Tuesday, September 20, 2011
The Last Days of the Parking Meter
by Michael M. Gyrnbaum
Motorists’ bane, magnet for thieves, and memorialized in the Beatles’ “Lovely Rita,” the diminutive parking meter has led an outsize life. But its days in New York City are about to expire.
A garage in Maspeth, Queens, where workers prepare the latest Muni-Meters for installation on the streets.
The city will remove its last decommissioned single-space parking meter in Manhattan on Monday, transportation officials said, the start of a yearlong process that will eventually eliminate all the steel-and-sludge-hued meters in the city.
A few stragglers will still remain in Manhattan, in areas like the Upper West Side, but their brains will be removed and the inert pole repurposed for a new use: a bicycle rack.
A silent fixture of the streetscape that became an improbable icon of a car-choked metropolis, the Manhattan meter would have turned 60 on the day of its demise. The cause of death, officials said, was an acute case of obsolescence.
The old-fashioned, pole-mounted meter will now yield to the robotlike Meter of Tomorrow: a solar-powered box, equipped with Wi-Fi, that can handle eight parking spaces at once and can shut itself down on free-parking Sundays.
The city’s Transportation Department, which recently accelerated its meter retirement program, says the change will benefit city and citizen alike: the new meters read credit cards, speak seven languages, require less maintenance, and free up room on the sidewalk.
But the death of the classic meter also means an end to some of New York’s smaller pleasures: the satisfying clunk of a coin in its slot, the illicit thrill of finding an extra few minutes still counting down.
“We’re losing the driver’s version of a lottery ticket,” said Samuel I. Schwartz, a former city traffic engineer and transportation commissioner.
Read more:
image: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Motorists’ bane, magnet for thieves, and memorialized in the Beatles’ “Lovely Rita,” the diminutive parking meter has led an outsize life. But its days in New York City are about to expire.
A garage in Maspeth, Queens, where workers prepare the latest Muni-Meters for installation on the streets.
The city will remove its last decommissioned single-space parking meter in Manhattan on Monday, transportation officials said, the start of a yearlong process that will eventually eliminate all the steel-and-sludge-hued meters in the city. A few stragglers will still remain in Manhattan, in areas like the Upper West Side, but their brains will be removed and the inert pole repurposed for a new use: a bicycle rack.
A silent fixture of the streetscape that became an improbable icon of a car-choked metropolis, the Manhattan meter would have turned 60 on the day of its demise. The cause of death, officials said, was an acute case of obsolescence.
The old-fashioned, pole-mounted meter will now yield to the robotlike Meter of Tomorrow: a solar-powered box, equipped with Wi-Fi, that can handle eight parking spaces at once and can shut itself down on free-parking Sundays.
The city’s Transportation Department, which recently accelerated its meter retirement program, says the change will benefit city and citizen alike: the new meters read credit cards, speak seven languages, require less maintenance, and free up room on the sidewalk.
But the death of the classic meter also means an end to some of New York’s smaller pleasures: the satisfying clunk of a coin in its slot, the illicit thrill of finding an extra few minutes still counting down.
“We’re losing the driver’s version of a lottery ticket,” said Samuel I. Schwartz, a former city traffic engineer and transportation commissioner.
Read more:
image: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Quantifying History
Two thousand years in one chart
Some people recite history from above, recording the grand deeds of great men. Others tell history from below, arguing that one person's life is just as much a part of mankind's story as another's. If people do make history, as this democratic view suggests, then two people make twice as much history as one. Since there are almost 7 billion people alive today, it follows that they are making seven times as much history as the 1 billion alive in 1811. The chart below shows a population-weighted history of the past two millennia. By this reckoning, over 28% of all the history made since the birth of Christ was made in the 20th century. Measured in years lived, the present century, which is only ten years old, is already "longer" than the whole of the 17th century. This century has made an even bigger contribution to economic history. Over 23% of all the goods and services made since 1AD were produced from 2001 to 2010, according to an updated version of Angus Maddison's figures.
Some people recite history from above, recording the grand deeds of great men. Others tell history from below, arguing that one person's life is just as much a part of mankind's story as another's. If people do make history, as this democratic view suggests, then two people make twice as much history as one. Since there are almost 7 billion people alive today, it follows that they are making seven times as much history as the 1 billion alive in 1811. The chart below shows a population-weighted history of the past two millennia. By this reckoning, over 28% of all the history made since the birth of Christ was made in the 20th century. Measured in years lived, the present century, which is only ten years old, is already "longer" than the whole of the 17th century. This century has made an even bigger contribution to economic history. Over 23% of all the goods and services made since 1AD were produced from 2001 to 2010, according to an updated version of Angus Maddison's figures.
