I smile when I’m angry…

Chiar zambesc, dar nu sunt furioasa ! Nu am mai scris de multisor si mi-am propus ca in acest post sa ating mai multe ganduri. Dar ma voi limita la a va indemna sa zambiti! Pe 5 Decembrie! Coincidenta sau nu, Cohen cu al sau vers a ales!

Nu aveam sa va impartasesc nimic altceva mai interesant decat acest eveniment. Cu toate astea, daca acest vers nu m-ar fi oprit in loc, ironic si intrebator, aproape parintesc… v-as fi povestit si alte nimicuri. Dar Nu, nu o voi mai face.

Au spus-o ei mai bine si mult mai potrivit

“…. Fideli crezului nostru ca “Un zambet poate crea viata”, scopul este sa facem cel putin 1.000.000 de oameni din toata tara sa zambeasca. Si te asteptam si pe tine in aventura noastra!

Daca vrei sa iti testezi energia si vitalitatea, sa daruiesti din inima zambete si sa descoperi cat de fain este sa primesti zambete inapoi, te invitam la noua campanie “Daruieste un zambet” – Un zambet pentru tine, intr-o zi minunata de Sambata 5 Decembrie 2009. Citeste mai multe aici!

P.S.  Io mi-s ghini!

Ancuta

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.

Voilà une dizaine de jours que je rédigeais un article inhérent à une requête simple: la mise à disposition de conteneurs et bacs poubelle.

Le message est visiblement très bien passé puisque depuis hier, c’est chose faite à proximité de mon immeuble d’habitation.

Et pour l’occasion, ils n’y sont pas allés de main morte, pas moins de 4 gros conteneurs poubelle qui arrivent d’un coup d’un seul, à point nommé. Les riverains ne sont pas habitués à cela, car évidemment ils n’en ont jamais eu à disposition! Ils n’auront que l’embarras du choix, quel conteneur pourront-ils bien choisir pour déposer leurs déchets n’est-ce-pas?

Mais en tout cas, je m’en réjouis pleinement et c’était là tout le sens de ma requête, c’est plus de propreté dans les rues de notre ville et plus de responsabilisation des habitants, les invitant à non plus déposer leurs sacs poubelle sur les trottoirs mais dans les conteneurs prévus à cet effet.

Serge Pugeault se vante constamment de la rapidité de la majorité municipale à entamer la réfection de la Halle du Boulingrin, alors que par le passé ce dossier paraissait au ralenti.

C’est clairement de la mauvaise foi car si Adeline Hazan et son équipe ont eu la possibilité de lancer aussi vite ce dossier, c’est grâce aux travaux d’études réalisés par l’équipe précédente. Il serait bon qu’ils ne l’omettent pas!

M. Pugeault met en cause la lenteur du déblocage de l’aide de l’Etat à la réfection qui était bloquée depuis 1996…C’est aussi objectivement l’une des causes du non avancement du dossier par le passé !

Surtout, c’est la preuve que gouvernements de gauche comme de droite n’avaient pas rempli cet engagement, alors même que Serge Pugeault se répand partout en affirmant que l’enveloppe accordée dans le cadre du plan de relance n’est que le rattrappage de cette promesse non tenue.

Enfin et c’est important de le souligner, c’est Jack Lang qui a classé ce bâtiment pour des raisons politiciennes en 1985, alors que sa qualité architecturale est très largement décriée.

M. Pugeault a la mémoire bien courte et une lecture partiale et partielle de ce dossier, il n’a même pas le souci de la cohérence dans les propos qu’il tient, trop occupé à politiser à outrance et à vouloir discréditer l’Etat et l’Exécutif…

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.

I came across this just now and thought I’d post it.  In a letter to his mother from 1918, Franz Rosenzweig—while reading through Hermann Cohen’s Logic of Pure Cognition—writes

Cohen is insanely hard. I would never have believed that a philosophical book would hold such difficulties for me.  Moreover-whether understanding him is accordingly worthy, is not yet certain for me; I almost believe it is not. But now I have begun it and am reading it through.

Rosenzweig, of course, ends up taking up Cohen’s infinitesimal method (of sorts) in the Star, but I find this passage somewhat comforting.

]]> http://philomtl.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/g-a-cohen-in-memoriam-a-critical-celebration-of-his-life-and-work/ Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:41:16 +0000 j. http://philomtl.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/g-a-cohen-in-memoriam-a-critical-celebration-of-his-life-and-work/

G.A. Cohen in Memoriam: A Critical Celebration of His Life and Work

This Friday, 27 November 2009, 10am – 4pm
McGill University, Old McGill Room, Faculty Club

Programme<http://www.creum.umontreal.ca/spip.php?article1122>:

* Joseph Carens (Toronto) “Motivation and Equality in Cohen”
* Jurgen De Wispelaere (CRÉUM) “Cohen in the Real World? Equality, Justice and Social Institutions”
* Pablo Gilabert (Concordia) “Cohen on Socialism, Equality, and Community”
* Jacob T. Levy (McGill) “Cohen on the Tasks of Political Philosophy”
* William Clare Roberts (McGill) “Analysis Terminated? Towards a Post-Analytical Marxism”
* Daniel Weinstock (CRÉUM) “Cohen and Cohen on Jokes”

Written by Sara Fryd / Illustrations by Emily Tran

“Papa, there’s a spider in the bathroom,” screamed the little boy!   I’m too little to catch it.   Come quick!  I can’t take a bath.  I’m too scared.”

Papa walked down the hall with a plastic container to fetch the spider and toss him out in the garden where he belonged.  He didn’t like spiders much; however, they were one of God’s creatures and had their place here on earth like everyone else.

“I don’t like spiders, although, I am very fond of crickets,” Papa said.  And Erez came running up the hall to the living room clearly jumping for

~ J   O   Y   !!!!

 He had heard Papa’s stories hundreds of times and couldn’t wait to hear them again.  “Papa tell me the story again”, Erez said while climbing into Papa’s lap chattering non-stop like most 5-year olds.  “Tell me the story again, please, please.  Another story about the Israeli Army where you guarded missiles, with bird names in the North.   Can I serve in the Israeli Army when I’m old enough?  Please, Papa please.” 

“That will depend on the Israeli Defense Forces,” Papa winked.

Sitting in his favorite big chair, Papa made a face while scratching his beard, “Okay, I’ll continue if you promise to go take your bath and climb into bed as soon as we are finished.   Mama is very tired after a long day at work, so we have to help out tonight.”

“Yes, yes,” Erez responded immediately.  His dark eyes lit up like fireflies in summer in the mid-western USA from where Papa had emigrated after high school with his family.   He bounced on Papa’s lap till he found that comfortable familiar place to curl up in.

“Me too, me too, giggled Libby.   How come he always gets to sit on your lap and hear stories and I don’t?   I’m almost 5, she smiled!   That radiant little girl smile that manages to throw darts at a father’s heart; usually getting little girls what they want every time.

“I don’t like spiders very much…although…I am very fond of crickets”, Papa began.  “And here’s why”, he continued.  “Wouldn’t you know the Israeli Army always sent me North in the winter and South in the summer, until I transferred to a research & development library in Tel Aviv.”

“Occasionally, I was assigned to guard a Hawk missile site near Safed. Every night a cricket would keep me company. He would chirp, chirp, chirp by rubbing his legs together.  And I would not feel so alone out there in the dark all by myself when I was only nineteen.”

“I named the cricket “Coincident.” For with all the creatures Hashem could have sent me to keep me company, why did he send me a noisy cricket to keep me up when I’d rather be taking a nap. After all, what on earth did I need a cricket for when I had an Uzi?” Papa winked.

Then wrinkling his brow for effect, with two enthralled children sitting in his lap, he continued, “One particularly dark, almost moon less night, I was on guard duty alone, when suddenly…(Papa’s voice got really low and both children jumped), my friend the especially noisy cricket “Coincident” stopped chirping.

I looked at the area on the far side of the cricket and saw a wild cat approaching me.  This cat was about the size of a Florida bobcat.  Almost the size of a small lion.  Big enough to eat me in one gulp!  I didn’t want to fire my Uzi at one of Hashem’s creatures, so I picked up a fist-sized rock and I threw it hard to the ground just left of the bobcat, which ran away very fast towards the Northeast.  Out of sight of the cricket and far away from Papa, Baruch Hashem (Bless God)!  And I’ve been fond of crickets ever since, though I still don’t like spiders very much.”

“Tell it again, tell it again,” the children shouted falling off of Papa’s lap. Libby grabbing the beard to keep from slipping too far.

