Ms. Collins and Mr. Blow are off today, so Bob Herbert goes solo.  In “Stacking the Deck Against Kids” he says the American economy is broken, economic woes are exacting a fierce toll on family life, and children are deeply affected. We must work harder to give our children the society they deserve.  Here he is:

Every year at Thanksgiving, parts of the Upper West Side of Manhattan become like a paradise for children. There’s the exciting preparation of the balloons and floats for the Thanksgiving Day parade, and then, on Thursday morning, the parade itself.

The weather isn’t always kind. I’ve seen the kids out there in snow, in freezing rain, in winds that threaten to send the balloons and their handlers soaring to distant venues. It doesn’t seem to matter. The children come into the neighborhood in waves, holding the hands of adults or riding atop their shoulders, smiling, laughing, playing hide-and-seek among the police barricades. Finally, inevitably, they end up staring in absolute open-mouthed, wide-eyed awe as the mammoth, colorful helium-filled creations of their favorite characters begin making their majestic way down Central Park West.

We have an obligation and an opportunity at this special moment in history to do right by these youngsters, and all the rest of America’s kids. It’s a special moment because we’ve seen so clearly the many things that have gone haywire in the society, and while it may not be easy to articulate, we have a sense of what needs to be done.

The American economy is broken, ruined by the greed and irresponsibility of fabulously wealthy corporate chieftains and their shabby acolytes and enablers in government. While Wall Street is handing out billions in bonuses, American families are struggling with joblessness, home foreclosures and rampant debt. The economic woes are exacting a fierce toll on family life, and children are taking a big hit — emotionally, psychologically and otherwise.

One effect of the Great Recession, according to a recent series in The Times, has been a big jump in the number of runaway children, many of them living in dangerous conditions on the street.

Family homelessness is also up, and poverty is increasing. More than a third of all black children in America are poor, and that tragic percentage is expanding. The outlook for America’s working classes is bleak. A few weeks ago a New York cab driver nearly broke down in tears as he told me he’d had to apply for food stamps to continue feeding his family.

A sense of urgency may be starting to emerge. With President Obama’s jobs summit approaching, representatives from labor and progressive organizations gathered in Washington to warn of the lasting damage being inflicted on the prospects of young Americans by the continuing employment crisis.

Millions of youngsters like those who were suffused with such delight at the Thanksgiving Day parade are being buffeted by an economy that is eroding their quality of life, curtailing their educational opportunities and undermining their prospects for economic success as adults. That more attention is not being paid to this growing disaster is criminal.

Groups represented at the meeting in Washington, which was sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute, included the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the N.A.A.C.P., the National Council of La Raza and the Center for Community Change. Among other things, they urged the administration and Congress to provide substantial additional relief to economically distressed state and local governments, to invest in much more widespread infrastructure improvements, and to engage in some direct government creation of jobs.

All of that, in my view, would amount to just a first step. We remain stuck in an economic model that not only permits but encourages the continued existence of financial institutions that are too big to fail, which means that when one or more of them fail — as will surely happen at some point — we’ll again be rushing to “save the system” by bailing them out at taxpayers’ expense.

The system remains grotesquely unfair, with the deck stacked against working people, even as we’re desperate to have them sustain the economy with nonstop consumer purchases. Keep in mind that at the start of the recession the collective wealth of the richest 1 percent of Americans was greater than that of the bottom 90 percent combined. The economic and political clout of that bottom 90 percent has only weakened since then.

We still have a hideously dysfunctional public education system, one that has mastered the art of manufacturing dropouts and functional illiterates. We have not even begun to turn that around.

We still keep fighting tragic, futile, stupid wars, squandering lives and resources and creative energies that could be put to use right here at home, where the need for nation-building is beyond critical.

The U.S. should be a paradise for young people. We need big changes in this country, approaches that are constructive, creative and fundamentally new, if we’re going to give those smiling kids I saw on Thanksgiving Day the kind of society they deserve.

Well, at the very least we have to make sure that they’re well-fed enough to serve as cannon fodder in the next war of choice, right?

E hoje pretendo dar fim à série dos motores Cosworth na F1, falando da série  denominada CR e suas variantes.

Na terceira parte da história eu falei a respeito da série Zetec. É verdade que a história ficou pobre, no que diz respeito à evolução do motor e modificações feitas por preparadores particulares porque falta fontes na internet. Porém, a partir deste ponto ficou um pouco mais fácil, pois a história do motor é compartilhada com várias equipes.

Sauber de 1996

A partir de 1996 a Cosworth passa a fornecer motores para a equipe Sauber, única equipe a andar com os motores ingleses neste ano. Os motores fornecidos eram os novos Zetec-R 3.0 de 10 cilindros em V, montado num ângulo de 72º. Pesava 120 kg e rendia ao redor de 670 à 690 cv. A diferença de potência existe porque na época os motores de qualificação eram mais potentes e feitos somente para essa finalidade. Os motores de corrida eram mais fracos, porém confiáveis. O melhor resultado alcançado foi um pódio com Herbert em Mônaco e dois quarto lugares com Frentzen.

Já em 97, a Ford-Cosworth começa sua trajetória com a equipe formada pelo tri-campeão Jackie Stewart. Foi neste ano que Barrichello conquistou segundo lugar em Mônaco. O motor recebeu melhorias e passou a render 720 CV para corrida e 730 CV para a qualificação. Era um bom motor, mas o carro quebrava demais e o brasileiro só terminou mais duas corridas na temporada. Além de fornecer para a Stewart, a Cosworth fornecia motores para a Lola e Tyrrell, mas na versão de 8 cilindros.

Barrichello comemora o pódio em Mônaco – 1997

Em 98 eles continuaram com a parceria com a equipe Stewart e ainda forneceram os mesmos motores para a Tyrrell e Minardi. Nenhum resultado surpreendente, mas a Stewart estava evoluindo a cada dia que passa e a Ford se envolve cada vez mais com a equipe. Já os motores Zetec-R ficaram em atividade até o ano de 2001, quando eram desenvolvidos pela European e equipavam os carros da equipe Minardi.

Em 1999 a Stewart passa ser a principal equipe a receber os motores da Ford-Cosworth. Neste ano, a Cosworth passa a fornecer uma nova gama de motores, denominada CR-1, 20 kg mais leve que o último motor Zetec e com uma série de melhorias mecânicas. Foi no ano de 1999 que a Cosworth volta ao lugar mais alto do pódio, com o inglês Johnny Herbert vencendo o GP da Europa, em Nurburgring. Além disso, Herbert e Barrichello conseguiram vários resultados expressivos durante a temporada.

Vitória de Herbert  e da Stewart no ano de 99

Barrichello e sua Stewart em Spa, 1999

A temporada de 1999 havia sido muito boa para a Stewart que conquistou o quarto lugar no mundial de construtores, uma coisa inimaginável para uma equipe que havia sido criada a dois anos e que vinha de uma fraca temporada no ano anterior. Como o envolvimento com a equipe crescia cada vez mais, a Ford resolve comprar a equipe, que passa a se chamar Jaguar. Porém, a investida da Ford com uma equipe própria não foi feliz, como veremos mais adiante.

No ano 2000, a Cosworth lança o CR-2, um 3.0 V10 2OHC, 4 válvulas por cilindro. Pesava 97 kg e o número de rpm alcançado era bem maior que seu antecessor, chegando aos 18000 giros. Porém, o início de temporada foi um fiasco, com a equipe conseguindo pontuar somente na 7ª corrida da temporada, um quarto lugar conquistado por Irvine em Mônaco. Depois disso, voltaram a pontuar somente na última etapa, com um sexto lugar de Irvine no GP na Malásia. Um péssimo ano para a Ford e para a Cosworth.

Estréia da Ford na F1 foi terrível

Para o ano de 2001, a Cosworth desenvolveu melhorias ao motor, que recebeu a denominação de CR-3. Nesta versão, o novo V10 desenvolvia 840 CV à 18500 rpm. Em comparação com os outros motores da época, o CR-3 era um motor moderno, que rendia potência suficiente para fazer frente aos demais construtores, sendo somente 10 cv mais fraco que os BMW’s que equipavam a Williams em 2001. Só isso já mostra o quanto o carro da Jaguar era ruim. Mais uma fez a equipe decepciona, conquistando apenas 9 pontos durante todo o campeonato. Consegue o primeiro pódio da equipe, com um terceiro lugar de Irvine em Mônaco. E só.