Source: The Economist
Simple Pickup
by Peter Lu
I was sitting on a fold-out couch, wearing only my boxers, when Daniel's email popped up. There was no subject line, just a simple YouTube link. Over the next hour, I watched all seven videos on Simple Pickup's channel, each three times over. I couldn't quite explain my delirium until I read a comment posted by user SeaWeedBrain013: "You guys are my heroes. I don't understand how your pants can withstand the weight of your balls.
Simple Pickup's YouTube channel is devoted to picking up girls. The stars -- Kong, Jesse and Jason -- film themselves on the streets of Los Angeles, approaching random women, making them laugh, then getting their numbers. In their 16 videos, they've picked up 125 numbers. I counted.
Like all red-blooded males, I'd heard of "The Game," the New York Times bestseller that introduced America to the art of seduction. I'd even read it. Mediocre shows like VHI's "The Pickup Artist" went further in exposing the "secrets" of the pickup community -- for instance, that a "neg" is a backhanded compliment to a pretty girl to get her attention. But these Simple Pickup videos -- these guys -- were literally the first time I'd seen proof of pickup artists in real life. They weren't ridiculous fops like Mystery, the dusty and irrelevant host of "The Pickup Artist," with his feather boas and guyliner. They looked like the dudes who'd gone to Yale with me -- normal-looking and nice, self-professed former nerds. Within a week, every guy I knew had either showed me the videos or been sent them by me. We were enamored with the even-keeled, irreverent way they approached women. More important, watching them had given us the deadly confidence that we could do it, too.
-----
On YouTube, where view count is king, their 16 videos have currently totaled 7.3 million views. Their most popular video, "Internet Trolls Pick Up Girls," has hit the 1 million view benchmark. But as a metric to measure Simple Pickup's reach, it doesn't tell the entire story. What's really important -- and where Jason, Jesse and Kong shine in a way no other pickup artists of their kind have -- is engagement with the audience: They read every single viewer comment (there have been over 38,000) and use the spiciest for inspiration. In July, one fan commented, "pick up girls acting completely gay, if you guys can do that hell I will call you guys my Gods." The next week, they donned booty shorts, neon tank tops and rollerblades, and picked up 11 numbers.
Read more:
I was sitting on a fold-out couch, wearing only my boxers, when Daniel's email popped up. There was no subject line, just a simple YouTube link. Over the next hour, I watched all seven videos on Simple Pickup's channel, each three times over. I couldn't quite explain my delirium until I read a comment posted by user SeaWeedBrain013: "You guys are my heroes. I don't understand how your pants can withstand the weight of your balls. Simple Pickup's YouTube channel is devoted to picking up girls. The stars -- Kong, Jesse and Jason -- film themselves on the streets of Los Angeles, approaching random women, making them laugh, then getting their numbers. In their 16 videos, they've picked up 125 numbers. I counted.
Like all red-blooded males, I'd heard of "The Game," the New York Times bestseller that introduced America to the art of seduction. I'd even read it. Mediocre shows like VHI's "The Pickup Artist" went further in exposing the "secrets" of the pickup community -- for instance, that a "neg" is a backhanded compliment to a pretty girl to get her attention. But these Simple Pickup videos -- these guys -- were literally the first time I'd seen proof of pickup artists in real life. They weren't ridiculous fops like Mystery, the dusty and irrelevant host of "The Pickup Artist," with his feather boas and guyliner. They looked like the dudes who'd gone to Yale with me -- normal-looking and nice, self-professed former nerds. Within a week, every guy I knew had either showed me the videos or been sent them by me. We were enamored with the even-keeled, irreverent way they approached women. More important, watching them had given us the deadly confidence that we could do it, too.
-----
On YouTube, where view count is king, their 16 videos have currently totaled 7.3 million views. Their most popular video, "Internet Trolls Pick Up Girls," has hit the 1 million view benchmark. But as a metric to measure Simple Pickup's reach, it doesn't tell the entire story. What's really important -- and where Jason, Jesse and Kong shine in a way no other pickup artists of their kind have -- is engagement with the audience: They read every single viewer comment (there have been over 38,000) and use the spiciest for inspiration. In July, one fan commented, "pick up girls acting completely gay, if you guys can do that hell I will call you guys my Gods." The next week, they donned booty shorts, neon tank tops and rollerblades, and picked up 11 numbers.
