Unfortunately the work around I had been using to embed Flash into wordpress no longer works so I’m posting this as a slideshow until I find a better method of displaying the content.

There are thumbnails on the bottom although they are so faint they may be invisble on some monitors. You can pause the slideshow with the control on top and use the thumbnails to compare saddles.!!!

It’s late early and I’m tired, but can’t sleep.

Things to do tomorrow:

• return movies
• order Christmas cards
• laundry
• pay bills
• mail check for tickets

♥

Cute pictures of the kids.  Think I’ll make this into a Christmas card.

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.

The self proclaimed ‘Artist Extraordinaire’ and quite rightly too, Mrs Brooks is a Virginian Elementary school teacher who moderates the blog Wonder Brooks. Her writing style is friendly and involving and I couldn’t help but browse through most of her blog, each post seemed to invite me in to read it. There’s a great range of diversity with some lovely unit examples from pupils including those you see posted. Check it out and maybe even bookmark her, you’ll want to keep going back.

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.

Mayor John Callahan and Charlene Donchez Mowers of the Historic Bethlehem Partnership welcome the Bethlehem Mounted Police. From left: Officer Timothy Brooks and Raven; Officer Jeff Mouer and Hamlet.

What do you get when you combine a great classic bike (I am rather partial to Raleighs), a great photographer, and the bike happens to be a mixte? That’s my “perfect storm”. Enjoy the stormy weather as we view Mrs. Z’s 1970s Raleigh Super Course Mixte.
-Doohickie

A Study in Green Hues

Doohickie,

This is my wife’s 1970s Raleigh Super Course. It’s in pretty good shape considering its lifetime of use, though some stickers are tattered and the chrome is quite pitted.

A Wonderfully Original Bike

Still, it has the original Brooks B-66 saddle, and it fits my wife just wonderfully. I’ve added some Velo Orange fenders to it to make it more elegant and weather-worthy, and eventually I’d like to add some vintage-look lights for the night rides.

Side View: Classic Lines

She rides smooth, and is surprisingly quick. I love the mixte design and I’ll admit to stealing a ride every once in a while. Hope you like her.

Idyllic Scene

There is more info on my blog, Lansing Photo Cyclist

Erich Z.

Naked in the Woods (no fenders!)

Here is one more picture lifted from Erich’s blog showing the bike before the fenders were added. I just love this bike, so much so that we have a new header picture for the blog!
-Doohickie

Brooks Women’s Twitch S Running Shoe Review

Feature

Overview
For the eager sprinter from the 50m to 400m, the Twitch means serious business. Made of high-tech materials ready to get you up on your toes and a spike plate to withstand each pounding stride, this shoe will no doubt make you a tape-breaker.
Specifications

Nov 21, 2009 07:00:07

David Brooks Takes One for the Team? Ummm, no.  That would never happen.  If it did, it certainly wouldn’t be for Conservatives.

As usual, Brooks is up to his RINO best defending Stimulus that isn’t, catastrophic unemployment, and an Administration that can’t decide if the war we are really in is real.  Icing it off by insinuating Obama and his minions have excellent survival instincts.  Wow.  Thanks Dave.  A bunch of tough survivors.  We would have preferred some leadership, thank you.    P.S. The unprofessional Palin slurs were a treat, too.

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.

….

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.

via Op-Ed Columnist – What Geithner Got Right – NYTimes.com.

Classificadas as 32 seleções para a Copa do Mundo de 2010, agora é possível fazer um levantamento dos fornecedores de material esportivo para o torneio.

A adidas patrocina 12 seleções: África do Sul, Japão, Nigéria, México, Argentina, Paraguai, Dinamarca, França, Alemanha, Grécia, Eslováquia e Espanha. São 6 a mais que em 2006.

A Nike patrocina 9 seleções: Austrália, Coreia do Sul, Estados Unidos, Brasil, Nova Zelândia, Holanda, Portugal, Sérvia e Eslovênia. Uma seleção a mais que em 2006.

A Puma patrocina Camarões, Costa do Marfim, Gana, Uruguai, Itália e Suíça. São 6, em 2006 eram 12.

