall Street Journal last week, “In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it.”

Rather than pushing all of the new costs onto future generations, as past governments have done, the Democrats have admirably agreed to raise taxes. Over the next generation, the tax increases in the various bills could funnel trillions of dollars from the general economy into the medical system.

Moreover, the current estimates almost certainly understate the share of the nation’s wealth that will have to be shifted. In these bills, the present Congress pledges that future Congresses will impose painful measures to cut Medicare payments and impose efficiencies. Future Congresses rarely live up to these pledges. Somebody screams “Rationing!” and there is a bipartisan rush to kill even the most tepid cost-saving measure. After all, if the current Congress, with pride of authorship, couldn’t reduce costs, why should we expect that future Congresses will?

The bottom line is that we face a brutal choice.

Reform would make us a more decent society, but also a less vibrant one. It would ease the anxiety of millions at the cost of future growth. It would heal a wound in the social fabric while piling another expensive and untouchable promise on top of the many such promises we’ve already made. America would be a less youthful, ragged and unforgiving nation, and a more middle-aged, civilized and sedate one.

We all have to decide what we want at this moment in history, vitality or security. We can debate this or that provision, but where we come down will depend on that moral preference. Don’t get stupefied by technical details. This debate is about values.

I’ve rarely seen such a crystal-clear example of FYIGM.  Bobo, give up your health insurance and go work for minimum wage at a job that won’t offer it to you and see how “secure” you feel.  Schmuck.  Here’s Mr. Cohen, who’s in Halifax, Nova Scotia:

Before coming up to Canada’s Atlantic provinces, where the nicest people in this nice country are said to live, I found myself seated next to Henry Kissinger at a New York dinner and asked him how he thought President Barack Obama was doing.

“He reminds me of a chess grandmaster who has played his opening in six simultaneous games,” Kissinger said. “But he hasn’t completed a single game and I’d like to see him finish one.”

I thought that wasn’t a bad image for Obama’s international gambits, and then here, at the first Halifax International Security Forum, I heard a similar observation from one participant: “We’ve had the set-up, but is there a middle game?” Or, put another way, can this probing, intelligent president close anything?

As an Obama admirer, I’m worried. He feels over-managed, over-scripted to me, to the point where he’s not showing the guts that prevailed at various difficult moments in the campaign. The ideas are good, but the warmth, cajoling and craft that make ideas more than that are lacking.

I find myself yearning for a presidential gaffe if only to reveal an instinctual human moment. Memo to Obama handlers: Give us a little more of the unvarnished. De-teleprompt the president for a few seconds!

The list of Obama’s international initiatives is of head-turning scope. There’s his “world without nuclear weapons,” announced in Prague last April, reiterated at the United Nations in September. It’s an idea with resonance, and may provide some moral suasion over countries contemplating pursuit of a bomb, but I can’t help recalling that the worlds of 1914 and 1939 were worlds without nukes. No thanks to that.

Unless proliferation, the most worrying global trend of the past 15 years is reversed, this dream is just a feel-good notion.

Then there’s the “reset button” with Russia, which always makes me think of those announcements on flights — “We’re trying to reset the video system” — and my heart sinks. One way to measure the importance of this attempt to warm a cool relationship is that Russia and the United States still control upward of 95 percent of the world’s nuclear arsenal.

There are glimmerings with Dmitri Medvedev, the Russian president, but as Robert Gates, the U.S. defense secretary, observed here, Russia now offers “two perspectives on the rest of the world depending on which of its leaders you’re talking to.” The other perspective is called Vladimir Putin.

Obama needs Russian help on Iran, but I’m not holding my breath for forthright cooperation from Moscow on any eventual sanctions. As for the follow-up agreement to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or Start, intended to cut Russian and American arsenals by about half and supposed to be signed before the old pact expires on Dec. 5, it still needs work. I don’t believe Obama has yet shifted the basic confrontational optic of a resurgent Russia emerging from the humiliation of imperial collapse.

On Afghanistan, where an announcement is at last imminent on the troops the United States will commit to “the necessary war,” Obama has mixed messages with unhappy results. The clarity of March yielded to the cloudiness of fall and the long think has, in the words here of John McCain, “sounded an uncertain trumpet.” Peter MacKay, the Canadian defense minister, said the hesitation was “not helpful” because “everyone has hit the pause button until the U.S. decision.”