Em 2002 o motor passa por algumas melhorias e passa a se chamar CR-4, enquanto os CR-3 eram entregues para a Arrows. Mas as coisas não iam bem para a Jaguar, que sofreu com muitas quebras e abandonos. Conseguiram seus primeiros pontos somente no GP da Bélgica, o 14º no ano, com um sexto lugar de Irvine. No GP seguinte a equipe consegue seu último pódio na F1, com um 3º de Irvine. O motor CR-4 já não batia mais de frente com os adversários, era hora de outra mudança.

Em 2003, a Cosworth apresenta o CR-5, um V10 compacto e mais leve que os anteriores, com uma arquitetura nova e formando um “v” de 90º. Além disso, forneceu motores para as equipes Minardi (CR-3) e Jordan (Cosworth RS1). A Jaguar foi um pouco melhor com Webber, que entrou no lugar do aposentado Irvine. Neste ano, Webber ia muito bem nos treinos e muito mal nas provas. No final das contas, o time conseguiu somar 18 pontos. Mas neste ano tem tudo foi perdido para a Cosworth. A Jordan de Giancarlo Fisichella venceu o GP do Brasil em 2003. Foi a última vitória da Ford e da Jordan na Fórmula 1.

A bagunça na entrada da reta dos boxes

*Eu estava lá, sentado na arquibancada de frente pro “S” do Senna. Foi realmente uma bagunça, Barrichello pintou e bordou na corrida, estava ganhando o GP, mas a Ferrari deixou ele sem gasolina. Uma p#@%ta sacanagem. Houve uma série de batidas durante a corrida por causa da aquaplanagem. Webber bateu na subida reta dos boxes. Depois disso, Alonso acabou acertando os restos do carro de Webber. Por causa deste incidente, a corrida foi interrompida e a vitória caiu no colo de Fisichella.

No ano de 2004 a Jaguar mantém Webber e contrata o novato austríaco Christian Klien. O motor passa por melhorias e recebe a denominação CR-6, conhecido como  TJ2004 Série 8. Já a Jordan recebeu os motores de nomenclaturas Cosworth RS2 e o TJ2004 Série 8 e a Minardi recebeu os Cosworth CR-3L V10 (CK2004). Webber tem um desempenho inferior ao da temporada passada e Klien faz apenas três pontos na temporada. Com o melhor resultado da equipe no ano sendo um sexto lugar na Alemanha, com Webber, e na Bélgica com Klien. Depois de passar tanta vergonha, no final de 2004 a Ford sai com o rabo entre as pernas e a equipe é vendida para a Red Bull, que seria a futura cliente da Cosworth.

Acho que a Minardi andou com todos os motores disponíveis na F1

Como podem perceber, as denominações que o motor recebia eram variadas a ponto de eu ter que parar por aqui para o texto não ficar maior do que já esta.

Acredito que a próxima história seja a derradeira.

Abraços

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.

Quem, ao assistir a um filme dublado, nunca ouviu a famosa frase: “versão brasileira Herbert Richers”?

Mas o que muitos não sabem é que Herbert Richers foi um importante produtor de cinema brasileiro que morreu nessa sexta-feira, no Rio de Janeiro. O produtor foi  velado na tarde de sexta, no Memorial do Carmo, na Zona Portuária do Rio, e será cremado no sábado (21).

Ele estava internado desde o último dia 8 na Clínica São Vicente, na Zona Sul da cidade. Ele sofria de problemas nos rins.

Herbert tinha 86 anos e nasceu em Araraquara, no interior de São Paulo e começou a produzir filmes em meados dos anos 50. Foram cerca de 60 filmes ao longo de sua carreira. Ainda nos anos 50 fundou a empresa que leva seu nome e começou na distribuição de filmes. Mais tarde, ela se transformou numa das pioneiras na dublagem Brasil e ainda hoje é uma das maiores no ramo no país.

O produtor de cinema Herbert Richers morreu.

Parece que agora vai rolar dois Vale a pena ver de novo.
O que que eu vou fazer nas férias?

Post original com mais informações no AMP.

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.

Ele vai ser velado na capela 1 do Memorial do Carmo, O corpo do produtor de cinema deve ser cremado no sábado (21).

Morreu nesta sexta-feira (20) o produtor de cinema Herbert Richers. Conhecido pela frase “versão brasileira Herbert Richers”, dita nos filmes dublados na TV, o produtor vai ser velado esta tarde no Memorial do Carmo, na Zona Portuária do Rio, e será cremado no sábado (21).

Ele estava internado desde o último dia 8 na Clínica São Vicente, na Zona Sul da cidade. Ele sofria de problemas nos rins.

Herbert tinha 86 anos e nasceu em Araraquara, no interior de São Paulo e começou a produzir filmes em meados dos anos 50. Foram cerca de 60 filmes ao longo de sua carreira.

Ainda nos anos 50 fundou a empresa que leva seu nome e começou na distribuição de filmes. Mais tarde, ela se transformou numa das pioneiras na dublagem Brasil e ainda hoje é uma das maiores no ramo no país.

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.

Mr. Oizo is definitely an Apes With Barrels favorite, ¡yay experimental french electro-house! , and I recently happened upon a remix he did of Doctor L back in 2000 titled ‘Strange Shit Happens (Mr. Oizo Remix)’ which was missing from my essentially complete collection of his music (His remix of Ark’s Punkadelic was only released on Vinyl, and is relatively rare, unfortunately it will probably never surface, and the tracks ‘Pig’, ‘Tnust’, and ‘Half A Square‘ continue to elude internet exposure) I apologize to those of you who have most of these, but I think all of this crazy surrealist Frenchmans remixes deserve to be posted regardless, so here goes, voici, la musique de l’ordinateur>>>

In “Once Again, Into the Apocalypse” Ms. Collins says a lot of people are worrying about the world coming to an end in 2012, and several books, Web sites and movies are tackling the subject.  Mr. Blow, in “The Passion of the Right,” says Republicans are likely to gain in 2010, not because of their anachronous tenets, but because of historical patterns and an electorate exasperated with seeming Democratic ineptitude.  Mr. Herbert discusses “A Recovery for Some,” and says the government has been on the side of elites in recent decades. The president’s employment summit will provide an opportunity to show whether that has changed.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

A lot of people are worrying about the world coming to an end in 2012.

Bummer. I thought we’d gotten over all that in 2000.

The question of whether the End of Time will arrive during the holiday shopping season three years hence is already the subject of a veritable library of books. We also have what “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to 2012” claims are almost 600,000 Web sites devoted to worrying about it.

This seems to be the fault of Nostradamus, the Mayan calendar, angst on the left about global warming and angst on the right about the election of Barack Obama. Or the health care bill. Or government bailouts. Or the repositioning of “In God We Trust” on the nation’s coinage.

Really, for ultraconservatives, the last year has been one sign of the apocalypse after the other. Soon, the rivers will run red with Starbucks Raspberry-Flavored Tazo Passion Shaken Iced Tea. Owls will give birth to two-headed frogs who shriek the lyrics to Lady Gaga songs.

Hollywood is unleashing a raft of movies about humanity tottering on the edge of extinction. In “2012,” a G-8 summit convenes to discuss the fact that “the world as we know it will soon come to an end.” Actually, I would not be surprised if the participants found this preferable to another round of the Doha trade talks.

The film characters who are best prepared for the planetary calamity had been consulting the ancient Mayan calendar, which runs through more than five millennia and then comes screeching to a halt on Dec. 21, 2012. Some say that for the Mayans, this was just the end of a cycle, like completing a really long year, and that if they’d been able to hang around for a few more centuries they’d simply have issued a new, post-2012 calendar, this time perhaps including some nice pictures of puppies.

Others see more dire forces at work. In “2012,” the crust of the earth starts bouncing around like Tom DeLay in that cha-cha competition. No one can save us, not the black president or the governor of California with an Austrian accent. Certainly the Europeans can’t help, since not even the collapse of every tall building on the planet can get Americans to pay attention to non-American ideas.

Also coming soon to a theater near you are: “The Road” (Viggo Mortensen struggles across a barren landscape after a mysterious cataclysm) and “The Book of Eli” (Denzel Washington guards a book that could save post-apocalypse humanity from Gary Oldman). Obviously, Hollywood has determined that the reason all those Iraq-war-themed movies failed was that the moviegoers felt the scenery wasn’t bleak enough.