As outras marcas são:
Joma (Honduras)
Umbro (Inglaterra)
LeCoq Sportif (Argélia)
Brooks (Chile)
Erke (Coreia do Norte)

Puma e adidas já fizeram o lançamento de grande parte de suas camisas para a Copa, inclusive já postei as imagens destas aqui no blog. As camisas da Puma, como sempre, apostando no mesmo template para todas as seleções, variando apenas cores e estampas personalizadas. Apesar de tudo, os resultados foram bons, principalmente nas camisas away. Mas é bom esperar pelo lançamento da camisa da Itália, que geralmente é algo diferente das demais. As camisas da adidas também apostam em peculiaridades de cada seleção em suas camisas, gerando bons resultados. Porém, em camisas como a Espanha e Grécia o excesso de simplicidade acaba sendo um erro.

A Nike, que em 2006 apostou em uma política de individualizar o uniforme de cada seleção, tanto nas fontes utilizadas como em outros detalhes, ainda não lançou oficialmente nenhuma das camisas para o ano que vem, mas essa tendência provavelmente permanecerá. A camisa do Brasil, inclusive, tem previsão para lançamento em fevereiro de 2010, durante o Carnaval de Salvador.

A Umbro/Inglaterra não deve lançar nada novo para a Copa. Quanto às outras seleções existe a possibilidade de mudarem de fornecedor para o mundial, uma vez que são marcas menores que não têm poder de competitividade com as “gigantes” do mercado. Honduras talvez permaneça com a Joma, marca que na Copa de 2006 forneceu material para a Costa Rica. A Argélia, caso não continue com LeCoq Sportif, pode ser “capturada” pela Puma, que tem forte presença e identificação no mercado africano, inclusive da África do Norte (patrocina Egito e Tunísia). Seria legal ver o Chile, que em sua última Copa (1998) tinha camisa da Reebok, com outra marca (talvez Umbro ou mesmo Nike, que só patrocina o Brasil na América do Sul). Agora, a Coreia do Norte é uma incógnita. Será que o governo comunista do país permitirá à sua seleção uma camisa de alguma das grandes multinacionais ou continuará com a pequena chinesa Erke? É esperar pra ver.

I snapped awake. I heard it again, the peal of shattered glass on tiled floor. It was distant. I assumed it was on the first floor. I wasn’t too particularly worried, there were still five flights of stairs and a large metal door to get through, which we had piled up a mountain of cheap hotel furniture. But then I heard a shout of a man.
Zombies can’t yell. I thought in my head, suddenly alert despite the late hour. I pulled the silver pocket watch out of my coat. It read 3 A.M.

Why can’t I seem to get any good sleep? I complained in my head.

I looked around, everyone was up and alert and packed. I guess they were waiting for me. I quickly packed up my bedroll, grabbed an apple and stuck it in my mouth and held it there, while pulling by belt which had my shotgun attached onto my waist. I snatched up my nailbat and said “We’re gonna have to make a path out of here. You guys ready?”

No one said anything, but all nodded. I pulled by bag around my shoulders. Me and Taylor began to move the furniture while Vincent and Jack packed. Will’s foot prevented him from helping but he protested nonetheless.

“I feel so useless with this foot” he muttered. “I need a split so I can walk right.”

“I’ll take care of it after we get out of here.” I said, thinking back to the First-Aid lessons I took in the Cub Scouts.

“I wonder what the hell he, or they, are doing down there.” said Taylor. “They either seem like they don’t care about living, they think they can rid the town of the infected or they’re just plain idiots.”

“Probably the second, considering we hear multiple voices and issues being ordered, probably the leader.” I replied.

We removed the last chair from the door and pulled the latch open and swung out the door. We walked down the stairs, single file once more, and this time, I was first, nailbat in hand. No zombies on the stairs, which wasn’t surprising, the slow footwork of the ghouls couldn’t navigate the steps.

We reached the bottom floor and began to move the furniture, which we had piled in front of this door as well, just in case.

We moved faster this time, with the added help of Vincent and Jack. After the grunt work, I turned to Taylor and pulled out my shotgun and handed it to him.