I worry now that Obama’s quest for perfect calibration will yield a less than resounding fudge where the tenacious message of a troop increase is undermined by talk of exit timing. That’s not how you break the will of an enemy.

In Europe, a more modest reset attempt has been compromised with political leaders (if not the public) by a perception of cool distance, underscored when Obama did not show at 20th-anniversary celebrations of the Berlin Wall’s fall. Feelings are particularly strong in Paris, where mutterings about Obama’s “Carterization” are heard. President Nicolas Sarkozy, who ushered France back to NATO’s integrated military command structure, and shattered political taboos dictating coolness toward America, has seen his hopes for a special relationship evaporate.

In Israel-Palestine, Obama underestimated the damage of the past decade and has been outmaneuvered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The president’s groundbreaking outreach to Iran, which I applaud, has unsettled a regime that does not know how to respond. But here, as elsewhere, Obama has been unnecessarily weak on human rights issues in the face of an unconscionable crackdown. There’s a trace of churlish “ABB” — “Anything but Bush” — in Obama’s failure to speak out more for human rights and freedom. Once again, calibration has trumped gut to a damaging degree.

Ieva Kupce, a Latvian Defense Ministry official here, told me, “Watching Obama, I worry that democracy is going out of fashion. We in Latvia would not have made it without the United States.”

The great battle of the 21st century is going to be between free-market democracies and free-market authoritarian systems. America’s position in that struggle has to be clear if Obama’s simultaneous grandmaster openings are to produce victories.

Now here’s Mr. Herbert:

I came to Detroit and its environs, the seat of America’s glorious industrial past, to see if I could get a glimpse of the future. Is the economic, social and physical deterioration that has caused so much misery in the Motor City a sign of what’s in store for larger and larger segments of the United States?

Or are there new industries waiting in the wings — some of them right here in the Detroit metropolitan area — with new jobs and bright new prospects for whole new generations of American dreamers?

I found real reason to hope when a gentleman named Stan Ovshinsky took me on a tour of a remarkably quiet and pristine manufacturing plant in Auburn Hills, which is about 30 miles north of Detroit and is home to Chrysler’s headquarters. What is being produced in the plant is potentially revolutionary. A machine about the length of a football field runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, turning out mile after mile after mile of thin, flexible solar energy material, from which solar panels can be sliced and shaped.

You want new industry in the United States, with astonishing technological advances, new mass production techniques and jobs, jobs, jobs? Try energy.

Mr. Ovshinsky knows as much or more about the development and production of alternative energy as anyone on the planet. He developed the technology and designed the production method that made it possible to produce solar material “by the mile.” When he proposed the idea years ago, based on the science of amorphous materials, which he invented, he was ridiculed.

But the thin-film photovoltaic solar panel was just one of his revolutionary ideas. He invented the nickel metal hydride battery that is in virtually all hybrid vehicles on the road today. And when I pulled into the parking lot outside his office in Bloomfield Hills, he promptly installed me in the driver’s seat of a hydrogen hybrid prototype — a car in which the gasoline tank had been replaced with a safe solid-state hydrogen storage system invented by Mr. Ovshinsky.

Within minutes, I was driving along a highway in a car that produced zero pollution. No carbon footprint whatsoever. How’s that for a wave of the future?

The point is that these (and many more) brilliant, innovative technologies are here. They are real, tangible. They exist. What’s needed now is the will to develop policies that will vastly expand these advances and radically reduce their costs. The United States should be leading the world in the creation of whole new energy technologies and industries, instead of allowing the forces of the old carbon-based industries — coal, oil, gasoline-powered vehicles — to stand obstinately in the way of real progress.

“Now,” Mr. Ovshinsky told me, “is when we have to build the new industries of the future.” He has always been driven by the desire to use science and technology to solve the real-world problems of real people, and that has meant creating employment and stopping the pollution of the planet. He and his late wife, Iris, formed a company (to become known as Energy Conversion Devices) in Detroit in 1960 with the idea of using their considerable talents, as he put it, “to do good, to change the world.”