“Maybe tomorrow night. Right now it’s bath time and there are no spiders in the bathroom, so no more excuses,” Papa explained detaching his beard from one little girl’s fingers and placing her on the floor with one deft hand.

 And two ecstatic children raced each other down the hall laughing till Papa could hear the water splashing; warmly watching while leaning against the wall with a smile that remembered, “The sounds of crickets still make me smile, though the sounds of my children…well, we’ll just have to save that for another bedtime story.”

All rights reserved.  ©2009 by Sara Fryd

Ms. Collins, in “Putting the Fond in Farewell,” says that by announcing that her show’s 25th season will be her last, Oprah Winfrey provided a useful tip in navigating life: Quit while you’re ahead.  Mr. Blow writes “In Defense of New York.”  He says questioning whether New York City can handle the trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is an insult. New Yorkers live with the threat of terrorism every day.  Mr. Cohen, in “What Makes Cities Live,” says wholesale gentrification deadens. The fight for the genuine in the world’s great cities is also a fight for jobs, workers and creativity.  Mr. Herbert addresses “An American Catastrophe,” and says Detroit and its environs are suffering because of policies that resulted in the implosion of crucially important components of America’s manufacturing base.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Few people have spent more time contemplating The Journey of Life than Oprah Winfrey, and on Friday she provided another useful tip in navigating it: Quit while you’re ahead.

At the current moment, this is not necessarily a thought for the masses. Unless something dramatic happens on the economic front, most of us are not going to be able to quit — period.

But the greatest decision a stellar public figure can make is to resist the temptation to keep doing the same thing forever. Even if the fans don’t want you to stop.

One day you’re the champion of the world, the people’s choice. Then, next thing you know, you’re losing a unanimous decision to Trevor Berbick. Or putting “Dictator for Life” on your business cards.

We are talking here about a timely and well-planned leave-taking — like George Washington, refusing a third term. Or the end of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

This is not to be confused with its evil twin sister, the Abrupt Rogue Departure. You cannot get yourself elected governor, serve for two and a half years, disappear for the better part of another and then announce you’re quitting because nobody likes a lame duck. Well, it turns out you can, but it is a really, really bad idea.

“I love this show. This show has been my life. And I love it enough to know when it’s time to say goodbye,” Winfrey told her fans tearily. She’s not actually leaving until the end of season 25, nearly two years from now. Talk about long-term planning.

However, if she really wanted to drive home how much her viewers were going to be losing, she might have picked a more inspiring lead-in to her announcement than a 20-minute interview with Ray Romano. (Along with a promo for an upcoming interview with a woman whose husband was addicted to porn.)

It’s been quite a run for the Oprah brand. The über-guests, the good works. The Obama campaign. Her forays into books (we will really miss the book thing) and spirituality (not so much). She never coasted.

Her next step seems to involve a new cable TV channel. But since Winfrey has — I believe this is an exact figure — a trilliondy-billion dollars, she probably has more than one option.

Her audience, of course, doesn’t want her to move on. Americans are congenitally attached to too much of a good thing: “Law & Order.” Professional sports. Christmas. (The national calendar seems to be divided into two seasons: Baseball and Holiday Shopping.)

The idea that anything popular should stay around until we turn green at the sight of it is not, of course, confined to our culture. The British have Tony Blair and The Spice Girls Reunion Tour.

We do hate change. Even though we know that our demand for more of the same is a treacherous road that will eventually lead to Sharon Stone in “Basic Instinct 2.”

Nowhere is the need for the graceful exit more apparent than in our politics. This week Senator Robert Byrd turned 92. He has been in office for more than 50 years. That’s an all-time record for Congress. In fact, it is probably a record for every deliberative body since Athens in the Age of Pericles.

To be fair, this was not entirely his idea. The Democratic Party begged Byrd to stay and hang onto a seat that will probably fall to the opposition when he leaves. But still, this is not a record that we want to encourage other people to aspire to break.

Nothing becomes a politician like a timely departure. If Rudy Giuliani had quit after 2001, we’d still think of him as America’s Mayor instead of the worst presidential candidate in the history of the world.

Imagine how much better Joe Lieberman would look if he had called it a day after the vice presidential run. Or Ross Perot if he had stopped in 1992.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg hasn’t even begun his controversial third term and already he seems to have shrunk to a pocketsize.

And what a revered figure Ralph Nader would be if he had called it quits back in the 1990s. He’d be an icon — the pioneer of consumerism who had the corporation’s number from the get-go, instead of the guy who robbed Al Gore of the presidency and then just wouldn’t stop talking. He could have spent the last 15 years giving inspiring lectures to college students and now it would be time for the comeback tour. People would be flocking to hear him explain how the structure of the American economy failed its people in last year’s collapse.

By the way, you can have a comeback tour if you retire gracefully. Just not one every single year.

Here’s Mr. Blow:

Representative John Shadegg of Arizona really knows how to put on a show.

Earlier this month, he used a live baby as part of a quasi-ventriloquist act on the House floor. Creepy? Yes. Still, we let it slide.

But he doesn’t get two passes in a row. Monday, he took a swipe at Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City for saying that the city could handle the security for the trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Shadegg sniped, “I saw the mayor of New York today said ‘We’re tough. We can do it.’ Well mayor, how are you going to feel when it’s your daughter that’s kidnapped, at school, by a terrorist?”

Say what you will about New Yorkers, but question our toughness, you will not.

Whether a civil or military trial would provide the best chances of securing a conviction while simultaneously signaling to the world a righting of America’s moral compass is a fair debate. But questioning whether New York City can handle the trial is an insult.

(By the way, what’s with this business of the mayor’s daughter being kidnapped? It sounds like the plot of a Jackie Chan movie.)

We New Yorkers live with the threat of terrorism every day — on our trains, in our high-rises, in our plazas. But we’ve learned to cope. Not by being afraid, but by being vigilant. Bringing Mohammed to Manhattan isn’t going to move the needle much.

A police spokesman told Reuters that “eight terrorism plots against the city have been scuttled since 2001, including plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and the retaining wall at ground zero.”

Yet the city didn’t blink. Schools still opened, trains still ran and the Naked Cowboy still serenaded gaggles of grown women who giggled like schoolgirls.

So Mr. Congressman, how many terror plots have been squashed in your district? Take your time. I’ll wait.

We love this city, and nothing and no one will make us afraid to be in it. We refuse to be cowed by cowards — not by those hiding in the Hindu Kush or by those hyperventilating in the halls of Congress.

And what galls us most is having watched for years as politicians like Shadegg used fear-mongering about 9/11 and the threat of attacks as a political tool.

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani used it to sidestep the extreme racial divisiveness he fostered in the city. Former President George W. Bush used it as a Trojan horse to ravage our civil liberties. Dick Cheney is still using it to shield his transgressions.

Let us be clear: The fear tactics that work in the hinterlands don’t work here.

We rose from the ashes of the Twin Towers. We don’t need a puppeteering politician from Phoenix lecturing us about being tough in the face of terror.

Nice alliteration.  He left out “pusillanimous,” though.  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

A couple of blocks and your life changes in this city. New York is worldly but fiercely local. Another borough is as remote as another country. Europe, just across the pond, can seem closer than across town.

Not so long ago, my office was moved a couple of blocks, a little west and a little south, from 43rd Street to Renzo Piano’s handsome light-filled building between 40th and 41st Streets. It proved to be a change of worlds.

The former headquarters was trapped in the neon tentacles of Times Square, a once seedy part of town re-imagined as the tourist-filled set for a movie called “New York,” a place where people from out of town loiter six-abreast gazing at the flashing lights while New Yorkers try to dodge the phalanxes of flesh.

The new premises, as I’ve gradually learned, placed us just within the garment district, an area where zoning laws have protected apparel manufacturing space and so held off the developers who would otherwise have turned clothes factories into condos and created yet another gentrified district bereft of seediness, tawdriness, community and that strange high-low alchemy essential to any great city’s mystery and charge.

I’ve come to love the dull, solid mid-rise brick buildings of the garment district, a universe away from the high-rise glass-and-neon of that other country two blocks away where Planet Hollywood and M&M’s World strut their stuff.

It’s wonderful to wander far from the movie theaters (or so it seems) past emporiums of buttons, palaces of thread, empires of zippers, long pink gowns, canary yellow chiffon skirts (on sale for $10), trimmings, lace, beads, ribbons, fake pearls, glittering belts, shoulder pads and ruffles — not to mention “Spandex World,” and “Leather Impact.” Stores have names like “Joyce Button and Trims.” They look like they’ve been there forever, or at least the American version of forever.