“I know you don’t have the best aim with a pistol, so I’ll lend you my shotgun for the time being. Be good to her, ya hear?” I joked.

“Haha, I will, you crazy bastard.” Taylor chuckled.

I swung the door out into the lobby and stepped inside. Glass covered the floor and three ghouls were eating at the body of a biker with a broken helmet. His bike was stalling at the other side of the room so I guessed he had crashed through the glass doors and fell off and broke his neck.

The zombies were quickly dispatched by Will’s M1 and Jack’s shotgun. A man of about 6′3, 200 pounds of pure muscle stepped into the remains of the door, and I swung to face him. He drew a sawnoff shotgun and pointed it at me, finger on the trigger, and walking forward. He acted like he knew he was a badass, so I quickly connected it would be his downfall.

“We aren’t infected so point that somewhere else.” I reasoned, trying to keep my cool.

The man didn’t answer, just kept walking forward. I decided I couldn’t reason with him so I gave up on that strategy.He was about five feet away and I knew he was going to fire.

I swung my nailbat, with the blunt side up,  into the back of his elbow of the arm he was holding the gun with. A sharp crack, a grunt, and the small protruding bone from his arm told me I hadn’t missed. I switched hands and swung the nailbat, still on the blunt side, into his throat, caving in his trachea.

“Shouldn’t have pointed a gun at me. I get pissed off easy.”

I left the man on the floor to die, thrashing on the ground. Morals didn’t exist here. There was no time to pity the doomed or the dying. Don’t ask for mercy, I won’t give it to you.

I pushed back against the rush of guilt of what I had done, but it was necessary. Self-Protection, I told myself, The law wouldn’t even punish me for this murder. No, not a murder. A mercy killing. Rather die by me than by being ripped apart alive and devoured.

I stepped out of the hotel, and looked up and down the street. Every building was either ransacked, or up in flames.The hum of a motorcycle engine announced the next biker to arrive. This one was bald and wearing sunglasses. At night. He also had a sawnoff, which he too pointed in my general direction.

“A little noisy don’t you think?” Taylor said to the man.

Taylor raised my shotgun and shot the man down, the motorcycle went crashing into a building, and hit a zombie.

“This isn’t Sons of Anarchy anymore. Time to grow up and get a grip on reality.” Taylor said

We walked quickly but silently out of the small town. We headed in the direction that we came from, toward the woods, toward the silence, toward safety.

Ten hours passed. I had splinted Will’s foot with a couple sturdy sticks and a crepe bandage and but his boots over it. He still couldn’t completely put all his weight on it, but with using his rifle as a cane, he could move in a fairly fast pace, which was enough.

We arrived at a library, sore from hours of walking and the fighting we had done recently. We went inside and checked the place for ghouls, and since this was a redneck town, we didn’t expect many to be there.

Jack volunteered to keep watch as we climbed into our respective bedding and I quickly drifted off.

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.

Mhmm, and I’m ashamed to say I really do suck at commitment, haha. I fear for the day I get married, honestly. I can’t be faithful to a simple blog and YouTube channel, that can’t be a good prediction for my future. So I was reading a friend’s blog and he decided to do a 100 days blogging challenge where he blogs every day for 100 days, he’s on day 12 and going strong. Now, I’m not going to do that by any means, but maybe since I know more people blogging now I’ll get back in the swing of things? I can’t promise anything though, as my last posts have been filled with a bunch of false hopes and empty promises. =/

In one of his posts he talks about an amazing game called Waterball and has some videos, so I went through my files to find a video of my Youth Group playing water ball back in Summer of 2008. It’s not nearly as intense as the videos he posted, but it’s still pretty good. :] If you don’t know what Waterball is, you should really come out from under the rock that’s sheltering you. It’s only one of THE best and, undoubtedly, most dangerous sports. Rugby doesn’t even come close to the thrill that is Waterball. I love playing it, but because I’m so small I tend to get hurt a lot so in this vid you’re about to see I’m the one filming, haha. (I cannot get the video to work in the actually blog, so you’ll have to click on the link, sorry!)