After nearly a half-century of revolutionary innovations with the company, Mr. Ovshinsky retired two years ago to focus his attention on the difficult and time-consuming effort to make solar energy economically competitive with coal and oil. “I know solar energy can’t live up to its possibilities unless it’s a hell of a lot cheaper,” he said.

He believes he has assembled a team that, with sustained, intense work under his direction — and if sufficient funding can be secured — will bring the price of solar power below that of coal and oil within a few years.

What’s weird is that this man, with such a stellar track record of innovation on products and processes crucial to the economic and environmental health of the U.S., gets such little attention and so little support from American policy makers. In addition to his work with batteries, photovoltaics and hydrogen fuel cells, his inventions have helped open the door to flat-screen televisions, new forms of computer memory and on and on.

So when Stan Ovshinsky tells us that we should be putting our chips on hybrid and electric vehicles, and that solar and hydrogen power can be the cornerstone of an industrial renaissance in the U.S. as well as a cleaner planet, we should be listening very, very closely.

As oil defined the 20th century, new forms of energy will define the 21st. The U.S. has the opportunity, the intellectual resources and the expertise to lead the world in the development of clean energy. What we’ve lacked so far has been the courage, the will, to make it happen.

Es sollte der Abschluss eines netten Tages werden. Denn bis zu jenem Moment war der Tag ja wirklich nett: Ausschlafen, aufräumen, meine Eltern bekochen, die sich erstmals in meiner neuen Wohnung die Ehre gaben – ein außergewöhnlich netter Tag also. Und um ihn ebenso nett ausklingen zu lassen wollten Herr N. und ich “mal schnell” auf einen Punsch gehen, denn den ganzen Tag über herrschte angenehm warmes Migräne-Föhn-Wetter – da ließ es sich auch abends draußen leichter ausharren als bei arktischen Temperaturen. Alles in allem ausgezeichnete Voraussetzungen für einen netten Abend.

Das erste böse Erwachen kam schon am Spittelberg, da Herr N. und ich jedes Mal vergessen, dass das arbeitende Volk sich allzu früh ins Bett begibt, und das Gros der Punschhütten ihre Pforten um 22  oder gar 21 Uhr schließt.  Doch Herr N. und ich wollten uns unseren nett geplanten Abend nicht vermiesen lassen. Da eilten wir also die schöne Siebensterngasse hinunter, vertieft in eine Konversation über die Lebens- und Schaffenskrisen, die derzeit unser Dasein beherrschen. Ist zwar weniger nett, diese Lebens- und Schaffenskrise, aber wir Künstler und Freischaffenden brauchen ja Lebens- und Schaffenskrisen, zwecks Kreativität und so. So liefen und kraxelten wir über die Dächer Wiens zum Museumsquartier hinüber, voller Vorfreude auf fette Beats, hippes Volk und heißen Ingwerpunsch. Doch als wir die Treppen vom Mumok hinabstiegen ist es so seltsam still und vor allem – leer. Und als wir erstmals in den Hof einsehen konnten traf uns der apokalyptische Anblick wie der Schlag: Der Eispalast, der wunderbare und einzigartige MQ-Eispalast, ist tot.

Touristen dachten erst, es wäre “a kind of modern art”, diese schwarze Vulkankraterlandschaft mitten im MQ-Hof. Sah ja auch tatsächlich so aus, nur fehlte das Schild mit Künstlername und Kurzbeschreibung. Ein einsamer Securitymann spazierte andächtig um die Ruinen herum, damit ja niemand ein Souvenir aus den verkohlten Überresten der Enzis entwenden konnte. Auf dem dem einzigen Enzi, der noch halbwegs als solcher erkennbar war, hatte jemand “Burn-Out-Syndrom” hingeschmiert. Fassunglos und voller Trauer standen wir um die Trümmer unserer kulturellen Zufluchtsortes herum. Natürlich bedauerten wir in erster Linie den Verlust des viel zu wässrigen und überteuerten Punsches. Doch vor allem galt: Wir mussten loslassen, loslassen von der Galionsfigur einer Wiener Subkultur, vom Wahrzeichen des Boboville-Winters und endgültig von unserem hohen Ross absteigen. Denn heuer wird es nix mehr mit dem Eispalast, der Großteil der Enzis ist den Folgen eines Kabelbrandes erlegen, und deren teure Wiederanschaffung wird sich wohl bis in den Frühling hineinziehen.