Read more:
Monday, September 19, 2011
Obama’s Economic Quagmire
Frank Rich and Adam Moss Talk About What’s Really in Ron Suskind’s Revealing New Book About the White House.
by Frank Rich
Adam: Hi, Frank. So there’s a little commotion about this new book Confidence Men, by Ron Suskind, which is being published on Tuesday. And as it happens, you and I have actually read it! So let's talk about that this week. To give readers a super-fast overview, it’s a book, essentially, about Obama’s economic team during his first two years in office. The news of the book, according to some reports, is that Tim Geithner was insubordinate to the president, pursuing his own pro-banker agenda. Or, according to other reports, that Larry Summers was insubordinate to the president, pursuing his own — well, monomaniacal agenda. I’d add that it’s also about Rahm Emanuel being insubordinate to the president, just because. Basically, it’s about the presidency being hijacked by these three guys. And the guys thing is important because they’re pretty awful to women. Anyway, they’re the villains. Paul Volcker, Christina Romer, and Elizabeth Warren are the heroes. Bankers win, America loses. Did I get that right?Frank: Hi, Adam, and yes, you did! I would point out that among the other heroes are more women (Sheila Bair, Brooksley Born, Maria Cantwell) and at least one man, the Princeton economist Alan Krueger, who also seems to be a serious Suskind source and who has now returned to the White House to succeed Austan Goolsbee and Romer as head of the Council of Economic Advisers. Not that that will do any good. I think the portrait of Geithner is devastating — his countermanding of the president's wishes to make a Wall Street object lesson of Citigroup, his nasty "Elizabeth Warren strategy" to silence and neuter the administration's rare genuine reformer. And yet Geithner is the only member of the original economic team still standing in the White House, poised to countermand any other rare independent voice that might yet speak up, like Krueger's.
A: You think the portrait of Geithner is more devastating than the one of Summers? I guess. In that instance you cite, Obama asks to put the dissolving of Citibank on the table, and Geithner simply ignores him, "walking back" the decision, in political parlance. More insidiously, he creates the framework, borrowed from Hippocrates, of "first, do no harm," which effectively cuts off any bold reforms for fear of their potential effects on the market. But Summers is portrayed as an egotistical nut job, single-mindedly determined to get Bernanke's job; when he doesn't get it, he goes bananas. He is supposed to be a conduit for the collective advice of the team, but undermines his colleagues, only passing along advice and information that supports his positions. I was kind of stunned how many officials were willing to go on the record against him.
Peter Orszag relays this eviscerating quote that Summers said to him about Obama during the worst of the economic distress. According to Orszag, Summers says, "You know, Peter we're really home alone. There's no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes." Later, Orszag says to Suskind, "Larry just didn't think the president knew what he was deciding. Was this [obstruction of the president's wishes] outright and willful?" In other words, asks Orszag, was Summers saying, "I know more than the president flat-out? That strikes me as ... likely." In an amazing memo, Pete Rouse, who would replace Emanuel temporarily as chief of staff, recommends firing Summers for "Larry's imperious and heavy-handed direction of the economic policy process." Romer says Summers made her feel "like a piece of meat."
In the end, nobody's talking to Summers — not even his crony Geithner. Furious that Geithner didn't recommend him for Bernanke's job, he stands Geithner up at a dinner for all the former Treasury secretaries — Summers is the only living former secretary not there. Geithner says, "Larry would rather be in Davos than at dinner with me." At least according to Suskind, the only person who could stand Summers was Obama, which — in Suskind's telling — was a misjudgment that had a rather profound effect on the first chunk of Obama's presidency.
F: I guess I thought Geithner's role was more shocking just because I have become inured to tales of Summers's outrageousness, dating back to his ill-fated presidency of Harvard. Particularly damning in Suskind's narrative is that when Summers says "there's no adult in charge" in the White House, he's actually right — and appoints himself as adult in charge, Alexander Haig–style. Summers was in charge, all right, but he behaved like a child and little got done except derailing the president's initiatives — he even blocked Obama's agenda of tough climate-change legislation.
But the buck stops with Obama. There's a poignant moment of sorts in December 2008 when the North Dakota senator Byron Dorgan implores the president-elect not to go with his economic team. "I don't understand how you could do this," he tells him. "You've picked the wrong people!" As indeed Obama did, under the tutelage of Robert Rubin, who also tried to finagle a White House guru role for himself, not unlike the perch from which he helped wreak havoc at Citigroup during its subprime orgy. So Suskind's book often reads like Halberstam's "Best and the Brightest," with Summers and Geithner as McNamara and Bundy. But the quagmire isn't a neo-Vietnam like Afghanistan — it's the economy, and the casualties are measured in lost jobs. After the stimulus bill passed in February 2009, Suskind writes, "little else happened on the jobs front for a year and a half," with proposals being "talked to death without resolution."