I’ve been disappointed that, so far, almost no one has noticed that St. Malachy’s List of the Last Popes has been running out of gas almost as fast as the Mayan calendar. Malachy was an Irish bishop who died in 1148, after allegedly having seen a vision of the future 112 popes who would reign until the end of the world. By this count, the current Benedict XVI would be 111.

Each of the popes gets a little hint as to his identity. For the most part, Malachy cannily chose to keep them general enough (“angelic shepherd”) that it was hard not to hit a lot of home runs. But good luck in figuring out how Benedict is “glory of the olives.”

Keeping things vague, or subject to multiple interpretations, is the real key to apocalyptic predictions. It’s what made Nostradamus a household name. He’d stare at a bowl of water for hours on end, and then come up with something like:

For the merry maid the bright splendor

Will shine no longer, for long will she be without salt.

With merchants, bullies, wolves odious,

All confusion universal monster.

Which is obviously a foretelling of the Sarah Palin book tour.

My own favorite prognosticator, The Amazing Criswell, always got into trouble with specificity, including his prediction that a black rainbow would circle the earth in 1999 and suck out all the oxygen. He lost a lot of credibility even earlier, after he announced that the United States would move its capital to Wichita and that pressures from outer space would turn Denver into jelly. Really, people tend to remember stuff like that.

I’m predicting that by the time we reach 2011, the 2012 Web sites will hit the million mark, not to mention the Twitters of Terror. But we’ve survived end-of-the-world panic many times before.

When I was a kid, the nuns at my school filled us with stories about prophecies of doom, frequently from Our Lady of Fatima. They always revolved around the Communist menace, and we were occasionally sent home on Friday with assurances that the End was coming by Sunday. We were credulous enough not to question why, in that case, there were homework assignments.

Here’s Mr. Blow:

In 354 days, the dead will rise. Or so believe Republicans.

They believe that their suffering and forbearance in the face of an overzealous, hyperliberal left will culminate in a 2010 resurrection of the battered Republican brand.

Case in point: After G.O.P. victories in Virginia last week, Representative Eric Cantor, the House Republican whip, exclaimed that voters are “looking for change. … The Republican resurgence begins again tonight!”

Unfortunately, he’s probably right, in part at least. They are likely to make significant gains, not because of their anachronous tenets, but because of historical patterns and an electorate exasperated with seeming Democratic ineptitude.

According to a Gallup poll on Wednesday, in a generic 2010 Congressional matchup, Republicans moved ahead of Democrats 48 percent to 44 percent. Now generic polls have to be taken with a grain of salt. That said, they do measure the mood of the populace, and it doesn’t look good for Democrats.

The most striking finding in the poll was the margin for Republicans among independents. It grew from 1 percentage point in July to 22 percentage points in November. This is important because according to the most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal Survey, independents are now nearly as large a group as Democrats and Republicans combined.

And, it gets worse for the Democrats. The Gallup poll was of registered voters, not likely voters who skew more Republican, in part because fewer young people vote in midterm elections.

Let’s take a look at how these factors played out in the recent gubernatorial races. In Virginia and New Jersey, the percentage of voters under age 44 dropped 18 and 14 percentage points, respectively, from last November to this November. And what of the all-important independents Obama narrowly won in both states? They voted overwhelmingly for the Republican candidates.

Cantor is also right that the people want change — still. They trusted Democrats to deliver. The Democrats haven’t, not yet at least, and pleas for patience come at a price. If voters’ thirst remains unsated, they will change politicians until politicians change policies.

The party that wins the White House generally loses Congressional seats in the midterm, but this Democratic-controlled government has particular issues. Its agenda has been hamstrung by a perfect storm of politics: the Republicans’ surprisingly effective obstructionist strategy, a Democratic caucus riddled with conservative sympathizers and a president encircled by crises and crippled by caution.

And, the most important pocketbook issue — jobs — hasn’t been the priority that it should be. History may eventually judge these Democrats favorably. Who knows? But real-time anxiety threatens to undermine them.

Jobs may be a lagging indicator of economic recovery, but consecutive summers of “staycations” may be a leading indicator of political realignment.

And now here’s Mr. Herbert:

President Obama’s strongest supporters during the presidential campaign were the young, the black and the poor — and they are among those who are being hammered unmercifully in this long and cruel economic downturn that the financial elites are telling us is over.

If the elites are correct, if the Great Recession really is over, then these core supporters of the president are being left far, far behind — as are blue-collar workers of every ethnic and political persuasion. Nobody wants to talk seriously about class in America, but the elites are smiling and perusing their stock portfolios while the checklist of Americans locked in depressionlike circumstances just grows and grows: construction and manufacturing workers, young men without college degrees (especially young black and Hispanic men), teenagers, and those who were already poor when the recession began.

The economic environment for all of these groups is an absolute and utter disaster.

Now we’re learning that unmarried women are among those being crushed by the epidemic of joblessness. As the Center for American Progress has noted, “The high unemployment rate of unmarried women, and particularly the 1.3 million unemployed female heads of household who are primary breadwinners for their families, is devastating to their financial circumstances and standard of living.”

Mr. Obama announced this week that he would convene a jobs summit at the White House next month to explore ways of putting Americans back to work. It remains to be seen whether the summit will yield anything substantial. But it’s fair to wonder why the president and his party have not been focused like fanatics on job creation from the first day he took office.

It was the financial elites who took the economy down, and it was ordinary working people, the longtime natural constituents of the Democratic Party, who were buried in the rubble. Mr. Obama and the Democrats have been unconscionably slow in riding to the rescue of those millions of Americans struggling with the curse of joblessness.

We’ve been hearing that there are six unemployed workers for every job opening in the U.S., but even that terrible figure is deceptive. There are 25 unemployed construction workers for every job opening in their field, and more than a dozen for every opening in the durable goods industries, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

This was not a normal recession, and we are not on the cusp of anything like a normal recovery. The unemployment rate for black Americans is 15.7 percent. The underemployment rate for blacks in September (the latest month for which figures are available) was a gut-wrenching 23.8 percent and for Hispanics an even worse 25.1 percent. The poverty rate for black children is almost 35 percent.

Wall Street can boast about recovery all it wants, much of America remains trapped in economic hell.

It will take a monumental leadership effort by the administration and Congress to spark the kind of changes necessary to transform this wretched employment landscape. Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute has written: “By itself, the private sector is unable to create jobs in the numbers the United States needs to obtain a robust, full economic recovery.”

If that’s true, and I have long believed it to be the case, then we need to rethink our entire approach to employment. Conventional efforts to kick-start economic growth are dwarfed by the vast scale of the problem. Bold new efforts — creative efforts — are needed.

A recent survey for the policy institute found that one in four families had been hit by a job loss during the past year and 44 percent had suffered either the loss of a job or a reduction in wages or hours worked. Economic insecurity has spread like a debilitating virus through scores of millions of American families.

What kind of recovery are we talking about if blue-collar workers, and men and women without college degrees, and large percentages of ethnic minorities and the young and the poor are not part of it? And how can any recovery be sustained if economic insecurity is a permanent feature of even middle-class life?

The financial elites have flourished in recent decades to a great extent because they have had government on their side, with the politicians working diligently to ensure that rules, regulations and tax policies established an environment in which the elites could thrive. For ordinary Americans, it has been a different story, with jobs shipped overseas by the millions and wages remaining stagnant, with labor unions under constant assault and labor standards weakened, with the safety net shredded and the message sent out to workers everywhere: You’re on your own.

We’ll get a chance to see at President Obama’s employment summit whether anything much has changed.

*

Caravaggio ("Narcyz")

*

* * *
Każdy kwiat jest narcyzem.
Bez uznania konieczności tego, że musi się być pięknym po to, by skutecznie uwodzić i wydać owoce, nie byłoby piękna kwiatów.

Jakież wyrzuty sumienia może mieć rajski ptak będąc świadom tego, iż jest najpiękniejszy – skoro pomaga mu to w zdobyciu wszystkiego, czego tylko zapragnie?