Seit jenem Tag trägt Boboville schwarzen Trauerflor, wer weiterhin nicht auf Punsch und Glühwein verzichten will, muss mit den anderen Christkindlmärkten vorlieb nehmen. Und die sind – bis auf den Spittelberg vielleicht – viel zu touristisch, viel zu kitschig, viel zu überfüllt, und einfach viel zu mainstream. Denn so ist es in Wien – zwischen Subkulturen bestehen tiefe Gräben – und zum Brücken schlagen fehlt die nötige Toleranz und Offenheit:  Offenheit auch Neues kennenzulernen und zu akzeptieren, auch wenn es noch so sehr “mainstream” ist und sich nicht in Naschmarktnähe befindet. Denn wir wollen ja anders sein als die anderen, so sehr anders und alternativ, dass wir gar nicht merken, wie gleich anders und gleich alternativ wir eigentlich sind. Jetzt, wo ein Zufluchtsort der Bobos weniger existiert, kommen wir erst drauf, wie sehr wir in unserer eigenen Seifenblase leben. Und wie klein diese Seifenblase ist.

Übrigens: Herr N. und ich überwanden den Verlust des MQ-Eispalastes relativ schnell und konnten trotz des Schocks  in einem Bobo-Beisl diesen netten Tag mit einem relativ netten Abend beenden.

Bobo and Prof. Krugman are both addressing matters economic today.  Who ya gonna believe?  Bobo, in “What Geithner Got Right,” says Timothy F. Geithner, like others on the White House economic team, is pragmatic and responds flexibly to situations, and that approach has paid off during the economic crisis.  Prof. Krugman, in “The Big Squander,” says by not extracting concessions from bankers during the rescue of A.I.G., policy makers undermined their own credibility — and put the broader economy at risk.  Hmmm…  A Nobel prize winning economist or some fool who thinks Applebee’s has salad bars…  Who ya gonna believe?  Here’s the fool:

It’s amazing to go back and read what people were saying about Timothy Geithner in the spring. Many people said he looked terrified as the Treasury secretary, like Bambi in the headlights. The New Republic ran an essay called “The Geithner Disaster.” Portfolio magazine ran a brutal, zeitgeist-capturing profile that concluded by comparing Geithner to Robert Redford’s hollow man character in “The Candidate.”

The criticism of his plan to stabilize the financial system came from all directions. House Republicans called it radical. Many liberal economists thought the plan was the product of hapless, zombie thinking and argued that only full bank nationalization would end the crisis. The Wall Street Journal asked 49 economists to grade Geithner. They gave him an F.

Well, the evidence of the past eight months suggests that Geithner was mostly right and his critics were mostly wrong. The financial sector is in much better shape than it was then. TARP money is being repaid, and the debate now is what to do with the billions that were never needed. It now seems clear that nationalization would have been an unnecessary mistake — potentially expensive and dangerously disruptive.

The course of events has vindicated the administration’s handling of its first big challenge. Obama could have flinched when the torrent of criticism was at its peak. But the president’s support for Geithner never wavered. Geithner never lost confidence in his policy. Rahm Emanuel mobilized to improve the presentation of the policy. The political team worked hard to deflect criticism from Geithner onto themselves.

In retrospect, their performance during this trial was impressive.

Events also vindicate Geithner’s basic policy instincts. The criticism back then was that Geithner was neither bold nor visionary. He was too cautious, too much the insider and bureaucrat.

But this prudence was the key to his effectiveness. In interviews and testimony, Geithner uses the word “balance” a lot. He talks about finding the right balance point between competing priorities. He also talks like a historian who sees common tendencies in certain contexts, not a philosopher who seeks clear general principles that apply across contexts.

This mentality makes it hard for him to project bold conviction, but it makes him flexible in the face of specific problems. When financial confidence is cratering, Geithner concluded, government should generally be as aggressive as possible, as early as possible. At the same time, it should try not to do things that the market does better, like set prices or run companies.

Geithner’s path was a middling one, but it helped the country muddle toward recovery.

If you wanted to step back and define Geithner’s philosophy, you’d probably say that he starts with a set of fairly conservative instincts about the role of government, which put him on the centrist edge of the Democratic Party.