Here’s the wonderful Waterball!

Now go over to the Blog Roll to the right and click on “Brooks’ Blog” to read and follow his blogging challenge. (Maybe this’ll bring you a couple more readers, haha)

For the few people who try to read my stuff,
-Bee-

…so ist es bei mir zumindest, wenn es um Sportklamotten geht! Eigentlich wollten wir ja für Levi nur ein Langarm-Shirt zum Laufen kaufen. Naja, es ist dann doch etwas mehr geworden.

Danke an RunnersPoint für die fairen Preise!

Brooks T6 Racer, Adidas ADIZERO, Asics CUMULUS 11 und das Laufshirt im Hintergrund

Und immer schön weiter die Wirtschaft ankurbeln…

Kara Ginther is an artist who specializes in carved and embellished leather; and particularly, the embellishment of some fine Brooks saddles. I assume the paint would wear off over time, however the ones that are simply carved should be no problem, time would probably only add character to the design. These would look amazing on some nice show bikes at the NAHBS, so hopefully we will see one of these beauties on some nice classic steel (hint, hint builders).

Bobo gives us “The Nation of Futurity” in which he says it would be nice if Americans regained their faith in the future. China seems to possess the optimism that once defined the U.S.  Mr. Cohen addresses “A Mideast Truce” and says peace between Israelis and Palestinians is unattainable. The wounds of the past decade are too deep.  Bob Herbert considers “What the Future May Hold” and says for future generations, we need to remember that infrastructure is linked to the health of the economy, the environment and the viability of the nation as a whole.  Here’s Bobo:

When European settlers first came to North America, they saw flocks of geese so big that it took them 30 minutes to all take flight and forests that seemed to stretch to infinity. They came to two conclusions: that God’s plans for humanity could be completed here, and that they could get really rich in the process.

This moral materialism fomented a certain sort of manic energy. Americans became famous for their energy and workaholism: for moving around, switching jobs, marrying and divorcing, creating new products and going off on righteous crusades.

It may seem like an ephemeral thing, but this eschatological faith in the future has motivated generations of Americans, just as religious faith motivates a missionary. Pioneers and immigrants endured hardship in the present because of their confidence in future plenty. Entrepreneurs start up companies with an exaggerated sense of their chances of success. The faith is the molten core of the country’s dynamism.

There are also periodic crises of faith. Today, the rise of China is producing such a crisis. It is not only China’s economic growth rate that produces this anxiety. The deeper issue is spiritual. The Chinese, though members of a famously old civilization, seem to possess some of the vigor that once defined the U.S. The Chinese are now an astonishingly optimistic people. Eighty-six percent of Chinese believe their country is headed in the right direction, compared with 37 percent of Americans.

The Chinese now have lavish faith in their scientific and technological potential. Newsweek and Intel just reported the results of their Global Innovation Survey. Only 22 percent of the Chinese believe their country is an innovation leader now, but 63 percent are confident that their country will be the global technology leader within 30 years. The majority of the Chinese believe that China will produce the next society-changing innovation, while only a third of Americans believe the next breakthrough will happen here, according to the survey.

The Cultural Revolution seems to have produced among the Chinese the same sort of manic drive that the pioneer and immigrant experiences produced among the Americans. The people who endured Mao’s horror have seen the worst life has to offer and are now driven to build some secure footing. At the same time, they and their children seem inflamed by the experience of living through so much progress so quickly.

“Do you understand?” one party official in Shanxi Province told James Fallows of The Atlantic, “If it had not been for Deng Xiaoping, I would be behind an ox in a field right now. … Do you understand how different this is? My mother has bound feet!”

The anxiety in America is caused by the vague sense that they have what we’re supposed to have. It’s not the per capita income, which the Chinese may never have at our level. It’s the sense of living with baubles just out of reach. It’s the faith in the future, which is actually more important.

China, where President Obama is visiting, invites a certain sort of reverie. It is natural, looking over the construction cranes, to think about the flow of history over decades, not just day to day. And it becomes obvious by comparison just how far the U.S. has drifted from its normal future-centered orientation and how much this rankles.