* * *
Dążenie do tego, aby być pierwszym, by zostać zwycięzcą, by zdobyć najbardziej urodziwą kobietę, by stworzyć najpiękniejsze dzieło… to wszystko związane jest z narcyzmem.
Chęć wyróżnienia się z anonimowego tłumu, wyniesienia się ponad “szarą masę” (jaką, tak naprawdę, dla poszczególnego osobnika są inni ludzie) – to jeden z najsilniejszych bodźców kierujących zachowaniem człowieka.
Wygląda więc na to, iż pewne elementy narcyzmu są czymś niezbędnym w budowaniu naszego świata. I były już obecne w przyrodzie, zanim człowiek stworzył swoją cywilizację.
Są siłą ewolucyjną równie mocną, jak dążność do władzy, chęć panowania nad innymi, narzucania innym swojej woli.
Jednym słowem: są czymś, jeśli nie boskim, to naturalnym.

* * *
Pismo czasami trafia w sedno, mówiąc np. bez ogródek:
“Kochaj bliźniego, jak siebie samego” (najwidoczniej odbywa się to przy założeniu, że miłość samego siebie jest czymś naturalnym i powszechnym).
Czy osoba, która nie kocha siebie, może pokochać kogoś innego?
Pytanie otwarte.
Jednak pewien jestem już tego, że ktoś, kto nienawidzi samego siebie, nie jest zdolny do miłości.

* * *
Kiedy kogoś bezgranicznie podziwiamy, wręcz ubóstwiamy? Czy wtedy, gdy projektujemy nań nasze własne pragnienia, dążenia i aspiracje?

Kiedy akceptujemy w kimś narcyzm? Czy wtedy, gdy widzimy w nim pewne atrybuty boskości?

Któraż z kobiet nie podziwiała choć raz swoich pomalowanych ust?
Któryż obdarzony mięśniami mężczyzna nie prężył przed lustrem swojej muskulatury?
Czyż nasze narcyzmy nie spotykają się ze sobą?

* * *
Czym są nasze kompleksy jeśli nie urażonym narcyzmem?

Czyjś narcyzm wziął górę nad naszym.
Rzadko wybaczamy taką zniewagę.

* * *
Narcyz przyznający się do swojego narcyzmu nie przestaje być narcyzem. Staje się po prostu narcyzem bardziej szczerym.
Ten zaś, który się nie przyznaje – narcyzem zatwardziałym.
Jest oczywiste, że większą sympatię wzbudza w nas ów pierwszy. Gotowi nawet jesteśmy przyznać, że narcyzmu się on wyzbył.
Co jest oczywiście złudzeniem.

* * *
Naturalnie, jest również ta ciemniejsza strona narcyzmu: niezaspokojona żądza, która kończy się autodestrukcją. Skupienie się na sobie prowadzące do zupełnego zerwania ze światem. Rozdmuchane ego, które dławi samo siebie. Miraż i złudzenie jako obiekt pożądania i źródło westchnień.
Wreszcie obłęd i katatonia – ostateczne uwięzienie w klatce skrajnego introwertyzmu.
Być może melancholia to łagodniejsza forma autyzmu.

* * *
Jesteśmy dziwnym zlepkiem narcyzmu i niechęci do samego siebie.

* * *
Trudno mi się jednak zgodzić z tym, że narcyzm jest – jak ktoś to określił – “korzeniem psychopatii”. Jeśli już chcemy ów “korzeń” znaleźć, to prędzej odnajdziemy go w czymś, co jest przeciwieństwem narcyzmu, a mianowicie w nienawiści do samego siebie, (czyli – w konsekwencji – w nienawiści do świata i innych ludzi).

* * *
Zwykle, posądzenia o narcyzm unikamy jak ognia.
Głównie dlatego, że pochwała samego siebie, działa zwykle na innych jak przysłowiowa płachta na byka – potrafi wręcz kogoś zdyskredytować, jako zarozumiałego pyszałka. Nawet jeśli jest prawdą… Co innego, jeśli to samo wypowiada ktoś inny.
To właśnie na to czeka narcyz, który udaje skromność. Jednakże, kto z nas nie pragnie pochwał?

Pascal: “Chcecie, aby ludzie mieli o was dobre mniemanie. Nie mówcie dobrze o sobie.”

* * *
“Metamorfozy” Owidiusza.
Mit o Narcyzie nabiera tu literackiej formy. Czy jednak możemy go traktować jako pochodną czegoś co jest głębiej, a mianowicie archetypu?
Co w nim jest?
Losy Narcyza i zakochanej w nim nimfy Echo są tragiczne: żadne z nich nie zazna zaspokojenia ani spełnienia. Oboje skazani są na alienację: Echo nigdy nie zespoli się ani z Naturą, ani z człowiekiem (powtarzając tylko to, co dotrze do niej z zewnątrz). Narcyz zatopi się zaś we własnym odbiciu i znajdzie tam śmierć (niezdolny do otwarcia się na świat i pokochania go – ani czegokolwiek, co jest poza nim, na zewnątrz).

Mit o Echu i Narcyzie wskazuje na to, iż rzeczywistość jest zbiorem elementów, które do siebie nie przystają.

Zwróćmy uwagę, że mitologiczny Narcyz (podobnie jak Echo), nie wywołuje w nas odrazy (ani nawet niechęci). Nie wydaje się też nam śmieszny. Budzi natomiast nasze współczucie, może nawet sympatię.
Czyż nie dzieje się tak dlatego, iż podświadomie odnajdujemy w nim wszystkie nasze zawiedzione miłości – zarówno te, w których kochamy kogoś innego, jak i tę, w której kochamy samego siebie?

* * *

APENDYKS

A OTO “NARCYZ”  HERBERTA:

“Ten mit tkwił we mnie całe dziesięciolecia, tkwił, ale nie rósł, nie rozwijał się jak piąstka niemowlęcia wokół nieruchomej grzechotki.

Cóż można bowiem powiedzieć o Narcyzie? Że był, że był piękny, że zapatrzył się w swoje odbicie w sadzawce i rażony pięknem utonął. A gdzież wzniosły przekaz, przesłanie, morał? Gapi się w wodę i nagle – chlup. W sam raz na modne haiku, które propagował przed laty pewien klasyk, aby powściągnąć wodolejstwo poezji rodzimej. W istocie mit był nieznośnie statyczny. Tkwił.

Czyniono wszakże próby ożywienia Narcyza. Wymyślono mu nerw, nerw oczywiście erotyczny. W Narcyzie zakochała się nimfa leśna – Echo. Z niewiadomych przyczyn Narcyz odrzucił tę miłość i Echo z żalu została bóstwem leśnych ustroni. Wycieczkom otyłych mieszczuchów odpowiadało – imię.
I tak nimfa stała się stewardesą natury.

Jak widać, brak Narcyzowi zarysu charakteru, czy choćby zalążka winy tragicznej, by można go było traktować poważnie i tropić jego losy naszym współczuciem lub gniewem. Tłumaczyć może on najwyżej imię kwiatu, uwodzicielskiego oczywiście, ale róża, która nie ma swojego kawalera i trubadura, jak wiadomo – obywa się bez mitów.

I jaka była kolejność? Zapewne olśnienie nowym zjawiskiem natury, poszukiwanie nazwy, wreszcie próba dopasowania anegdoty, bez której i tak istniał, więc była ona czymś przypadkowym i bez znaczenia, niekoniecznym. Tak więc Narcyz został emblematem tautologii.

Taki los musiał spotkać Narcyza, którego jedyną cnotą była – uroda”.

*  *  *

Zbigniew Herbert (“Król mrówek. Prywatna mitologia”)

To odnalezienie Herberta zawdzięczam  Adzie . Przy okazji zapraszam do zobaczenia całej galerii TUTAJ  .

 

 

John William Waterhouse ("Echo and Narcissus")

 

Para quem não esta acompanhando a história dos motores Cosworth na F1 deixo o link para o acesso da 1ª parte e 2ª parte. Mas se você esta acompanhando a história, queria agradecer a visita e espero que nesta história de hoje tenha o mesmo sucesso alcançado das anteriores.

Na última parte da história eu parei no ponto em que falava da versão DFR no final da década de 80, quando a Cosworth tinha um contrato de exclusividade com a Benetton, que durou até o ano de 1990. Neste ponto eu cometi um equívoco, pois disse que o motor participou da F1 até 1991, o que não é completamente verdade.

O que aconteceu é que em 1991, a Cosworth passou a fornecer os mesmos motores DFR que equipavam a Benetton para a equipe Jordan e em 1992 passou a fornecer para a Lotus. Porém, os motores receberam outra nomenclatura, agora eram chamados de HB. Para complicar ainda mais a sua cabeça, existia equipes que correram com os motores DFR e HB em 1991. Por isso que ficou com cara de meia verdade. Mas vamos continuar a história.