In an interview on Wednesday, for example, I asked Geithner what government could do to help promote innovation. Usually when I ask leaders that, they reel off some cool technologies that government should promote — windmills, nanotechnology, etc. Often they sound like children trying to play at being entrepreneurs. Geithner didn’t do that. He said that government’s limited job was to get the underlying incentives right so the market could figure out what innovations work best. That suggests a pretty constrained view of government’s role.

On the other hand, you would also have to say that Geithner, like many top members of the Obama economic team, is extremely context-sensitive. He’s less defined by any preset political doctrine than by the situation he happens to find himself in.

In the next few months, Geithner will be confronted with a cross-cutting set of pressures. First, the need to reduce the deficits, which is uppermost on his mind. Second, the rising populism in Congress, which has to be battled sometimes and appeased sometimes by an administration that hopes to get things passed. Third, intense public cynicism about government, which means that every debate is washed in negativity.

Most important, there’s the jobs situation. If job growth returns, that will be a sign that the recovery is normal and Geithner and the administration can return to a more moderate path. If employment does not rebound or the economy double dips, that will be a sign of systemic problems. Geithner and his colleagues will probably adopt a much more activist posture and have to throw their lot in with the left.

I hate to rely on the most overused categories in punditry, but they really do apply here. Some administrations are staffed by hedgehogs, who are guided by a few core principles. But this one is staffed by foxes, who respond flexibly to situations. In the administration’s first big test, that sort of pragmatism paid off.

Here’s Prof. Krugman, who actually knows what he’s talking about:

Earlier this week, the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, a k a, the bank bailout fund, released his report on the 2008 rescue of the American International Group, the insurer. The gist of the report is that government officials made no serious attempt to extract concessions from bankers, even though these bankers received huge benefits from the rescue. And more than money was lost. By making what was in effect a multibillion-dollar gift to Wall Street, policy makers undermined their own credibility — and put the broader economy at risk.

For the A.I.G. rescue was part of a pattern: Throughout the financial crisis key officials — most notably Timothy Geithner, who was president of the New York Fed in 2008 and is now Treasury secretary — have shied away from doing anything that might rattle Wall Street. And the bitter paradox is that this play-it-safe approach has ended up undermining prospects for economic recovery. For the job of fixing the broken economy is far from done — yet finishing the job has become nearly impossible now that the public has lost faith in the government’s efforts, viewing them as little more than handouts to the people who got us into this mess.

About the A.I.G. affair: During the bubble years, many financial companies created the illusion of financial soundness by buying credit-default swaps from A.I.G. — basically, insurance policies in which A.I.G. promised to make up the difference if borrowers defaulted on their debts. It was an illusion because the insurer didn’t have remotely enough money to make good on its promises if things went bad. And sure enough, things went bad.

So why protect bankers from the consequences of their errors? Well, by the time A.I.G.’s hollowness became apparent, the world financial system was on the edge of collapse and officials judged — probably correctly — that letting A.I.G. go bankrupt would push the financial system over that edge. So A.I.G. was effectively nationalized; its promises became taxpayer liabilities.

But was there any way to limit those liabilities? After all, banks would have suffered huge losses if A.I.G. had been allowed to fail. So it seemed only fair for them to bear part of the cost of the bailout, which they could have done by accepting a “haircut” on the amounts A.I.G. owed them. Indeed, the government asked them to do just that. But they said no — and that was the end of the story. Taxpayers not only ended up honoring foolish promises made by other people, they ended up doing so at 100 cents on the dollar.

Could things have been different? Some commentators argue that government officials had no way to force the banks to accept a haircut — either they let A.I.G. go bankrupt, which they weren’t ready to do, or they had to honor its contracts as written.

But this seems like a naïve view of how Wall Street works. Major financial firms are a small club, with a shared interest in sustaining the system; ever since the days of J.P. Morgan, it has been common in times of crisis to call on the big players to forgo short-term profits for the industry’s common good. Back in 1998, it was a consortium of private bankers — not the government — that put up the funds to rescue the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management.

Furthermore, big financial firms have a long-term relationship, both with the government and with each other, and can pay a price if they act selfishly in times of crisis. Bear Stearns, the investment bank, earned itself a lot of ill will by refusing to participate in that 1998 rescue, and it’s widely believed that this ill will played a major factor in the demise of Bear Stearns itself, 10 years later.