The pleasure, I think, comes from the sense of something still purposeful and authentic, woven by the years — a slither of town between 35th and 40th Streets where designers, manufacturers, small retailers, showroom owners and others interact and create, and where money, big money, has not swept all in its path.

The area still has pungency. It has not surrendered to the great anaesthetizing march of modernity. It has not chased its working class to faraway suburbs. It has not become a hollow movie-set version of an authentic place — a “garment district” cleansed to quaintness, shaped for the well-to-do, complete with guides relating the rich history of immigrants and their sewing machines.

Unlike Paris — where the horse butchers and the tripe restaurants and the hammering of artisans and the garlic-whiff of the morning Métro are long gone — New York preserves, in small enclaves, its shabby splendor. Its center, unlike London, has not become a near-exclusive preserve of the super-rich.

No — miracle of miracles — people here still buy and use sewing machines! A million square feet or so are devoted to garment manufacturing. The jobs have not all vanished to Bangladesh.

It’s funny how we crave the authentic, the unspoiled, the genuine — the un-globalized and un-homogenized and un-gentrified — only to destroy them. And then, as if in remorse, attempt to create unthreatening Disney versions of the authentic, the unspoiled and the genuine. It’s funny how the rich, tired of grilled tuna or Chilean sea bass, weary of New York generic (never simmered, always seared), want to eat like the poor, while the poor just want to be rich.

Speaking of food, the move has also brought deliverance from theme restaurants and chains to a garment-district diversity as wondrous as the ostrich feathers and sequined robes in store windows. Let’s face it: Dives are the last redoubt of genuine fare in New York.

I’ve found a Balkan cellar whose cevapcici (grilled lozenges of minced meat) take me back to Sarajevo days; a deli whose tongue sandwiches remind me of the tongue my mother prepared; a Chinese hole-in-the-wall with heartwarming oxtail on rice; and a Szechuan joint whose duck tongues on a bed of scallion, dressed in a scallion pesto, are a little miracle of many-layered succulence — the reddish-brown Szechuan pepper imparting a numbing-tingling heat, the duck tongues crunchy (about the consistency of frogs’ legs) and gelatinous and looking, in the pesto-green sauce, a little like asparagus tips. If you wish, you may follow that with a fish-head (carp) stew in spiced chili broth that’s hot enough to ease your eyes from their sockets.

Two blocks away they’re eating burgers and Bubba Gump shrimp and never dreaming of this other land just around the corner. You don’t have to travel far to change countries; and you can travel across the world and still find yourself in the globalized mall of bright lights, bland foods and brands.

I’m grateful for my New York journeys and for the zoning laws that make them possible. Wholesale gentrification deadens. There’s an untamed thread that binds button stores and stir-fried intestines with chili: They’re genuine. The fight for the genuine in the world’s great cities is also a fight for jobs, workers and creativity.

It’s sort of telling that Mr. Cohen didn’t seem to be aware of that “other world” a couple of blocks from his old office.  Canalized much, sir?  Here’s Mr. Herbert, writing from Detroit:

In many ways, it’s like a ghost town. It’s eerily quiet. Driving around in the middle of the afternoon, in a city that once was among the most productive on the planet, you see very little traffic, minimal commercial activity, hardly any pedestrians.

What you’ll see are endless acres of urban ruin, block after block and mile after mile of empty and rotting office buildings, storefronts, hotels, apartment buildings and private homes. It’s a scene of devastation and disintegration that stuns the mind, a major American city that still is home to 900,0000 people but which looks at times like a cross between postwar Berlin and the ruin of an ancient civilization.

Detroit was the arsenal of democracy in World War II and the incubator of the American middle class. It was the city that taught mass production to the rest of the world. It was a place that made cars, trucks and other tangible products, not derivatives. And it was the architect of the quintessentially American idea of putting people to work and paying them a decent wage. It’s frightening to think seriously about what we’ve allowed to happen to this city and what is now happening to the middle class and the American economy as a whole.

I was in Detroit with Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in labor issues. He grew up in Detroit and his love for the city and its people are palpable, as is his grief for the horrors the city has endured.

The popular narrative of what happened to Detroit contains a great deal of truth but its focus is too narrow to account for the astonishing decline of this former industrial colossus. Yes, there were the riots of 1967, and white flight; and political leadership that was not just shortsighted but at times embarrassingly incompetent and corrupt. And, yes, the auto industry was a case study in self-destruction.

But as Mr. Shaiken points out, Detroit was still viable enough for the Republican Party to hold its convention here in 1980, when it nominated Ronald Reagan. And it was not the riots, but the devastating recession of the early ’80s that really knocked the city senseless. “That’s when the place really cracked,” said Mr. Shaiken, “and that was about aggressive globalization and the lack of an industrial policy, not the riots.”

Detroit and its environs are suffering the agonies of the economic damned because of policies, crafted at the highest national and corporate levels, that resulted in the implosion of crucially important components of America’s manufacturing base. Those decisions have had a profound effect on the fortunes not just of Detroit, or even Michigan, but the entire U.S. economy.

“We’ve been living with the illusion that manufacturing — making things — is so 20th century,” said Mr. Shaiken, “and that we could succeed by concentrating, for example, on complex financial instruments while abandoning the industrial base that sustained so many American families.”

The idea that the fallout from the wrongheaded economic concepts of the past 30 or 40 years could be contained, with the damage limited to the increasingly troubled urban areas while sparing prosperous suburbia, has now proved as phony as Bernie Madoff’s fortune. Americans, whether they live in big cities, suburban towns or rural areas, need jobs, and when those jobs are eliminated (for whatever reasons — technological advances, globalization) without being replaced, the national economy is guaranteed at some point to hit a wall.

Professor Shaiken and I drove past vast lots filled with rubble and garbage and weeds, past the old Michigan Central Terminal, which was once Detroit’s answer to New York’s Grand Central Terminal but which has long since been abandoned; past a onetime Cadillac manufacturing plant that is now an empty lot.

We stopped at an old Ford plant and stood in a stiff, cold wind, reading a plaque put up by the Michigan Historical Commission: “Here at his Highland Park plant, Henry Ford began the mass production of automobiles on a moving assembly line. By 1915 Ford built a million Model T’s. In 1925 over 9,000 were assembled in a single day. Mass production soon moved from here to all phases of American industry and set the pattern of abundance for 20th century living.”

Professor Shaiken’s grandfather, Philip Chapman, took a job at the Highland Park plant in 1914, earning five dollars a day, and worked on production at Ford until his retirement in the mid-1950s.

We’re at a period no less significant to the U.S. than Mr. Chapman’s early years at Ford. We need a revitalized industrial policy, including the creation of whole new industries, if American families are to prosper in the coming decades. If there is any sense of urgency about this in the hearts and minds of our corporate and government leaders, I’ve missed it.

Stateam asa si ma uitam in urma, nu foarte mult in urma… Am ajuns la concluzia ca am inceput sa debitez diverse chestii relativ ciudate. Doar pentru ca trebuie. Cam aiurea… Sunt destul de putine lucruri pentru care inca mai simt ca merita sa-mi dau silinta. Lipsa mea de interes pare insa sa fie inteleasa de univers. Nu ma cearta, nu ma pedepseste nimeni.

Vad, de altfel, ca am ajuns sa fac unele lucruri destul de inconstant. Ca sa reformulez intr-o maniera mai potrivita: am ajuns sa nu mai fac unele lucruri. Ei bine, daca voi lipsi din peisaj nu presupune ca ceva rau se va fi intamplat. Poate din contra. Posibil sa nu respect ce zic, probabil sa o fac.

Cohen aduce in seara asta linistea si poate curand si vise ca cele atat de frumoase din noptile trecute.

Va salut!

this actually happened: Wir sind ein Volk (We are one people).

Skepptic shares some moving images and video about the 20th anniversary of Der Mauerfall, the fall of the Berlin Wall. I visited ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ in May and I wish I had stayed to see the toppling of the dominos and the symbolic fall of the Berlin wall.

Whenever I think of the cold war, I think of this Cohen cover by Jennifer Warnes.

Programme de la Rencontre Annuelle du G.E.R.M

Le Statut avancé à l’épreuve de l’Union pour la Méditerranée

RABAT – MAROC

4-5 Décembre 2009

Vendredi 4 décembre 2009 :

 8 h 30 min : Enregistrement

 9 h 00 min : ouverture des travaux

 Allocution d’ouverture

M. André AZOULAY, Président de la Fondation Anna Lindh pour le Dialogue interculturel et Conseiller de sa Majesté le Roi Mohamed VI.