Lotus de Johnny Herbert em 1993 usava os motores HB

Pois bem, nos anos de 91 e 92 a Cosworth forneceu os mesmos motores da Benetton para a inesperiente Jordan, que fazia seu ano de estréia, e para a já decadente Lotus, em 1992. Porém, a Benetton ainda era beneficiada, pois recebia antes das outras equipes as atualizações que o motor HB recebia na época.

Essa situação ficou bem explícita em 1993, quando a Honda abandonou a McLaren no final de 92. Fugindo um pouco do assunto, a McLaren se viu em apuros, pois a Renault era o grande nome do momento e já estava acertada com a Williams e a Cosworth mantinha esse acordo com a Benetton, que estava em fase de ascenção. Com isso, a McLaren teve que se acertar com a Cosworth, que iria fornecer os motores, mas que não tinham a mesma especificação que os da Benetton.

O carro da McLaren era um dos carros mais avançados da temporada de 1993, mas não foram páreos para o Williams/ Renault V10. E sofreram muito para ficarem à frente dos Benetton, que tinham os Cosworth V8 mais avançados.

Senna em 1993: Prejudicado pela Cosworth

Mesmo assim, Senna operou vários milagres durante o ano, vencendo cinco corridas, quase todas debaixo de chuva. Foi com esse motor fajuto que Senna deu um show em Donington e venceu (uma rara vitória no seco em 93) em Adelaide, sua última vitória na F1. Essa corrida da Austrália também foi a última vitória do motor HB. A Benetton também venceu uma prova no ano de 93, em Estoril.

Só para efeito de curiosidade, a Jaguar usou uma versão do HB em um de seus carros protótipos. O motor foi montado no grande sucesso da montadora, o Jaguar XJR-14.

Para o ano de 1994, a FIA proibiu o uso da eletrônica e a Benetton (que estava anabolizada eletrônicamente) recebeu uma grande ajuda da Cosworth, pois passou a receber os novos motores Ford Zetec-R EC V10, que faziam frente aos V10 da Renault, que ainda fornecia à Williams. Já as outras equipes continuaram a receber o antigo HB de oito cilindros em V.

Desta forma, Schumacher acabou sendo beneficiado pelo novo motor e de várias maracutaias durante todo aquele ano. Se sagrou campeão, vencendo 8 etapas (França, Canadá, Mônaco, San Marino, Brasil, Europa, Hungria e Pacífico) e conquistou 6 poles (Mônaco, Espanha, Canadá, Hungria, Nurburgring e Japão). Foi o último campeonato que a Cosworth conseguiu vencer.

Alemão em 1994: foi o último título da Ford-Cosworth

Em 1995 o motor Zetec-R V10 passou por modificações, recebendo a nomenclatura ECA. Este motor ficou na F1 até o ano de 1997. E durante esse período, a Cosworth fornecia também os motores V8 com a nomenclatura ED.

No final da década de 90, tivemos outras empresas que faziam suas próprias modificações nos motores Cosworth, como a Fondmental e European.

Iinfelizmente carece material de pesquisa sobre essa ultima parte da história dos motores Zetec e suas variações. Senti falta também de material para pesquisar sobre a forma que foram acontecendo as mudanças técnicas nos motores. Quem tiver algo para completar a história ficarei muito feliz pela contribuição.

A parte final da história da Cosworth falarei à respeito dos motores da série CR. Espero que tenham gostado da 3ª parte desta história.

Abraços

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.”

Herbert Marcuse,  ‘Political Preface, 1966′  to Eros and Civilization

xii-xiii

As the affluence of society depends increasingly on the uninterrupted production and consumption of waste, gadgets, planned obsolescence, and means of destruction, the individuals have to be adapted to these requirements in more than the traditional ways.

[...]

Mass democracy provides the political paraphernalia for effectuating this introjection of the Reality Principle; it not only permits the people (up to a point) to choose their own masters and to participate (up to a point) in the government which governs them – it also allows the masters to disappear behind the technological veil of the productive and destructive apparatus which they control, and it conceals the human (and material) costs of the benefits and comforts which it bestows upon those who collaborate. The people, efficiently manipulated and organized, are free; ignorance and impotence, introjected heteronomy is the price of their freedom.

It makes no sense to talk about liberation to free men – and we are free if we do not belong to the oppressed minority. And it makes no sense to talk about surplus repression when men and women enjoy more sexual liberty than ever before. But the truth is that this freedom and satisfaction are transforming the earth into hell. The inferno is still concentrated in certain far away places: Vietnam, the Congo, South Africa, and in the ghetoos of the “affluent society”: in Mississippi and Alabama, in Harlem. These infernal places illuminate the whole.

—–

Notes:

Introjection – internalization

Reality Principle – Freudian: deferral of gratification of id, in order to overcome obstacles of reality. Leads to creation of Superego. (For Marcuse the model may be used to map relations between individual, society and state, whereby the Super Ego represents the logic of economic need internalised by the individual. In late capitalism this has become reified so that an outmoded logic, no longer necessary, can be maintained in order to insure hegemony (domination) of the individual and society by state and market. This is my reading, anyway, although I was so excited by the passage quoted that I have not yet progressed beyond the preface…

Let me also note how readily this analysis applies to our current political moment, despite its age. Think on it.

———-Wit

———–x

Some other blogs on Marcuse:

Shron, The New Forms of Control (Chap 35)

Lbrandenburg, Theories of Technology ( The New Forms of Control, Chap 35)

10. Brave New World
Aldous Huxley

Huxley’s future world where genetic engineering dictates the laws and structure of society is truly haunting and full of foresight. His tale is the struggle of individualism in a world where people are are literally born and raised to be a particular person and everyone is kept in line. Values are the opposite of what many may believe them to be; monogamy is forbidden for example. This is one of the greatest dystopian novels of the last century, showing the consequences of a constant pursuit for happiness which sacrifices the spirit of the individual.

9. The Forever War
Joe Haldeman

One of the great advantages of using the science fiction and fantasy genres to tell a story is that the author can take a relevant theme, such as war and humanity, and can take it out of its natural setting of this world which allows us to see them from a different perspective and break those themes down and examine them further. This is what Joe Haldeman does with the Forever War, taking the current relevancy to the Vietnam War of that time and putting it in the setting of a war with an Alien race.

8. Nightfall
Issac Asimov

One of the most influential short stories ever written for the science fiction genre by one of the genres great masters. In Nightfall, Asimov describes a solar system with 6 stars, where darkness is a virtual unknown. Nightfall has been called the greatest sci-fi short story ever and helped build the foundation of modern day science fiction.

7. Ender’s Game
Orson Scott Card

Ender’s Game is the story of a young genius who is being groomed as the commander of Earth’s space fleet against an invading alien race. The book follows the boy’s training while describing a world which has been very loosely united through the threat of a common alien foe. This story does come with some critical controversy; some are highly bothered by the fact that Ender’s actions have no consequences, while others describe Ender’s Game as ‘geek porn’. However, only literature with the kind of substance and magic that Ender’s Game has would be able to stir up those controversies. It is a highly engaging story and a solidly constructed piece of sci-fi storytelling.

6. Stranger in a Strange Land
Robert A. Heinlein

Stranger in a strange land was able to use science fiction to explore themes of alienation, culture clashes, and individual freedom. Heinlein’s story of a man who was born as a Martian and returns to Earth transcended the the science fiction readers and brought in readers of other literary genres. Now it is aconsiddered one of the most popular classics sci-fi has to offer and one of its greatest achievements.

5. Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell

In a futuristic world where the government controls everything and Big Brother is always watching you, a man struggles to maintain individual freedom and creative expression. Orwell’s masterpiece plays upon the fears of mankind concerning higher powers and state control in a way that it has become ingrained our very thinking about these issues. It is a haunting look at a world set in the not-so-distant future, all the more haunting because the possibility of that world coming into being is within the realm of believability.

4. The Time Machine
H. G. Wells

H.G. Wells is often considered the father of science fiction, and The Time Machine is perhaps his most acclaimed novel. Wells uses the concept of time travel to explore the future of mankind, which has actually evolved into two different races. The reason for this may seem obvious to some and up for debate to others. The future that Wells describes and how things got to be that way is a feast of scientific speculation. The Time Machine is one of the first science fiction novels and still one of the greatest.