The U.S. now has an economy shifted too much toward consumption, debt and imports and too little toward production, innovation and exports. It now has a mounting federal debt that creates present indulgence and future hardship.

Americans could once be confident that their country would grow more productive because each generation was more skilled than the last. That’s no longer true. The political system now groans to pass anything easy — tax cuts and expanding health care coverage — and is incapable of passing anything hard — spending restraint, health care cost control.

The standard thing these days is for Americans to scold each other for our profligacy, to urge fiscal Puritanism. But it’s not clear Americans have ever really been self-disciplined. Instead, Americans probably postponed gratification because they thought the future was a big rock-candy mountain, and if they were stealing from that, they were robbing themselves of something stupendous.

It would be nice if some leader could induce the country to salivate for the future again. That would mean connecting discrete policies — education, technological innovation, funding for basic research — into a single long-term narrative. It would mean creating regional strategies, because innovation happens in geographic clusters, not at the national level. It would mean finding ways to tamp down consumption and reward production. The most pragmatic guide for that remains Michael Porter’s essay in the Oct. 30, 2008, issue of Business Week.

As the financial crises ease, it would be nice if Americans would once again start looking to the horizon.

Here’s Mr. Cohen:

I’ve grown so pessimistic about Israel-Palestine that I find myself agreeing with Israel’s hard-line foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman: “Anyone who says that within the next few years an agreement can be reached ending the conflict simply doesn’t understand the situation and spreads delusions.”

That’s the lesson of early Obama. The president tried to rekindle peace talks by confronting Israel on settlements, coaxing Palestinians to resume negotiations, and reaching out to the Muslim world. The effort has failed.

It has alienated Israel, where Obama is unpopular, and brought the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, close to resignation. It’s time to think again.

What’s gone wrong? There have been tactical mistakes, including a clumsy U.S. wobble toward accepting Israeli “restraint” on settlements rather than cessation. But the deeper error was strategic: Obama’s assumption that he could resume where Clinton left off in 2000 and pursue the land-for-peace idea at the heart of the two-state solution.

This approach ignored the deep scars inflicted in the past decade: the killing of 992 Israelis and 3,399 Palestinians between the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000 and 2006; the Israeli Army’s harsh reoccupation of most of the West Bank; Hamas’ violent rise to power in Gaza and the accompanying resurgence of annihilationist ideology; the spectacular spread of Jewish settlements in the West Bank; and the Israeli construction of over 250 miles of a separation barrier that has protected Israel from suicide bombers even as it has shattered Palestinian lives, grabbed land and become, in the words of Michael Sfard, an Israeli lawyer, “an integral part of the West Bank settlement plan.”

These are not small developments. They have changed the physical appearance of the Middle East. More important, they have transformed the psychologies of the protagonists. Israelis have walled themselves off from Palestinians. They are less interested than ever in a deal with people they hardly see.

As Ron Nachman, the founder of the sprawling Ariel settlement, comments in René Backmann’s superb new book, “A Wall in Palestine,” the wave of Palestinian suicide attacks before work on the barrier began in mid-2002 meant that: “Israelis wanted separation. They did not want to be mixed with the Arabs. They didn’t even want to see them. This may be seen as racist, but that’s how it is.”

And that’s about where we are.

With Palestinians saying, “Not one inch further will we cede.” The myriad humiliations of the looping barrier, which divides Palestinians from one another as well as from Israel, have cemented this “Nyet.”

On the surface, Obama’s decision to tackle settlements first was logical enough. Nothing has riled Palestinians as much as the continued flow of Israeli settlers into East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Both Oslo (1993) and the Road Map (2003) called for settlements to stop, but the number of settlers has risen steadily to over 450,000.

The president was categorical in his Cairo speech: “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.”

Nor do I. But facts are hard — and Obama has tried to ignore them. The history briefly outlined above makes clear that the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won’t deviate from the pattern of settlement growth established since 1967.

Indeed, Backmann’s book (from which the Sfard quote is also taken), demonstrates a relentless continuity of Israeli purpose, now cemented by a fence whose aim was in fact double: to stop terrorists but also “to protect the settlements, to give them room to develop.”