Mme Latifa AKHARBACH, Secrétaire d’Etat au Ministère des affaires Etrangères et de la Coopération

M. Ulrich Storck, Représentant résident de la Fondation Friedrich Ebert Stiftung au Maroc

M. Habib EL MALKI, Président du Groupement d’Etudes et de Recherches sur la Méditerranée

 Rapport Introductif

M. Driss KHROUZ, Secrétaire Général du G.E.R.M

 Séance 1 : Président M. Aziz HASBI, Chercheur Universitaire

 Axe 1 : Le Statut avancé et l’Union pour la Méditerranée : Quelles interactions et quelles perspectives communes ?

 10 h 20 min :

M.Nabil DHOGHI, Directeur des Affaires Européennes au Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et de la Coopération,  « Le Statut Avancé, la Politique de Voisinage et l’Union pour la Méditerranée au service d’un même dessein ».

 10 h 45 min :

M. Jérôme CASSIERS, Chef de Section au sein de la Délégation  de la Commission européenne à Rabat,  « Le Statut Avancé : Perspectives  Maroc UE »

11 h 10 min.

Pause café

11 h 30 min :

Débat

 12 h 20 min :

Denis AKAGÜL, maître de conférence à l’université de Lille-I et chercheur au laboratoire Médee (Mécanismes économiques et dynamique des espaces européens). 
 « Vertus et limites de l’intégration économique ».

 12 h 45 min :

M. Med BEN AYAD, Secrétaire Général du Centre National du Commerce Extérieur : « Statut Avancé : Quel convergence ? »

Perla COHEN, Professeur à l’Université de Toulouse : « Education,  Formation : Repères et perspectives ».

13 h 10 min :

Débat

13 h 35 min : Clôture de la séance

13 h 40 :

Déjeuner

Reprise de travaux

Séance 2 : Président Jaouad KARDOUDI, Président de l’association IMRI

15 H 00

Mme Perla COHEN, Professeur à l’Université de Toulouse : « Education,  Formation : Repères et perspectives ».

 15 h 25

15 h 50 min :

M. Moha MARGHI, Secrétaire Générale au Ministère d’Agriculture : « Les Négociations Agricole dans le cadre du Statut avancé ».

 16 h 15 min

Ivan MARTIN, Professeur et Chercheur Universitaire en Espagne et chargé des questions médit : « Des nouveaux instruments financiers pour un nouveau statut avancé?”,

16 h 40 min

Débat

 17 h 15 min : Clôture de la Séance

 17 h 30

Pause café

Samedi 5 décembre 2009 

 9 h 00 min :

Pause café

9 h 30min :

Ouverture des travaux

 Président de Séance: M. M. LOUKILI,  Professeur de Relations Internationales à la Faculté Mohamed V, Rabat.

Axe 2 : Les politiques et les mécanismes de mise en œuvre du Statut Avancé.

 9 h 50 min :

Henri REGNAULT,  « crise de régulation et construction Euromed: chance ou handicap ? »

10 h 20 min :

Mme Santonja MAYOR, Francisca,  Conseiller Exécutif  au Secrétariat d’Etat des relations avec l’Union européenne: « le rôle des collectivités locales dans le cadre du Statut avancé »

 11 h 00 min :

Mme Nezha ALAOUI, Chef de division aux Affaires étrangères et  M. Larbi JAIDI, Chercheur à la Faculté Med V : « le Statut Avancé, un Nouveau Régime de Coopération Euro méditerranéenne ? »

 11 h 30 min :

Samim AKGÖNÜL, Historien et politologue, « L’Union pour la méditerranée et la Turquie : entre méfiances et espoirs » 

 12 h 00 min :

Représentant de la  CGEM, en cours de confirmation

12 h 30 min :

Débat

13 h 30 min :

Clôture des travaux de la Rencontre

13 h 40 min 

Déjeuner

 ****************************************************************************

Rapport de synthèse : M.Driss EL ISSAOUI

Tocmai am realizat subit [a.k.a m-a lovit inspiratia] ca nu am mai postat nimic nou…. de un an, si cum neuronii mei cer sa fie asternuti in cuvinte pixelate am hotarat, spre fericirea mea si prea nefericirea altora, sa mai bag niste aberatii tipice Issel Revlis pe teava tunului…. si sa trag!

Asadar asa cum ziceam, obsesiile lunii noiembrie:

1.Niste sosete roz absolut dementiale, pe care trebuie sa le procur cat se poate de repede, inainte ca piciorusele de panda sa imi degere din cauza frigului si a zapezii inexistente care ar trebui sa vina cu luna decembrie.

2. Housareala urmatoare:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRE6ssTulcI

Desi genul meu de muzica nu include aceste manifestatii, melodia asta m-a obsedat de vreo doua saptamani incoace…. si sincera sa fiu, pare ca se va afla o perioada lunga la categoria obsesii.

3. Fiind noiembrie, obsesiile mele au hotarat sa se rasfranga si asupra Torei Amos, astfel pentru duminicile ploiase:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XN17rDMGs74

Despre melodia asta se va auzi si prin decembrie

4. J….. despre el se va auzi si peste un an :X

Tinand cont ca toamna se pare ca eu revin la viata, iar obsessile mele se trezesc dupa hibernarea calduroasa de sub valurile de caldura ale verii, astept ca si altii sa  se bucure de zilele ruginii ale toamnei.

…. Issel

Want to start a fight?  Choose this surname for your son.

Thanks to Photoquilty for suggesting Cohen as Name of the Day.

With kids answering to names like Riley and Madison, it might be hard to see why Cohen courts controversy.

Except.

As Nameberry’s Pamela Redmond Satran wrote in her Daily Beast article last May, Cohen isn’t just any surname.  It’s from the Hebrew kohen – priest.  That’s more than an etymology.  The Kohanim are considered direct descendants of Aaron, big brother to Moses and first High Priest of the Israelites.  For generations, the Kohanim performed specific duties and formed  a priestly class within Judaism.  Even today, you’ll find communities where the Kohanim observe specific rules and receive certain privileges in return.  Lest you think that’s just an old tradition, it turns out that genetic testing bears out the idea that the Kohanim share a common ancestry.

Not every Kohanim is a Cohen and not every Cohen is a priest.  Names like Kaplan, Conklin, Kahn, Coen, Kogan, Cahen and Caen have all been used as equivalents.  George M. Cohan was Irish Catholic.  Koen is a diminutive for the Dutch and German equivalents of Conrad.  It’s perfectly possible to argue that your boy Cohen has nuthin’ to do with the Torah.

Plenty of parents do.  In 2004, Cohen entered the US Top 1000 at #650.  By 2008, he stood at #356 – a quick climb.  (Though even at #356, fewer than 1,000 newborns received the name.)  Koen ranked #877 is 2008.

If you’re flipping through the phone book to find a baby name, Cohen seems like a logical companion to Carter, Carson and Cooper, as well as names like Colton and Cody.  And, of course, all of those names and more are sometimes subject to respelling with a K.  (I’m guessing that very few of the 238 Koens born last year are wearing the name as a nod to their German or Dutch heritage.)

Factor in our continued preference for two-syllable, ends-in-n names for boys, and Cohen was almost sure to surface.  The Cohen family – including Adam Brody’s appealing character Seth Cohen – on TV’s The O.C. fueled his rise.

To complicate matters, plenty of popular choices are heavy with religious symbolism.  Keeping company with Cohen in the US Top 1000 are:

• Nevaeh (#34) and Heaven (#275), both for girls;
• Trinity (#70 for girls), Genesis (#95 for girls) and Messiah (#704) for boys;
• Zion (#699 for girls and #233 for boys).

That’s without considering virtue names, saints’ names and names culled from obscure Biblical figures.  You could argue that calling your kid Messiah is a heavier burden than the possibly-priestly Cohen.

But why bother?  If Cohen appeals, surely you could choose Colton or Nico or Colby or Kohl.  (I’m a big fan of Crosby myself.)

Odds are that parents picking Cohen mean no disrespect by choosing the name.  Some probably like the idea that their son’s name carries a religious connotation.

Assuming you’re reading this before signing Cohen on your child’s birth certificate in permanent marker, think twice.  It seems unfair to your child to saddle him with a name that – rightly or not – will be viewed by some as an insult.