3. Rendezvous with Rama
Aurthur C. Clarke

Science fiction has varying degrees within the genre, and many fans describe sci-fi as being either soft or hard; hard meaning that there is a lot of emphasis on the actual science involved in the story. Clarke was a master of hard science fiction and perhaps never showed off this mastery more than with Rendezvous with Rama. The story describes Earth’s encounter with a mysterious spacecraft, delving into the mysteries of the universe beyond our own knowledge. It has been an influence on countless sci-fi stories since, the most obvious of which are the first Star Trek movie, Alien, and Michael Chrichton’s Sphere. However, most sci-fi writers have been influenced by Clarke’s genius, which shows up very strongly here with Rama.

2. Dune
Frank Herbert

Dune is the Lord of the Rings of science fiction. Herbert’s world is intricate in its details and extensive in its scope while the story is layered in themes. The world of Dune is rich with individual cultures, mythologies, and customs and is so descriptive it’s as though Herbert actually visited the world and recorded what he saw rather than created it from his mind. Dune deals with politics and socioeconomics as well as the depths of the human soul and how one man deals with his fate and how to cope with losing all you once had. Dune is a rich novel which will last in the higher echelon of sci-fi for many years to come.

1. The Foundation Trilogy
Issac Asimov

From the master of science fiction, Asimov’s massive and epic Foundation series has become the cornerstone of science fiction literature. It is the only series to win the Hugo all-time best series award. The story deals with the link between science and civilization and the struggle to retain and preserve knowledge. Foundation has had a huge impact and influence on all science fiction to come after in books, film, and television. It is the best and most important work of science fiction by one of the genre’s great writers.

Ms. Collins has a suggestion about the “Weekend Sports Lineup” — she says if the House health care vote happens this weekend, perhaps you will want to flip back and forth between the football games.  Mr. Blow, in “Obama’s to Fix,” says the financial crisis may have begun on George W. Bush’s watch, but the lack of jobs is now President Obama’s problem, and he needs to act quickly to solve it.  In “Stress Beyond Belief” Mr. Herbert says that sending service members on numerous combat tours exacts a horrendous price on their mental health and the readiness of our armed forces.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Here we are at the big Health Care Bill Weekend! The House of Representatives is actually getting ready to vote on legislation. How long has this been in the works, anyway? Was “Mad Men” on TV when the debate started? Had TV been invented?

On the eve of the big vote, leaders admitted that things could stretch into next week. But no later than Tuesday. Unless something else happens. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Anyhow, we concerned citizens need to decide exactly what we’re rooting for. Public option? Which one? How much would you care if there were none at all? For some people, a health care bill without a public option is like a car without an engine. For others — including some members of the Obama administration — it’s more like a car without a hood ornament.

Everything was thrown into an uproar by this week’s elections, when people in Virginia and New Jersey voted down a deeply unpopular Democratic governor and a deeply incompetent Democratic would-be governor. This has been interpreted as a sign that the much-beloved independent voter thinks Obama is not doing enough, and also too much.

Congress is panicking! This happens quite a bit, but right now they’re behaving like a herd of overly caffeinated cattle that missed the last train connection.

Meanwhile, there’s nothing but confidence and serenity among the right-wing tea-party types. They cannot get over the triumph in upstate New York, where thanks to their really extraordinary efforts, a completely safe Republican seat went to the Democrats. Think how far their movement has come! Only a few months ago, they barely had the power to disrupt a town meeting. And soon they will be able to destroy anything in their path, including their own party, like conservative locusts.

The tea-party folk were back in Washington at the end of the week for a rally against the health care bill called by Representative Michele Bachmann, Washington’s newest Famous Strange Person. Their extreme enthusiasm and cheer was truly awesome.

Representative Todd Akin of Missouri led the rally in the Pledge of Allegiance — noting that the part about “one nation under God” always “drives the liberals crazy.” Then he promptly forgot the rest of the words. In most hyperpatriotic groups, the inability of a Congressman to remember that this is one nation indivisible might be a downer. But the crowd responded like a troop of pumped-up motivational speakers.

“Great job!” someone cried without the least trace of cynicism.

“That was awesome, Todd!” yelled someone else.

You cannot totally dislike a group with that kind of team spirit, so I hope those were not the exact same people carrying the sign that equated the health care bill with the Holocaust.

There was something sort of touching, in an eerie, slightly disturbing way, when John Ratzenberger — the guy who once played the mailman on “Cheers” — told the crowd that the health care bill advocates were “Woodstock Democrats” like Abbie Hoffman and Wavy Gravy. The crowd seemed on the old side, but is it really possible that any of them are still worrying about Abbie Hoffman? That any of them knew who Wavy Gravy is? Wasn’t his main claim to fame giving out free granola? Is this a problem we need to deal with at the present moment?

But I digress, sort of. If the health care vote happens this weekend, perhaps you will want to flip back and forth between the football games. Try to picture Minority Leader John Boehner as an overage cheerleader with a strange-colored tan.

A while back, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was promising that the House bill would have a “robust” public option that would have offered real competition to the insurance companies, thus driving costs down. But then Pelosi was faced with a mini-rebellion from red state Democrats who were terrified by the news of Republican victories in races having nothing whatsoever to do with Barack Obama, Congress or health care, and she modified the plan.

Now it’s a nonrobust option, sort of like decaf instant coffee. And even if it passes, the bill will go to the Senate where everybody is embroiled in an argument over whether the public option should involve a trigger, as Olympia Snowe urges, or an opt-out, which Majority Leader Harry Reid is peddling, or be eliminated altogether so the red state Democrats are pacified and Joe Lieberman does not go through with his threat to filibuster.

Although Lieberman is no longer a Democrat and backed John McCain in the last election, his former party did let him hang around and keep his important committee chairmanship. Supporting an attempt to kill the Democrats’ most important piece of legislation through a parliamentary procedure would be a tad churlish. But there we are.

The health care bill has a lot to recommend it anyway, but if you’re a public option fan, where do you draw the line?

Personally, in these moments of crisis, I generally recommend looking to see where Joe Lieberman is going. Then head the other way.

Here’s Mr. Blow:

What a difference a year makes.

In October 2008, the candidate Barack Obama delivered a major economic speech in Toledo, Ohio. In it he said: “Right now, we face an immediate economic emergency, and that requires urgent action. We can’t wait to help workers and families and communities who are struggling right now — who don’t know if their job or their retirement will be there tomorrow; who don’t know if next week’s paycheck will cover this month’s bills. … We need to pass an economic rescue plan for the middle-class, and we need to do it not five years from now, not next year, we need to do it right now.

“So today I’m proposing a number of steps that we should take immediately to stabilize our financial system, provide relief to families and communities and help struggling homeowners. It’s a plan that begins with one word that’s on everybody’s mind, and it’s easy to spell: J-O-B-S.”

“Right now,” “immediate economic emergency,” “requires urgent action,” “can’t wait.” Wow! He gave the impression that job creation would be his top priority, that action would be swift and effective, that his solutions would not only stanch the hemorrhaging, but reverse the trend.

Fast forward. On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released unemployment figures for October 2009. The official rate was 10.2 percent, up more than 50 percent from the time Obama gave that speech. Oops, nevermind.

(By the way, the underemployment rate, which includes part-time workers who want to work full time and those who’ve given up searching, is a staggering 17.5 percent.)

Job creation has dropped from top priority to one of many, and President Obama has been remanded to pandering for patience and offering excuses. On the one hand, he argues the tortured rationale that there is good news in the awful numbers: Things are still getting worse but at a slower pace. On the other, he incessantly reminds us that he inherited the crisis. The implication: Don’t blame me, blame Bush.

But this president can’t keep deflecting to the last one. Pain is presently felt. The crisis that took form on Bush’s watch is being experienced on Obama’s. Fair or not, finger-pointing is not effective policy.

This is now Obama’s crisis, and it carries political consequences. During Tuesday’s gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, nearly 9 in 10 voters said that they were worried about the direction of the nation’s economy in the next year. And the majority of those who held that view voted for the Republican candidates. This could portend a flashback to 1994.

It isn’t President Obama’s fault that he inherited this mess, but it is his to fix, and he must make haste. To paraphrase his Toledo prelection: you need to do it not five years from now, not next year, you need to do it right now. J-O-B-S.