So officials could have called on bankers to offer a better deal, for their own sake, and simultaneously threatened to name and shame those who balked. It was their choice not to do that, just as it was their choice not to push for more control over bailed-out banks in early 2009.

And, as I said, these seemingly safe choices have now placed the economy in grave danger.

For the economy is still in deep trouble and needs much more government help. Unemployment is in double-digits; we desperately need more government spending on job creation. Banks are still weak, and credit is still tight; we desperately need more government aid to the financial sector. But try to talk to an ordinary voter about this, and the response you’re likely to get is: “No way. All they’ll do is hand out more money to Wall Street.”

So here’s the real tragedy of the botched bailout: Government officials, perhaps influenced by spending too much time with bankers, forgot that if you want to govern effectively you have retain the trust of the people. And by treating the financial industry — which got us into this mess in the first place — with kid gloves, they have squandered that trust.

now this is weird,
sobrang weird na hindi maproseso ng utak ni donna.

overview :
diosa started working two months ago. in more or less half of that, someone got interested masisissi nyo ba ang diosa?! : diosa nga eh! na wala lang. as in wala lang sa kanya.. shit, old shit lang yon sa kanya, wala! like, ano ba.. can’t you befriend someone who thinks you’re “something”? geez,she doesn’t even want to have a syota much less a boyfriend. ANO BA!! it’s like SUPER EEEWWW. how many times does she have to tell everyone that she don’t need a man (as of now *disclaimer alert), that she doesn’t see herself romantically involve with someone. but don’t get her wrong.. she dates. ano?! further ado pa ba?

okay, so ayon nga, may nagpakita ng interes, well, for those who knew donna, they would definitely understand that she is merely having fun and making friends. nothing more, nothing less bit of kilig won’t hurt : pampahaba ng buhok.. HELLO! there is nothing to it. damn it.

here goes.
she went out with this guy para manood ng live streaming ng boxing sa sosyal na sosyal na ynares. both of them wearing pambahay outfits, walang ligo-ligo, come and go pa sila sa ynares. they didn’t even have a bite. pagdating don laban na.. right after, uwi na. walang masyadong usap-usap. nood lang.

and then the afternoon breaks sa office. you see, there are 10mins breaks na pwede mong gugulin sa labas para maiba-iba naman yung view mo sa loob ng opisina, pwede kang mag-coke sa labas.. the likes. yeah, they’ve been seen together – but, so what? they are not doin’ anything aside from smoking. it’s not like they’re having an affair or something to that effect. isa pa, magkaganonman (rebellion na ito) walang syang makitang masama kasi, wala silang sabit pareho. BOTH. UNATTACHED.

but then again, let’s try to see things from other’s point of view na aminin na ring may malaking-malaking point.
: ang organisasyong pinapasukan ng diosa ay mapanghusga, malisyoso, bobo.
: tanong, kaya mo ba ang eskandalo? *with this, hindi talaga abot ng isip ni donna kung anong klaseng eskandalo yung pwede.. what, that if the ‘relationship’ (if ever) goes south she’ll be branded as the guys girl? that they had sex before? that she’s easy ‘coz she went out with the guy she barely even know?

**how would you know someone if you don’t get to talk to them or be with them? it’ll be like first impressions-ALWAYS**

that.. what else?! wala talagang maisip ang donna na pwede.. and she is trying her damnest to rationalize this ‘coz she don’t want to be unfair or anything. she doesn’t want to be treated that way.
:

weirder :
: nakikinig si donna.
: naa-amuse si donna.
: natatawa si donna.
: she is not scared.
: donna is taking everything into consideration but it gets funny everytime she sits and think this through ‘coz it was like seeing a shrink who thinks you’re sick just to pshyco-analyze her.
: she still want to go out with him irregardless of what might happen.. she is her own person and won’t be sway of what others might think of her. she knows herself well. she’ll do as she damn well pleases. no regrets. she is not the type to be orderred. and Higher Up knows she is not doing anything wrong.
: that if she screws up, she screws up alone.

jesus christ, donna don’t want complications.. not in any form!
goddamnit.