2006 Kış Olimpiyatları ikincisi Sasha Cohen, Ocak ayından düzenlenen 2010 ABD Şampiyonasına hazır olacağına düşünüyor.

Sakatlık nedeniyle 2009 Trophée Eric Bompard ve 2009 Skate America yarışmalarından çekilen Cohen, “Yarışmalara girmemekle iyi ettim. Artık ağrım-sızım ya da başka bir sıkıntım yok. Şimdi kaybolan zamanı telâfi etmekle meşgulüm” dedi.

2006 Dünya Şampiyonasından sonra yarışmalara girmeye ara veren Cohen, 2010 Kış Olimpiytalarına katılabilmek amacıyla üç buçuk yıllık aradan sonra pistlere geri dönmeye karar vermişti.

.

.

Bu amaçla yazın yoğun bir hazırlık dönemi geçiren Sasha Cohen, ISU Grand Prix yarışmalarından Trophée Bompard ve Skate America’da yarışacaktı. Paris’teki yarışmadan birkaç gün önce sağ baldırında tendon iltihaplanmasına bağlı sakatlık nedeniyle yarışmadan çekildiğini açıklayan Cohen, Skate America öncesinde de bir açıklama yaparak satatlığının devam ettiğini ve bu yarışmadan da çekildiğini duyurmuştu.

Skate America’ya Cohen’in Emily Hughes katılmıştı.

25 yaşındaki Cohen, “ABD Şampiyonasında en iyi şekilde kaymak için iki ayın yeterli olacağına inanıyorum” dedi.

Cohen, katıldığı son yarışma olan 206 Dünya Şampiyonasında bronz madalya kazanmıştı.

ABD, 2010 Kış Olimpiyatlarında Bayanlrda iki patenciyle temsil edecek. Bu iki patenci, ABD Şampiyonasında belirlenecek.

.

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.

Cohen (“Visual Color & Color Mixture”, see the bibliography) did something very interesting. In fact, he did something useful which I had never seen before.

Although this post uses some matrices which we saw in the color posts, I think this can stand on its own: you need not have read the color posts. But if you are specifically interested in color, or in Cohen’s work, this post is very relevant.

He was trying to describe how to find a transition matrix between two given data matrices. This will come in handy — very handy! — whenever people give the alleged result of an unspecified linear transformation of a data matrix.

On p. 93, he wrote

D T = C in general

F T = A in particular

with

.

Because D’D (that is, ) is invertible, we infer that D and C are taller than wide, like the A matrix… like our usual data or design matrix X.

We also infer that T is a small matrix: its size is cxc, where c is the number of columns of D. D and C are the same size.

I do have to point out that in his equation (and his notation)

D T = C,

T is an attitude matrix! I will change that. (Trust me: you want me to change that.)

Since we have both XYZ (i.e. 1931 xyz bar) and RGB (1931 rgb bar) tables, and since they are supposed to be related by the transformation matrix T31…

… we should try the idea embodied in that equation for T. Assuming that there is a transition matrix T, let J and K stand for the XYZ and RGB matrices respectively.

As usual, let me use 20 nm intervals instead of the published 5 nm intervals. We have

In case you have not read the color posts, all I am saying is that J and K and T31 are given matrices, and T31 is supposed to be a transition matrix between J and K.

We do know — or take it as given — that for the transition matrix T31, old is XYZ ~ K, so let me write

K’ = T J’

That says T is a transition matrix which, applied to each column vector of J’, delivers the corresponding column of K’.

Transpose:

K = J T’

and then pretend exists (even though J is rectangular)

and then substitute the appropriate pseudo-inverse:

.

(The inappropriate pseudo-inverse would use JJ’ instead — which cannot be of full rank, given the assumed shape of J, hence cannot be invertible.)

That equation defined the transpose T’, but here’s T:

Recall the given T31:

By doing it my way, I constructed the counterpart to T31, which is the published transition matrix between XYZ and RGB (1931) with XYZ considered the “old” basis.

T and T31 are very close, but not the same.

Even if I used the full tables, at 5 nm intervals, we would not get T31.

First, I am certain that if there were a transition matrix T, then we must have computed it. Since this computation did not yield T31, I infer that T31 is not the transition matrix.

Second, is T the transition matrix? We should apply T to the appropriate table and see what we get. We had assumed

K’ = T J’, or equivalently

K = J T’

so let’s compute a counterpart to K, namely Q = J T’:

and compare it to K, via Q – K:

(I keep using pictures for things like that, namely scientific notation, just because it’s easier than editing the LaTeX.)

The largest entry in absolute value is… 0.000069765 . The three columns of Q look like this:

Pretty small, and pretty random, but still not really zero. Well, maybe it wouldn’t be. Let’s try our magic formula on J and Q, since they are related by the transition matrix T. From

,

I compute what I call t’:

,

and then display the transpose of the transpose, t” = t:

Recall T:

So. That equation for T’ does recover the transition matrix if there is one. The discrepancy between T and T31 is real.

Maybe I’m making too big a deal of this. I infer that the XYZ and RGB tables do not span exactly the same subspace. They almost do, but not quite.

To be more explicit: the 1931 XYZ (xbar, ybar, zbar) and RGB (rbar, gbar, bbar) tables are not exactly related by any transition matrix whatsoever, although the published T31 is close to being one for them.

I have found a marvelous example — disappointing as a published result but marvelous as a bad example — where the discrepancy is significant. I expect to show it in another post, soon.

We’ve been looking at the computation in one way: if there is a transition matrix T such that

K’ = T J’

then

.

What if there is no such transition matrix T? We can still define T by that equation, and compute (still assuming J is of full rank, with more rows than columns), but what are we getting, if T itself does not exist as a transition matrix?

That is, what if we compute T, and find that

?

Well, this will be clearer in the next post, but…. That equation for T’ looks an awful lot like the normal equations for a least-squares fit.

What I will illustrate in the next post is that generates a transition matrix to the subspace spanned by J. That is, T is a transition matrix — any invertible matrix is! — but it relates J to a subspace other than (the one spanned by) K.

(In our case, we had 21 observations; the 3 columns of J and of K define 3D subspaces of . Those two 3D subspaces are almost the same, but not exactly.)

Let me try to explain here it without a good (I mean, bad) example. If J and K span the same subspace, then any one column of K (think of it as the dependent variable y) can be written as a linear combination of the columns of J (think of it as the X matrix).

But if J and K do not span the same space, then the best we can do is to find that linear combination (call it yhat !) of columns of X which is as close to y as possible.

They really are examples of y and yhat and X.

And what is T’ ? Well, if we write it with y and X…

we might recognize that as in ordinary least squares.

Let me show you that, while providing another example of the utility of the pseudo-inverse.

The derivation of the normal equations for ordinary least squares is fairly complicated, if only because it involves the derivative of a matrix. But the pseudo-inverse would let us recover the equations themselves.

Deriving them is one thing; recovering the form of them once we know they exist is another.

We write our model (this is a quick & dirty recollection of the answer, not a derivation):

.

(I guess I have to talk about that. True is . But I write y instead of yhat, as though we have equality rather than a projection onto a subspace.)

We pretend that X is invertible, and write

.

Since X is not invertible, but X’X is (by assumption X is of full rank with more rows than columns), we replace the non-existent inverse by the pseudo-inverse and write

.

The real derivation gave us that very answer. Once I know that, I never need to compare them again. I have a plausibility argument that gives me the known right answer.

This is analagous to confirming in the previous color post, among others, that if I compute

then I have a dual (or reciprocal or biorthogonal) basis E such that

E’A = I.

In that case, I prefer to verify it computationally every time.

Incidentally, this trickery with the pseudo-inverse would also generate a true result if I had started with yhat instead of y — it is true that , but it’s not very useful because we don’t know yhat!

You might have noticed that corresponds, algebraically, to a column of T’. Asking if the first column of K is a linear combination of all the columns of J gives us the first column of T’; asking if the ith column of K is a linear combination of all the columns of J gives us the ith column of T’. This, too, will be in the next related post.

Summary

Given two data matrices J and K, tall and thin, we can define and compute

.

If the individual observations are in fact related by a transition matrix M, so that

K’ = M J’,

then our computed T is M:

T = M.

This is pretty slick. Any time someone hands us some data and the alleged result of applying an unspecified linear transformation to it — we can find that linear transformation if it exists, or demonstrate that it does not exist (in which case, they goofed).

And if there is no such matrix M? Well, it’s simple enough: if there is no such M — and J and K are both of full rank — then our computed T must be something else, so we do not have equality:

.

That’s all it takes for us to know that there is no transition matrix M between J’ and K’. If there were, it would be T, but that didn’t work.