That is why, even at 250 miles, the barrier (projected to stretch over 400 miles) is already much longer than the pre-1967 border or Green Line: It burrows into the West Bank to place major settlements on the Israeli side, effectively annexing over 12 percent of the land.

The United States condoned the construction of this settlement-reinforcing barrier. It cannot be unmade — not for the foreseeable future. Peace and walls do not go together. But a truce and walls just may. And that, I must reluctantly conclude, is the best that can be hoped for.

Obama, who has his Nobel already, should ratchet expectations downward. Stop talking about peace. Banish the word. Start talking about détente. That’s what Lieberman wants; that’s what Hamas says it wants; that’s the end point of Netanyahu’s evasions.

It’s not what Abbas wants but he’s powerless. Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist, told me, “A nonviolent status quo is far from satisfactory but it’s not bad. Cyprus is not bad.”

I recall my friend Shlomo dreaming of peace. That’s over. The last decade destroyed the last illusions: hence the fence. The courageous have departed the Middle East. A peace of the brave must yield to a truce of the mediocre — at best.

At least until Intifada-traumatized Israeli psychology shifts. I agree with the Israeli author David Grossman when he writes: “We have dozens of atomic bombs, tanks and planes. We confront people possessing none of these arms. And yet, in our minds, we remain victims. This inability to perceive ourselves in relation to others is our principal weakness.”

And now here’s Mr. Herbert:

What will the United States be like in 20 years when today’s toddlers are in college or trying to land that first job or maybe thinking about starting a family?

The answer will depend to a great extent on decisions we make now about the American infrastructure.

This came to mind as I was reading about yet another closure of the problem-plagued San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which is more than 70 years old. In 20 years, will today’s toddlers be traveling on bridges and roads that are in even worse shape than today’s? Will they endure mammoth traffic jams that start earlier and end later? Will their water supplies be clean and safe? Will the promise of clean energy visionaries be realized, or will we still be fouling the environment with carbon filth to the benefit of traditional energy conglomerates and foreign regimes that in many cases wish us anything but good?

The answers to these and many other related questions will depend to a great extent on decisions we make now (even in the midst of very tough economic times) about the American infrastructure. We’re trundling along in the infrastructure equivalent of a jalopy, with bridges rotting and falling down, while other nations, our competitors in the global economy, are building efficient, high-speed, high-performance infrastructure platforms to power their 21st-century economies.

We used to be so much smarter about this stuff. A recent publication from the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution reminds us that:

“Since the beginning of our republic, transportation and infrastructure have played a central role in advancing the American economy — from the canals of upstate New York to the railroads that linked the heartland to industrial centers and finally the interstate highway system that ultimately connected all regions of the nation.

“In each of those periods, there was a sharp focus on how infrastructure investments could be used as catalysts for economic expansion and evolution.”

Policy makers all but gave up on that kind of thinking years ago. America’s infrastructure, once the finest in the world, has been neglected for decades, and it shows. Felix Rohatyn’s book on the subject, “Bold Endeavors,” opens with: “The nation is falling apart — literally.”

It’s almost as if we no longer understand the crucial links between infrastructure and the health of the American economy, the state of the environment and the viability of the nation as a whole. We’ve become stupid about this.

Consider transportation. As Brookings tells us, “Other nations around the globe have continued to act on the calculus that state-of-the art transportation infrastructure — the connective tissue of a nation — is critical to moving goods, ideas and workers quickly and efficiently. In the United States, however, we seem to have forgotten.”

Much of the nation’s rail infrastructure is approaching the tail end of its useful life. If you’ve flown anywhere recently, you know what a nightmare that can be.

To the extent that we have any infrastructure policy at all, it is badly disjointed, dysfunctional, often doing more harm than good as it serves the interests of politicians who are crazy for pork rather than the real needs of the American public.

Brookings’ studies of American infrastructure policy have been extensive, and a conversation last week with one of its executives, Bruce Katz, offered a glimpse of the kind of economic environment today’s toddlers could face in a couple of decades if we started getting things right now.