And now here’s Mr. Herbert:

The authorities will deal with Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who is accused of bringing the nightmare of mass murder into the sanctuary of a military base on American soil. But the rest of us need to look very closely at the stress beyond belief that is being endured by so many other men and women in the armed forces — men and women who are serving gallantly and with dignity, who have not taken out their frustrations on one another, and who deserve better from the broader society.

Simply stated, we cannot continue sending service members into combat for three tours, four tours, five tours and more without paying a horrendous price in terms of the psychological well-being of the troops and their families, and the overall readiness of the armed forces to protect the nation.

The breakdowns are already occurring and will only get worse as the months and years pass and we remain engaged in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. None of this is the military’s fault. There have not been nearly enough people willing to serve in the all-volunteer armed forces to properly staff two wars that have already gone on for the better part of a decade.

I spent some time on the West Coast recently interviewing doctors and researchers studying the enormous problem of troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq with some form of mental health disorder, most commonly depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D. The caseloads are off the charts, and very often the P.T.S.D. or depression (or both) are accompanied by substance abuse, problems with anger management, domestic violence and family breakdown.

These are not weak men and women we are talking about. This is the toll that the horror of combat, especially repeated doses of it, takes on people — even those who are young, physically fit and mentally sound.

“These invisible wounds of war are profound and relatively common,” said Dr. Charles Marmar, a psychiatrist and one of the nation’s leading experts on stress-related disorders. “Pound for pound, they may be more disabling than physical wounds. People often don’t seek treatment for P.T.S.D. or depression or psychosis, and they are very disabling without proper treatment.”

At the time I interviewed Dr. Marmar a few weeks ago, he was the chief of psychiatry at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in San Francisco and vice chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. He is to become chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at New York University on Dec. 1.

Both Dr. Marmar and a colleague at the medical center, Dr. Karen Seal, noted the link between multiple deployments and an increased risk of mental health problems. “We know there is a statistically significant association between having more than one deployment and P.T.S.D.,” said Dr. Seal.

Dr. Marmar added, “The Department of Defense is losing people right now — war fighters are being disabled by P.T.S.D. every day.”

The military has been trying to cope, but the challenge is enormous and there are significant institutional obstacles to overcome. Just last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates spoke publicly about the widespread fear among military personnel that they will be stigmatized if they seek help for psychological problems. And he criticized the military and government bureaucracy for often complicating the efforts of individuals who are trying to get help.

The fallout from the mental health challenges facing America’s fighting men and women is vast, and it descends most immediately on close relatives. We have laid an unconscionably heavy burden on the volunteers and their families. The wives, husbands, children and parents bleed emotionally right along with those who are sent into the war zones.

This small sliver of the overall U.S. population has carried the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, mostly without complaint, for years. It’s time to reassess what we’re doing to them.

By the end of last summer, the Army was reporting the highest tallies of soldier suicides since accurate record-keeping began. We’re getting saturation media coverage of Thursday’s outburst of horror at Fort Hood, but we haven’t heard a lot about the scores of suicides at that same base — the highest of any U.S. military installation — since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

If we’re going to fight wars as a nation, then we need to draw our warriors from a wider swath of the population and give them the full and complete support that they need and deserve. We’ll no doubt be analyzing the twisted psychological state of Nidal Malik Hasan every which way from sundown. But we’ll continue to give short shrift to the daily struggles and frequent horrors of the honorable men and women who have taken on the thankless task of fighting our wars.

This is not just shameful, it’s unsustainable.

I’ve been sick the past few days, so that’s why I haven’t posted. Please forgive me.

Anyway, the PSA finally has a new mission coming soon. I need to finish my missions page so I’m ready for it. Also, coming soon will be an EPF page, but the missions will be exclusive and password-protected.

Also, if you go to the Dojo, there’s a sign saying “Help Build Amulets” or something like that.

What has Herbert been up to? Comment on your ideas. Remember Rockhopper’s plants from the Adventure Party? They might not have come from Rockhopper at all. Play Mission Ten and you’ll se what I mean…

Herbert’s plans involve puffles. What does that mean? What is he planning? Leave a comment if you have any idea…

Anyone think I should redo Polar Bear Lookout again? Might come in handy, as the original site had several facts and suspicions in the missions that me and my friend came up with about one of the agents… they suggested an inside job.

-Jenny

Oh, sweet baby Jesus…  In “Cellphones, Texts and Lovers” Bobo is going tut-tut again, this time about cellphones and texting technology that give suitors instantaneous contact, without the stability of guidance from the community.  Oh, Christ, Bobo.  Your grandpa probably said the same thing about the telephone.  Mr. Cohen, in “The Hinge of History,” says Iran is experiencing a brutal clampdown, but memories of 1989 suggest that the dam must break when a repressive regime and the society it rules march in opposite directions.  Mr. Herbert, in “A Glimpse of the Future?”, says President Obama gave a stirring speech on the crucial issue of energy last week, but it lacked the excitement that should accompany an important national mission.  Here’s Bobo:

Since April 2007, New York magazine has posted online sex diaries. People send in personal accounts of their nighttime quests and conquests. Some of the diaries are unusual and sad. There’s a laid-off banker who drinks herself into oblivion and wakes up in the beds of unfamiliar men. There’s an African-American securities trader who flies around the country on weekends to meet with couples seeking interracial sex. (He meets one Midwestern couple at a T.G.I. Friday’s.)

But the most interesting part of the diaries concerns the way cellphones have influenced courtship. On nights when they are out, the diarists are often texting multiple possible partners in search of the best arrangement.

As the journalist Wesley Yang notes in a very intelligent analysis in the magazine, the diarists “use their cellphones to disaggregate, slice up, and repackage their emotional and physical needs, servicing each with a different partner, and hoping to come out ahead.”

Often the diarists will be on the verge of spending the evening with one partner, when a text arrives from another with a potentially better offer. To guard against not being chosen at all, Yang writes, “everyone is on somebody’s back-burner, and everybody has a back-burner of their own, which they maintain with open-ended texts.”

The atmosphere is fluid, like an eBay auction. This leads to a series of marketing strategies. You don’t want to appear too enthusiastic. You want to invent detached nicknames for partners. “Make plans to spend day with the One Who Cries,” a paralegal, 26, from the East Village writes. You want to appear bulletproof as you move confidently through the transactions. “I have a Stage Five Clinger on my hands,” a TV producer writes. “He asks me to hang out again this coming Sunday. I do not respond.”

People who send in sex diaries to a magazine are not representative of average Americans. But the interplay between technology and hook-ups will be familiar to a wide swath of young Americans. It illustrates an interesting roadblock in the country’s social evolution.

Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.

Over the past few decades, these social scripts became obsolete. They didn’t fit the post-feminist era. So the search was on for more enlightened courtship rules. You would expect a dynamic society to come up with appropriate scripts. But technology has made this extremely difficult. Etiquette is all about obstacles and restraint. But technology, especially cellphone and texting technology, dissolves obstacles. Suitors now contact each other in an instantaneous, frictionless sphere separated from larger social institutions and commitments.

People are thus thrown back on themselves. They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships. Social life comes to resemble economics, with people enmeshed in blizzards of supply and demand signals amidst a universe of potential partners.

The opportunity to contact many people at once seems to encourage compartmentalization, as people try to establish different kinds of romantic attachments with different people at the same time.

It seems to encourage an attitude of contingency. If you have several options perpetually before you, and if technology makes it easier to jump from one option to another, you will naturally adopt the mentality of a comparison shopper.

It also seems to encourage an atmosphere of general disenchantment. Across the centuries the moral systems from medieval chivalry to Bruce Springsteen love anthems have worked the same basic way. They take immediate selfish interests and enmesh them within transcendent, spiritual meanings. Love becomes a holy cause, an act of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment.

But texting and the utilitarian mind-set are naturally corrosive toward poetry and imagination. A coat of ironic detachment is required for anyone who hopes to withstand the brutal feedback of the marketplace. In today’s world, the choice of a Prius can be a more sanctified act that the choice of an erotic partner.

This does not mean that young people today are worse or shallower than young people in the past. It does mean they get less help. People once lived within a pattern of being, which educated the emotions, guided the temporary toward the permanent and linked everyday urges to higher things. The accumulated wisdom of the community steered couples as they tried to earn each other’s commitment.