(That’s if J and K are both of full rank; if only one is not, then one of J’J or K’K is actually not invertible — as JJ’ and KK’ are not invertible — and T can only be computed in one direction. I expect that T is not invertible if J and K are not both of full rank.)

And when there is no transition matrix M, we nevertheless get a transition matrix T, but it’s between J’ and Q’ = T J’.

I will freely confess that I did not know any part of this before I read Cohen: neither that we could find the transition matrix so easily; nor what we were finding if it were not a transition matrix.

(Cohen implicitly assumes that there exists a transition M; he does not discuss what happens if there isn’t one.)

Next post on this topic, a numerical illustration.

The following blog post is an edited version of a piece I wrote just before the release of Brüno last July and just after stepping down as a teacher from the private Christian school I worked at during the ‘08-’09 school year. I’ll be posting the piece, which was originally entitled “Real Men Aren’t Gay: Homophobia, Sexism & the Current State of Masculinities,” over the next several days in multiple parts (it’s kind of long).

(Very important disclaimer: I’m not suggesting you run to the video store to rent this movie!)

Part 1:

It’s crude. It’s graphic. It’s beyond politically incorrect. And it’s bound to make just about anyone extremely uncomfortable. Yet, Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen’s most recent movie, due out on DVD later this week, may be one of the most important movies of the year.

Frankly, I don’t even find Brüno that funny. On a strictly comedic level, he doesn’t hold a candle to Cohen’s other two characters, Borat and (still my favorite) Ali G. But to evaluate Cohen’s work strictly in terms of its comedic value is to overlook its deeper agenda.

Sure, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan was arguably the funniest movie of 2006, but the film’s real strength was in its ability to expose the latent bigotries of American public life. And Brüno’s no exception: Behind all of its offensive humor, the film succeeds in exposing the deep-seated hatred for homosexuals in this country.

Having worked as a teacher at a Christian high school, an environment in which otherwise concealed hate is often embraced, if not lauded, I am inclined to say that of all the latent forms of hatred that live on in this country, none are as widespread and vitriolic as that currently harbored for homosexuals.

While Cohen doesn’t exactly “prove” this to be the case with Brüno—though I think he comes close—he goes beyond a simple illustration or a mere confirmation of hatred, and it’s this move which accounts for the true genius of his movie and his comedy in general.

Though perhaps capable of alarming us on some visceral level, simple illustrations and confirmations of hate leave the more important question of why we hate in the first place completely unanswered and often present hate as a whimsical emotion altogether devoid of meaning. But whether our hate is for homosexuals, Muslims, Americans or ponies, it always carries meaning, and Cohen, it seems to me, understands this (the nature of hate) as well as anyone in Hollywood today…

Bobo wants us to “Meet John Thune.”  He says the junior senator from South Dakota has conservative roots but is pragmatic at the surface, and may be a strong Republican candidate in 2012.  In “Of Fruit Flies and Drones” Mr. Cohen says President Obama has shown a quiet predilection for drone warfare, but the U.S. should not be targeting people for killing without a public debate.  In “Free to Lose” Mr. Krugman says with long-term unemployment at its highest levels since the 1930s and on the rise, the U.S. should consider policies that address job growth directly.  Here’s Bobo:

Some days the Republican Party seems to be going crazy. Its public image is often shaped by people who appear to have gone into government because they saw it as a steppingstone to talk radio.

But deep in the bowels of the G.O.P., there are serious people having quiet conversations. The people holding these conversations created and admired Bob McDonnell’s perfectly executed Virginia gubernatorial campaign. And now as they look to the future of their party, and who might lead it in 2012, the name John Thune keeps popping up.

As you may or may not know, Thune is the junior senator from South Dakota, the man who beat Tom Daschle in an epic campaign five years ago. The first thing everybody knows about him is that he is tall (6 feet 4 inches), tanned (in a prairie, sun-chapped sort of way) and handsome (John McCain jokes that if he had Thune’s face he’d be president right now). If you wanted a Republican with the same general body type and athletic grace as Barack Obama, you’d pick Thune.

The second thing people say about him is that he is unfailingly genial, modest and nice. He grew up in Murdo, S.D., population 612. His father was a Naval aviator in World War II and a genuine war hero. He was called back home after the war to work in the family hardware store and went on to become an educator, as did his wife.

John was a high school basketball star and possesses idyllic small-town manners, like the perfect boy in a Thornton Wilder play. He appears to be untouched by cynicism. In speeches and interviews, he is straightforward, intelligent and earnest. He sometimes seems to have emerged straight into the 21st century from a more wholesome time.

After high school, he attended Biola University, a small Christian college outside of Los Angeles. He then got an M.B.A. from the University of South Dakota and has spent his adult life ascending — as a Congressional staffer, South Dakota Republican Party chairman, the state railroad director, a member of the U.S. House, and now the Senate.

His positions on the issues are unremarkable. He is down-the-line conservative on social, economic and foreign policy matters. What’s notable is the way he talks about the issues and jumps off from them.

He is a gracious and ecumenical legislator, not a combative one. When you ask him to mention authors he likes, he mentions C.S. Lewis and Jeff Shaara, not political polemicists. The first person who told me I had to write a column about Thune was a liberal Democratic senator who really likes the guy.

Thune also possesses the favored Republican profile du jour: conservative at the roots but pragmatic at the surface. Like McDonnell, nobody can question Thune’s conservative bona fides. As a result, he doesn’t have to talk about them. Instead, he prefers to talk about what he calls the “economic cluster” of issues: job creation, balanced budgets and small-business-led growth.

He doesn’t have radical plans to cut the federal leviathan. He just wants to restrain the growth of government to bring deficits down. He doesn’t have ambitions to restructure the tax code. He just wants to lift burdens on small business.

He says his prairie background has given him a preference for small companies and local government. When he criticizes the Democrats, it is for mixing big government with big business: the bailouts of Wall Street, the subsidies to the big auto and energy corporations. His populism is not angry. He doesn’t rail against the malefactors of wealth. But it’s there, a celebration of the small and local over the big and urban.

Republican pros are attracted to Thune because he could rally the hard-core conservatives without scaring away the suburbanites. His weakness is that he’s never really worked outside of government, and he’s almost never shown a maverick side.

At the moment, Republicans are riding an emotional wave. Karl Rove had a piece in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal that captures the mood: Obama is being defined as a liberal. Independents are fleeing. The political tide is shifting.

That overstates things. Obama remains the most talented political figure of the age. After health care passes, he will pivot and pick some fights with his own party over spending. He’ll solidify his standing with independents, and if the economy recovers, he could go into his re-election with as much momentum as Ronald Reagan enjoyed in 1984.

Republicans are still going to have to do root-and-branch renovation if they hope to provide compelling answers to issues like middle-class economic anxiety. But in the meantime, people like Thune offer Republicans a way to connect fiscal discipline with traditional small-town values, a way to tap into rising populism in a manner that is optimistic, uplifting and nice.

Optimistic, uplifting and nice — three attributes Republicans have recently proven they don’t have.  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

I hadn’t thought much about the relationship between fruit flies and Predator drones before visiting the California Institute of Technology, but Caltech, which boasts more than 30 Nobel laureates, teaches many things, not least about the fast-growing field of robotics and war.

Fruit flies, as I learned from a graduate student, use optic flow to navigate their environment. Optic flow is the apparent motion of the landscape relative to the insect as it flies through it. When the insect gets closer to an object, that object appears to get larger; the expansion in the optic flow field triggers a collision avoidance response in the fly, which veers away from the expanding object.

“The insect eye is not, and does not need to be, high resolution to make this computation, so it follows that low resolution sensors can be employed in robotics and serve the same purpose,” she told me.

Call this bio-mechanics — biologically inspired engineering principles. It’s a booming field. You’ll find fruit flies tethered to pins under microscopes in a virtual arena with the aim of developing simplified command algorithms that will tell a robot sensor how to mimic the insect for navigation. The feedback loop for the robot is simple: If an object is expanding at a certain rate, that equals proximity, so turn away!

The U.S. military is interested in such experiments because robotics is its hot new thing. The loss of more than 5,000 U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 has concentrated minds on putting robots rather than flesh and blood in harm’s way.

When the United States went into Iraq in 2003, it had a handful of pilotless planes, or drones; it now has over 7,000. The invasion force had no unmanned ground vehicles; the U.S. armed forces now employ more than 12,000. One is called the PackBot and is made by iRobot, manufacturers of the popular robot vacuum cleaner called the Roomba.