“We’ll very likely have a low-carbon-based economy,” said Mr. Katz, “which will require enormous innovation with regard to energy and the infrastructure. We’ll be much more export-oriented than we are today, less consumption-focused.” And as a nation, he said, we should have a better understanding of the importance of the metropolitan areas that are the major drivers of the U.S. economy, and how essential it is to give them the coordinated national support that they need on infrastructure and other forms of development.

You can’t thrive as a nation while New Orleans is drowning, and Detroit is being beaten into oblivion decade after decade, and a bridge in Minneapolis is collapsing into the Mississippi River, and cities in upstate New York and the Rust Belt are rotting from lack of employment opportunities, and so on.

Imagine, instead, an America with rebuilt, healthy, dynamic metropolitan areas, and gleaming new port facilities, and networks of high-speed rail, an America with electric vehicles and a smart grid and energy generated by the power of the sun and wind and water and the ocean’s waves. Imagine if the children of today’s toddlers had access to world-class public schools all across the nation and a higher education system that is both first-rate and affordable.

Imagine if we set out seriously to do all this.

Imagine.

You may think us blogging/guru types wake up every morning wondering how we can sell more stuff to you. I hope not — that’s pretty cynical — because it’s not true. -see details at StoryFix

I didn’t read Freshman Dorm books beyond about Book #22  ( in my first semester of college- yep I read a YA novel in college!) so I am glad I never knew until know how crappy the series became. I have read a few of the later books to recap on here at some point and much like other YA novels as they continue to write more, the books continue to get more and more shitty. It makes me wish the YA writers would quit while they were ahead and just end the series ( as it seemed Betsy Haynes did with the Fabulous Five) before it got to be super shitty and melodramatic- but noooooooo

Well, a lot has happened since I last reviewed a Freshman Dorm book. As everyone who has read other later Freshman Dorm books or read the recap I did on Freshman Dorm #19, in Freshman Dorm #18 Josh and Winnie got married. Josh and Winnie share a house with Clifford Bronton, the short guy who briefly dated the dancer Kimberly, Rich Greenfield, a speech pathology major who does ventriloquist acts with his puppet Greenwood and briefly dated Liza Ruff,  and well in this book we are introduced to a new roommate.  Winnie and Josh are having major financial difficulties- both are full time college students, and Winnie is now preggers with their first child. For some weird fucking reason neither one can even work part time due to their demanding schoolwork ( and ok granted I didn’t work in college other than in summers but a lot of my friends did- I had friends who practically worked full time and attended college full time not unheard of especially if you are married and pregnant!) and they are getting tired of constantly having to ask both sets of parents for cash.  Meanwhile, Josh also bought a motorcycle recently and Winnie keeps begging Josh to sell the motorcycle a buy a station wagon, especially sinc e the gyno told Winnie it’s dangerous to be on a motorcycle while pregnant.

Well, to solve part of their financial woes, Winnie figures they can find another housemate.  Then Fredericka Barstow, aka Freddie, walks into Winnie’s life- well she walks into the crisis hotline building where Winnie volunteers. Freddie says she desperately needs a place to live so about 5 minutes later, Winnie tells Freddie she is more than welcome to move in. Freddie is a chemical engineering major and LOVES computers and motorcycles- you see where this will go don’t you?