Today there are fewer norms that guide in that way. Today’s technology seems to threaten the sort of recurring and stable reciprocity that is the building block of trust.

Here’s Mr. Cohen:

Ever since June 15 in Tehran I’ve been asking the most alluring and treacherous of historical questions: “What if?”

What if the vast protesting crowd of perhaps three million people had turned from Azadi (Freedom) Square toward the presidential complex? What if Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, had stood before the throng and said, “Here I stand with you and here I will fall?” What, in short, if Azadi had been Prague’s Wenceslas Square of 20 years ago and Moussavi had been Vaclav Havel?

In history, of course, the hypothetical has little value even if at any one moment — like that one in the Iranian capital three days after the disputed election — any number of outcomes was as plausible as what came to pass.

Retrospective determinism (Henri Bergson’s phrase) now makes it hard to imagine anything other than the brutal clampdown that has pushed Iranian anger beneath the surface. Yet of course things might have ended differently.

In 1989, the revolutionary year, the Tiananmen Square massacre happened in Beijing and, five months later, the division of Europe ended with the fall of the Wall in Berlin. Could it have been otherwise? Might China have opened to greater democracy while European uprisings were shot down?

We cannot know any more than we know what lies on the road not taken or what a pregnant glance exchanged but never explored might have yielded.

All we know, as Timothy Garton Ash observes in The New York Review of Books, is, “The fact that Tiananmen happened in China is one of the reasons it did not happen in Europe.”

And now those events of 20 years ago — Europe’s 11/9 — are pored over by historians in search of definitive answers to how that world-changing moment transpired, and pored over by 21st-century repressive governments to ascertain wherein exactly lay the weakness (as they see it) of Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who would not open fire.

The history of 1989 is still being written — a plethora of new books testify to that. The history of Iran in 2009 will also be written many times over. Truth is elusive, but it’s worth recalling that beyond the inexorable historical forces at work in moments of crisis, there often lies one person’s decision in a particular confused moment.

The hinge of history hangs on a heartbeat.

Harald Jaeger is a good reminder of that. I first met him in Berlin a decade ago. He’s the former officer in the East German border guards who, on the night of Nov. 9, 1989, opened the gate at Berlin’s Bornholmer Strasse, ending the Cold War.

Now 66, Jaeger recently retired to a small town near Berlin where he cultivates his garden. When I saw him a few weeks ago, he was wearing a blue T-shirt and gold-rimmed spectacles: an ordinary-looking gray-haired guy with a frank gaze. He’s not been invited to the elaborate 20th-anniversary celebrations but bears no rancor. “To put it in a nutshell,” he told me, “It was a lucky moment.”

I tried to imagine him at his post 20 years ago, facing a growing crowd, defending the border that had been his life, knowing that a senior official (Günter Schabowski) had just said East Germans could travel “without meeting special provisions,” unable to get clear orders from his superior, wavering, alone.

Just after 11 P.M., he gave the order to open the gate. How did he feel? “Sweat was pouring down my neck and my legs were trembling. I knew what I had done. I knew immediately. That’s it, I thought, East Germany is finished.”

Jaeger had not set out to terminate a country. Behind him lay great forces: Pope John Paul II; Lech Walesa and the heroic Poles of Solidarity; Soviet economic collapse; Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall;” Gorbachev’s refusal to go the Tiananmen route; the irrepressible stirring of the myriad European souls imprisoned at Yalta.

Yet, despite all this (history’s long arc), the event itself — the unimaginable event — still needed a single beleaguered officer to open a gate rather than open fire. A decade ago, Jaeger told me: “I did not free Europe. It was the crowd in front of me, and the hopeless confusion of my leadership, that opened those gates.”

Having been in that Tehran crowd, I know the force was with it. I felt myself how fear evaporates with such numbers. Nobody, not in 2009, can slay millions. Behind those Iranians, too, lay greater forces, all Iran’s centennial and unquenchable quest for some stable balance between representative government and religious faith.

The millions didn’t want to overthrow the Islamic Republic; they just wanted the second word in that revolutionary name to mean something — enough, anyway, for their votes to count.

What if they had wheeled and borne down on the fissured heart of power in the instant of its disarray? What if this had been Iran’s “lucky moment?”

I have no answer to my “what if?” but 1989 suggests this: One day the dam must break when a repressive regime and the society it rules march in opposite directions.

And now here’s Mr. Herbert:

President Obama made an appearance in Florida last week that should have gotten more attention. At a time when many Americans are apprehensive about the state of the economy and uncertain about the nation’s long-term prospects, Mr. Obama delivered an upbeat speech that offered a glimpse of a broader overall vision and a practical way forward on the crucial issues of energy and jobs.

Speaking at the opening of a solar energy center run by the Florida Power & Light Company near Arcadia in rural DeSoto County, the president touted his administration’s $3.4 billion investment in the so-called smart grid, a potentially revolutionary advance in the way electric power is produced and delivered in the U.S.

The president spoke at a scene described by The Times as “futuristic,” a sea of shimmering solar panels tilted toward the sky across the vast acreage of the DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center.

Mr. Obama said that the plant will produce enough power to serve all 6,000 residents of Arcadia. He added: “Its construction was a boost to your local economy, creating nearly 400 jobs in this area. And over the next three decades, the clean energy from this plant will save 575,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions, which is the equivalent of removing more than 4,500 cars from the road each year for the life of the project.”

The energy center was one of dozens of projects receiving grants from the federal government and private industry for the development of smart-grid technology. These are the kinds of baby steps that, if encouraged, replicated and systematically expanded, can put the country on the road to a saner, more prosperous and more secure future.

More significant than the size of the grants being handed out was the thrust of Mr. Obama’s remarks, which sounded like a national call to action. He offered a compelling analogy:

“Just imagine,” he said, “what transportation was like in this country back in the 1920s and 1930s, before the Interstate Highway System was built. It was a tangled maze of poorly maintained back roads that were rarely the fastest or the most efficient way to get from point A to point B. Fortunately, President Eisenhower made an investment that revolutionized the way we travel — an investment that made our lives easier and our economy grow.

“Now it’s time to make the same kind of investment in the way our energy travels — to build a clean energy superhighway that can take the renewable power generated in places like DeSoto and deliver it directly to the American people in the most affordable and efficient way possible. Such an investment won’t just create new pathways for energy — it’s expected to create tens of thousands of new jobs all across America in areas ranging from manufacturing and construction to I.T. and the installation of new equipment in homes and in businesses.”

The president then made the conceptual leap from an innovative plant in rural Florida to a bold new landscape of energy for all of America. “We can imagine the day,” he said, “when you’ll be able to charge the battery on your plug-in hybrid car at night, because your smart meter reminded you that nighttime electricity is cheapest. In the daytime, when the sun is at its strongest, solar panels like these and electricity stored in car batteries will be able to power the grid with affordable, emission-free energy.

“The stronger, more efficient grid would be able to transport power generated at dams and wind turbines from the smallest towns to the biggest cities. And, above all, we can see all this work that would be created for millions of Americans who need it and who want it, here in Florida and all across the country.”

They were stirring words. It was a powerful and important call from a sitting president. On the same day, Vice President Biden announced in Wilmington, Del., that a General Motors plant that had been shut down would be reopened by a company that plans, with the help of loans from the federal government, to manufacture long-range, plug-in, electric hybrid vehicles.

What was missing from these appearances by the president and vice president was the feeling of excitement that should accompany the early stages of an important national mission. Mr. Obama made his appearance in Arcadia, delivered his remarks and quickly moved on to other matters. The nation was not moved. The president’s remarks were not widely heard.

The news media, perhaps understandably, took a ho-hum approach to both appearances. The reporters had heard similar rhetoric before. There were no signals from the White House that something big and important was happening.

Mr. Obama’s vision, briefly glimpsed, seemed to vanish in an ocean of other concerns.

And of course, it’s Mr. Obama’s fault that the fracking media can’t be bothered to do its goddamn job…

Building this one… reminds me when I did dolls years ago.  Body parts laying everywhere.  I love paper mache…

Herbert,  that wonder dog.

Shirley always has something to say about everything…. always….

Sign improvements… by Richard

paper mache birds…

As you can see,  I’m breaking in a new camera.  Way too many directions in that book.  I’m going to pretend I know what I’m doing, and skip that heavy duty reading.  Not required.  Have a good week! xx PJ