Since taking office, President Obama has shown a quiet predilection for drone warfare. He’s been vacuuming up targets. There are two programs in operation: a publicly acknowledged military one in Iraq and Afghanistan and a covert C.I.A. program targeting terror suspects in countries including Pakistan.

As Jane Mayer notes in a groundbreaking recent piece in The New Yorker, “The intelligence agency declines to provide any information to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is in charge, or how many people have been killed.”

According to a just-completed study by the New America Foundation, quoted in Mayer’s piece, Obama has authorized as many drone strikes in Pakistan in nine and a half months as George W. Bush did in his last three years in office — at least 41 C.I.A. missile strikes, or about one a week, that may have killed more than 500 people.

The dead have included high-value targets like Osama bin Laden’s oldest son and Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban leader in Pakistan — as well as bystanders. Circling drones have struck panic. But as Mayer notes, “The embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force.”

These are targeted international killings, no less real, and indeed more insidious, for their video-game aspect. The thing about robotic warfare is you can watch people get vaporized on a screen in Langley, Virginia, and then drive home for dinner with the kids. The very phrase “go to war” becomes hard to distinguish from going to work. That’s a conflation fraught with ethical danger. The barriers to war get lowered.

P.W. Singer, the author of an important new book called “Wired for War,” told me that, “We are at a breakpoint in history. The U.S. Air Force this year will train more unmanned system pilots than fighter and bomber pilots combined. And, as Bill Gates has noted, robotics are now where computers were back in 1980.”

Now you might think that a “pilot” sitting behind a computer bank in Nevada blowing away people in Afghanistan is less liable to combat stress than a soldier in a unit deployed there, but Singer said the opposite has often proved the case

It’s time for a reckoning, especially from a president who campaigned so vigorously against the “dark side” of the war on terror. Congressional review of the drone programs and the full implications of robotic warfare is essential to cast light and lay ground rules. The Obama administration should not be targeting people for killing without some public debate about how such targets are selected, what the grounds are in the laws of war, and what agencies are involved. Right now there’s an accountability void.

There are also broader questions. When robots are tomorrow’s veterans, does war become more likely and more endless? Do drones cow enemies with America’s technological prowess or embolden them to think America is not man enough to fight? What is the psychological toll on video-screen warriors?

There’s nothing innocent after all about the fluttering of a fruit fly’s wing.

And now here’s Mr. Krugman:

Consider, for a moment, a tale of two countries. Both have suffered a severe recession and lost jobs as a result — but not on the same scale. In Country A, employment has fallen more than 5 percent, and the unemployment rate has more than doubled. In Country B, employment has fallen only half a percent, and unemployment is only slightly higher than it was before the crisis.

Don’t you think Country A might have something to learn from Country B?

This story isn’t hypothetical. Country A is the United States, where stocks are up, G.D.P. is rising, but the terrible employment situation just keeps getting worse. Country B is Germany, which took a hit to its G.D.P. when world trade collapsed, but has been remarkably successful at avoiding mass job losses. Germany’s jobs miracle hasn’t received much attention in this country — but it’s real, it’s striking, and it raises serious questions about whether the U.S. government is doing the right things to fight unemployment.

Here in America, the philosophy behind jobs policy can be summarized as “if you grow it, they will come.” That is, we don’t really have a jobs policy: we have a G.D.P. policy. The theory is that by stimulating overall spending we can make G.D.P. grow faster, and this will induce companies to stop firing and resume hiring.

The alternative would be policies that address the job issue more directly. We could, for example, have New-Deal-style employment programs. Perhaps such a thing is politically impossible now — Glenn Beck would describe anything like the Works Progress Administration as a plan to recruit pro-Obama brownshirts — but we should note, for the record, that at their peak, the W.P.A. and the Civilian Conservation Corps employed millions of Americans, at relatively low cost to the budget.

Alternatively, or in addition, we could have policies that support private-sector employment. Such policies could range from labor rules that discourage firing to financial incentives for companies that either add workers or reduce hours to avoid layoffs.

And that’s what the Germans have done. Germany came into the Great Recession with strong employment protection legislation. This has been supplemented with a “short-time work scheme,” which provides subsidies to employers who reduce workers’ hours rather than laying them off. These measures didn’t prevent a nasty recession, but Germany got through the recession with remarkably few job losses.

Should America be trying anything along these lines? In a recent interview, Lawrence Summers, the Obama administration’s highest-ranking economist, was dismissive: “It may be desirable to have a given amount of work shared among more people. But that’s not as desirable as expanding the total amount of work.” True. But we are not, in fact, expanding the total amount of work — and Congress doesn’t seem willing to spend enough on stimulus to change that unfortunate fact. So shouldn’t we be considering other measures, if only as a stopgap?

Now, the usual objection to European-style employment policies is that they’re bad for long-run growth — that protecting jobs and encouraging work-sharing makes companies in expanding sectors less likely to hire and reduces the incentives for workers to move to more productive occupations. And in normal times there’s something to be said for American-style “free to lose” labor markets, in which employers can fire workers at will but also face few barriers to new hiring.

But these aren’t normal times. Right now, workers who lose their jobs aren’t moving to the jobs of the future; they’re entering the ranks of the unemployed and staying there. Long-term unemployment is already at its highest levels since the 1930s, and it’s still on the rise.

And long-term unemployment inflicts long-term damage. Workers who have been out of a job for too long often find it hard to get back into the labor market even when conditions improve. And there are hidden costs, too — not least for children, who suffer physically and emotionally when their parents spend months or years unemployed.

So it’s time to try something different.

Just to be clear, I believe that a large enough conventional stimulus would do the trick. But since that doesn’t seem to be in the cards, we need to talk about cheaper alternatives that address the job problem directly. Should we introduce an employment tax credit, like the one proposed by the Economic Policy Institute? Should we introduce the German-style job-sharing subsidy proposed by the Center for Economic Policy Research? Both are worthy of consideration.

The point is that we need to start doing something more than, and different from, what we’re already doing. And the experience of other countries suggests that it’s time for a policy that explicitly and directly targets job creation.

In “The Rush to Therapy” Bobo says the well-intentioned public commentary that followed Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s rampage at Fort Hood denied any possibility of evil in his actions.  Mr. Cohen, in “In This Together,” says the U.S. economic recovery has accentuated rather than eased inequalities, another reason why health reform is so important.  Mr. Herbert, in “A Word, Mr. President,” says health care reform is important, but President Obama’s priorities should be putting Americans back to work and ending the war in Afghanistan.  Here’s Bobo:

We’re all born late. We’re born into history that is well under way. We’re born into cultures, nations and languages that we didn’t choose. On top of that, we’re born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can’t control. We’re thrust into social conditions that we detest. Often, we react in ways we regret even while we’re doing them.

But unlike the other animals, people do have a drive to seek coherence and meaning. We have a need to tell ourselves stories that explain it all. We use these stories to supply the metaphysics, without which life seems pointless and empty.

Among all the things we don’t control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to make sense of the world. Individual responsibility is contained in the act of selecting and constantly revising the master narrative we tell about ourselves.

The stories we select help us, in turn, to interpret the world. They guide us to pay attention to certain things and ignore other things. They lead us to see certain things as sacred and other things as disgusting. They are the frameworks that shape our desires and goals. So while story selection may seem vague and intellectual, it’s actually very powerful. The most important power we have is the power to help select the lens through which we see reality.

Most people select stories that lead toward cooperation and goodness. But over the past few decades a malevolent narrative has emerged.

That narrative has emerged on the fringes of the Muslim world. It is a narrative that sees human history as a war between Islam on the one side and Christianity and Judaism on the other. This narrative causes its adherents to shrink their circle of concern. They don’t see others as fully human. They come to believe others can be blamelessly murdered and that, in fact, it is admirable to do so.

This narrative is embraced by a small minority. But it has caused incredible amounts of suffering within the Muslim world, in Israel, in the U.S. and elsewhere. With their suicide bombings and terrorist acts, adherents to this narrative have made themselves central to global politics. They are the ones who go into crowded rooms, shout “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” and then start murdering.

When Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan did that in Fort Hood, Tex., last week, many Americans had an understandable and, in some ways, admirable reaction. They didn’t want the horror to become a pretext for anti-Muslim bigotry.

So immediately the coverage took on a certain cast. The possibility of Islamic extremism was immediately played down. This was an isolated personal breakdown, not an ideological assault, many people emphasized.

Major Hasan was portrayed as a disturbed individual who was under a lot of stress. We learned about pre-traumatic stress syndrome, and secondary stress disorder, which one gets from hearing about other people’s stress. We heard the theory (unlikely in retrospect) that Hasan was so traumatized by the thought of going into a combat zone that he decided to take a gun and create one of his own.