Well, as anyone could have predicted, Freddie starts completely moving in on Josh- she wears sexy nighties around him and is always available to hang out with Josh.  And Josh and Winnie are having marital troubles as it is- Winnie is so obsessed with the pregnancy it is all she talks about. And because Winnie is pregnant,Winnie refuses to go to any parties or have sex with Josh. Winnie also keeps scheduling doctor appointments while Josh has classes even though Josh keeps telling her he wants to be there. As Winnie and Josh get into more and more arguments, and Winnie keeps turning Josh down for sex, one night after Josh is dissed, he and Freddie share a passionate kiss. Josh feels terrible about that and decides he does have to do his best to stick things out with Winnie especially as they are having a child together. Winnie finally sees that she is completely losing Josh ( after Freddie pretty much tells Winnie that she and Josh are spending tons of time together and Josh will soon be hers) and she decides she will attend Liza Ruff’s party. Liza is having a huge dorm party to celebrate her debut on some sitcom produced by Rich Greenfield’s dad. Everyone is to come to the party dressed as a TV character. Faith goes as a character from Little House on the Prairie.  ( yeah big stretch for Faith). Melissa is to go as Bugs Bunny and her boyfriend Danny as Ironside because Danny is in a wheelchair. Liza is Lucille Ball of course. Josh goes as a Star Trek character, and Freddie is Kelly Taylor from 90210. Winnie decides to go as a sexy alien girl from Star Trek to get Josh back. It does work, and Winnie agrees to be spontaneous with Josh after the party and go on his motorcycle despite Josh saying they can just walk back to the dorm and he wants to be rid of the motorcycle tomorrow so he can save their marriage. Winnie says one time on the cycle won’t hurt- and well guess what- as again anyone could have predicted especially as the book pretty much gives it away on the back cover- Winnie and Josh do get into a motorcycle accident and neither one gets THAT hurt but Winnie loses the baby!!!! And the book ends with Winnie’s miscarriage.

Well of course no Freshman Dorm book is complete without about 100 subplots.  Melissa McDormand is now dating Danny, Mr. Wheelchair man that she hooked up with in Freshman Obsession, when Melissa was on ‘roids. Melissa and Danny are having issues because Danny keeps thinking Melissa will leave him for an able bodied man- specifically, Danny’s own brother Ted who is a major athlete and very flirty. Ted actually does try to flirt with Melissa hardcore to see if Melissa will go for it so Ted can see if Melissa actually loves Danny. But Melissa just tells Ted that she really loves Danny and she wishes Danny would ” let her in” and trust her more. Ted reveals to Melissa that in Danny’s senior year of high school he got into a major car accident that cost him the ability to walk, and Danny’s girlfriend at the time ( they were going to go to Northwestern together) dumped him upon learning of his injuries which does suck ass, so Danny has had a hard time trusting women since. Melissa goes to Danny about this, and they make up and are as a tight a couple as ever.

Brooks is participating in the game Assasin, a popular game in college dorms that I never played, whereby you follow someone around ( whose name you pick) tag them with a sticker or whatever, and ” kill” them. Ted suggests to Brooks that Assasins is a great way to meet women and Brooks is really wanting a new girlfriend.  The girl Brooks is searching for is named Angela Beth Whitman and she’s pledging a sorority full of blonde Midwestern girls who wear lots of pink and green. As Brooks tries to find Angela Beth, he keeps running into a sorority sister of her, Carmen Fuentes, who has long, dark, curly hair and teases Brooks a lot. Well finally- we learn that Carmen Fuentes and Angela Beth are the same woman! When Brooks first met Angela Beth she said her name was Carmen Fuentes which is her mom’s name because Brooks was with Ted and Angela Beth didn’t want Ted the womanizer knowing her real name. Angela Beth’s dad’s family is straight off the Mayflower, and her mom is Latina hence the name and her looks. Angela Beth and Brooks become a couple.

Dash Ramirez was apparently almost thrown out of school because he was framed for starting a fire at the Tri Beta house- turns out Lauren investigated and found out it was a bunch of skinheads who started it, and the skinheads were out to get Dash. Despite Lauren clearing Dash’s name, people at school still avoid him and Dash is ready to just leave U of S and transfer to another school and never tells Lauren. And Lauren and Dash broke up AGAIN because Dash was convinced Lauren was doing some reporter but Lauren was not doing that reporter. Lauren finally convinces Dash of this the night of Liza’s costume party, and Lauren and Dash get back together and Dash decides that with Lauren’s support, he can stay at U of S. I used to love Lauren and Dash together but their constant make up and break up shit now drives me bananas!

In this coming week, I do hope to recap ” Kristy’s Great Idea” for you! In the next few weeks, I have a couple of Sweet Valley High books coming up ( specifically ” Kidnapped” and ” Playing with Fire” ) a Sweet Valley Twins book named ” Amy Moves In” and 2 Sleepover Friends books- ” Stephanie’s Family Secret” and ” the New Kate.”