A shroud of political correctness settled over the conversation. Hasan was portrayed as a victim of society, a poor soul who was pushed over the edge by prejudice and unhappiness.

There was a national rush to therapy. Hasan was a loner who had trouble finding a wife and socializing with his neighbors.

This response was understandable. It’s important to tamp down vengeful hatreds in moments of passion. But it was also patronizing. Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts. If public commentary wasn’t carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage.

Worse, it absolved Hasan — before the real evidence was in — of his responsibility. He didn’t have the choice to be lonely or unhappy. But he did have a choice over what story to build out of those circumstances. And evidence is now mounting to suggest he chose the extremist War on Islam narrative that so often leads to murderous results.

The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality. It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.

It denied, before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn’t the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation.

I guess we all should have rushed off and hurled pork chops at the nearest mosque, right, Bobo?  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

When two Northwest Airlines pilots get so into their laptops that they overshoot their destination by 150 miles, breezing past Minneapolis like they’d never heard of the place, American self-absorption has clearly reached new heights. No longer just bowling alone, Americans are flying alone.

I couldn’t believe that story. Nobody could when they heard that the Cheney-Cole pilot-first-officer team had swept eastward toward Milwaukee last month. How, even with a name like Cheney, can you forget that you’ve got 144 people on board and are supposed to land a plane?

But the more I thought about it — and thought of the repeated Earth-to-Mars experience of trying to get through to my kids when they’re on their laptops, and thought of how often people thumb-typing on their Blackberries bump blindly into me on New York sidewalks, and thought about how technology now trumps community in the United States (even when that community is 39,000 feet up) — the more I felt those Northwest pilots were symbolic enough.

After 9/11 half of America went to war and the rest went shopping. Wall Street coined newfangled financial instruments to leverage the universe and Main Street fell for them. Division grew, fellowship withered. Everyone knew money could not really rain from the sky in the American dream factory but they went on playing their own versions of online solitaire.

The Obama victory was a reaction to all this. His message was that we are all Americans in this together. The country at war and the country in the mall are one. American possibility is alive but depends on American responsibility. That kicks in when you look up from your laptop to see this beautiful, battered land (or, as the case may be, the runway).

Nine months into his administration, President Obama has had a hard time delivering. Washington politics are still ugly. The taxpayer-funded economic recovery, such as it is, has accentuated rather than eased inequalities. Wall Street and Main Street are more estranged than ever. Guys with families and no jobs (most of the 8 million job losses have been male) see bankers back on the fat-bonus gravy train.

David Hale, a Chicago-based economist, told me that U.S. employment had declined at a much faster rate than national output (6 percent versus 3.8 percent) since the Great Recession began, whereas in Germany and Japan the job losses have been just a fraction of the falls in output.

In other words, U.S. corporate management has used the crisis to slash jobs well beyond what economic decline strictly demanded — ruthless prudence, they would argue. Elsewhere on earth job preservation has been a priority.

Hale called the resultant rise in American productivity “stunning.” U.S. businesses are more competitive than ever, which could eventually bring jobs. But for now, the newly jobless ask, “What recovery? What justice?”

“If managements are raising profits by cutting jobs, and that gives them a stock market gain of 55 percent, in the end you’re magnifying inequality,” Hale said. Yep, you can’t oblige businesses to use their profits to hire. That’s the American way.

But impunity is not the American way. After the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s, more than 3,000 bankers went to jail. Well, this global crisis stemmed from dishonest bankers writing bad loans, and selling and securitizing them in the knowledge they were fraudulent, while ratings agencies collected big fees for giving triple-A ratings to garbage. And who’s gone to jail? Just about nobody.

None of this has reinforced the republic or the commonwealth nor given the sense the same rules apply to everybody. That’s hurt Obama. He’s appeared powerless at best, complicit at worst.

In any context, I would argue, health reform was important for America, but in this fractured one, the health care reform bill that just passed the House is critical. It’s critical because, although not perfect, it does involve the acknowledgment that, when it comes to health, we are indeed all in this together rather than zoned out on our individual screens. Pooling the risk between everybody is, as the rest of the developed world knows, the most efficient way to forge a healthier society.

U.S. health care has been grossly inefficient — spending has ballooned even through the recession — and a proposed new government insurance plan and national insurance exchange will help force waste out the system. A surtax on the wealthy will help pay for it. There’s going to be some sacrifice in the name of the general good. That’s an important idea right now. The Senate should quickly approve the legislation. It won’t “socialize” America but will solidify it by at last framing basic health care as a moral obligation rather than financial opportunity.

As Archibald MacLeish once wrote: “If we had not held these truths to be self-evident, if we had not believed that all men are created equal, if we had not believed that they are endowed, all of them, with certain unalienable rights, we would never have become America, whatever else we might have become.”

And now here’s Mr. Herbert:

If I were a close adviser of President Obama’s, I would say to him, “Mr. President, you have two urgent and overwhelming tasks in front of you: to put Americans trapped in this terrible employment crisis back to work and to put the brakes on your potentially disastrous plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan.”

Reforming the chaotic and unfair health care system in the U.S. is an important issue. But in terms of pressing national priorities, the most important are the need to find solutions to a catastrophic employment environment that is devastating American families and to end the folly of an 8-year-old war that is both extremely debilitating and ultimately unwinnable.

We have spent the better part of a year locked in a tedious and unenlightening debate over health care while the jobless rate has steadily surged. It’s now at 10.2 percent. Families struggling with job losses, home foreclosures and personal bankruptcies are falling out of the middle class like fruit through the bottom of a rotten basket. The jobless rate for men 16 years old and over is 11.4 percent. For blacks, it’s a back-breaking 15.7 percent.

We need to readjust our focus. We’re worried about Kabul when Detroit has gone down for the count.

I would tell the president that more and more Americans are questioning his priorities, including millions who went to the mat for him in last year’s election. The biggest issue by far for most Americans is employment. The lack of jobs is fueling the nervousness, anxiety and full-blown anger that are becoming increasingly evident in the public at large.

Last Friday, a huge crowd of fans marched in a ticker-tape parade in downtown Manhattan to celebrate the Yankees’ World Series championship. More than once, as the fans passed through the financial district, the crowd erupted in rhythmic, echoing chants of “Wall Street sucks! Wall Street sucks!”

I would tell the president that the feeling is widespread that his administration went too far with its bailouts of the financial industry, sending not just a badly needed lifeline but also unwarranted windfalls to the miscreants who nearly wrecked the entire economy. The government got very little in return. The perception now is that Wall Street is doing just fine while working people, whose taxes financed the bailouts, are walking the plank to economic oblivion.

I would also tell him that rebuilding the economy in a way that allows working Americans to flourish will require a sustained monumental effort, not just bits and pieces of legislation here and there. But such an effort will never get off the ground, will never have any chance of reaching critical mass and actually succeeding, as long as we insist on feeding young, healthy American men and women and endless American dollars into the relentless meat grinders of Afghanistan and Iraq.

We learned in the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was trumped by Vietnam, that nation-building here at home is incompatible with the demands of war. We’ve managed to keep the worst of the carnage — and the staggering costs — of Iraq and Afghanistan well out of the sight of most Americans, so the full extent of the terrible price we are paying is not widely understood.

The ultimate financial costs will be counted in the trillions. If you were to take a walk around one of the many military medical centers, like Landstuhl in Germany or Walter Reed in Washington, your heart would break at the sight of the heroic young men and women who have lost limbs (frequently more than one) or who are blind or paralyzed or horribly burned. Hundreds of thousands have suffered psychological wounds. Many have contemplated or tried suicide, and far too many have succeeded.

“Mr. President,” I would say, “we’ll never be right as a nation as long as we allow this to continue.”

The possibility of more troops for the war in Afghanistan was discussed Sunday on “Meet the Press.” Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania noted candidly that “our troops are tired and worn out.” More than 85 percent of the men and women in the Pennsylvania National Guard have already served in Iraq or Afghanistan. “Many of them have gone three or four times and they’re wasted,” said Mr. Rendell.

More troops? “Where are we going to find these troops?” the governor asked. “That’s what I want somebody to tell me.”

While we’re preparing to pour more resources into Afghanistan, the Economic Policy Institute is telling us that one in five American children is living in poverty, that nearly 35 percent of African-American children are living in poverty, and that the unemployment crisis is pushing us toward a point in the coming years where more than half of all black children in this country will be poor.

“Mr. President,” I would say, “we need your help.”