A: I kept flipping back and forth between fury at Obama and — I know I'm easy — sympathy. So much of the damage comes from the initial decision to hire these guys, a decision he had to make almost immediately after being elected. He was inexperienced, he needed help, they burned him, he let them — that's the story in brief. The number of stupefyingly momentous decisions he had to make in those first few months put me in a vicarious panic. There was no obvious path, the way I read it — though in your view, I suspect, the choices were clearer. Though we'll never know for sure what other solutions might have worked, the book is a litany of missed opportunities, particularly with respect to financial reform (one banker after another wonders incredulously — and anonymously — why Obama didn't pin them when they were down). Would some other president have had more success?
One thing you're struck with is how bizarre it is that Obama has this job in the first place. Obama feels that too — and it gives him a deluded sense of his own magical powers. "Look, I feel lucky," he says. "Just look at me. My name is Barack Hussein Obama and I'm sitting here." He's cocky, but also kind of amazed. What an astonishing blend of good and bad luck the man has had — the unusual cocktail of circumstances that brought him to the White House, and the pretty much impossible situation he faced when he got there. Which is not to say it's not agonizing to watch him, in the book, fail time after time to make the big, bold move — the book is a narrative after all, and passivity (or, to be fair, caution), does not become a protagonist.
Read more:
Welcome to Your Hungarian Internet
by Tim Karr
The New York Times reported on Wednesday that the U.S. has sunk to 25th in a global ranking of Internet speeds, just behind Romania.
Why? Because our nation's regulators abandoned an earlier commitment to foster competition in the marketplace for Internet access providers.
In the years that followed the signing of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, lobbyists working for powerful providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon pressured a compliant FCC to tear down all of the important safeguards established by Congress.
Under the Bush administration, the FCC tossed out competitive broadband safeguards such as open-access requirements, which opened lines to other providers. In 2002 the agency declared that high-speed cable Internet access would no longer be considered a telecommunications service that opened the network to competitors, but rather an “information service” that did not. Following a 2005 court decision, the FCC also reclassified broadband delivered by the phone companies as an “information service.”
These were radical policy shifts that went against the long-held assumption that open communications in competitive markets were essential to economic growth and innovation.
While the U.S. blindly followed a path of "deregulation," other nations in Europe and Asia beefed up their pro-competitive policies. The results are evident in our free fall from the top of almost every global measure of Internet services, availability and speed.
About this my Free Press colleague Derek Turner writes:
The absence of true consumer choice has driven prices up and services down. Wednesday'sNew York Times reports that in some parts of the country the situation has had a direct impact on economic growth, education and public safety.
"This is about our overall competitiveness," Jonathan Adelstein of the Rural Utilities Service told the Times. "Without broadband, especially in rural areas, kids might not reach their full potential. And we can’t expect to be competitive in a global economy."
via:
h/t: Boing Boing. Image: US Mail, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from stephoto's photostream
Why? Because our nation's regulators abandoned an earlier commitment to foster competition in the marketplace for Internet access providers.
In the years that followed the signing of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, lobbyists working for powerful providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon pressured a compliant FCC to tear down all of the important safeguards established by Congress.
Under the Bush administration, the FCC tossed out competitive broadband safeguards such as open-access requirements, which opened lines to other providers. In 2002 the agency declared that high-speed cable Internet access would no longer be considered a telecommunications service that opened the network to competitors, but rather an “information service” that did not. Following a 2005 court decision, the FCC also reclassified broadband delivered by the phone companies as an “information service.”
These were radical policy shifts that went against the long-held assumption that open communications in competitive markets were essential to economic growth and innovation.
While the U.S. blindly followed a path of "deregulation," other nations in Europe and Asia beefed up their pro-competitive policies. The results are evident in our free fall from the top of almost every global measure of Internet services, availability and speed.
About this my Free Press colleague Derek Turner writes:
"By turning its back on the 1996 Act, the FCC ordered up a future of digital mediocrity and stuck American consumers with the bill. Americans pay more per month for broadband than consumers in all but seven of the 30 nations in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development ... When price and speed are considered together as a measure of value, we see that Americans pay more per megabit per second than consumers in many other countries. The value of U.S. connections is some four times less than that of countries like France, and is only slightly better than the value of connections in Hungary, a country with a per capita GDP nearly two-and-a-half times lower than the United States."The lack of competition has turned America into a broadband backwater. In the aftermath of the FCC’s decisions, powerful phone and cable companies legislated and lobbied their way to controlling 97 percent of the fixed-line residential broadband market — leaving the vast majority of consumers with two or fewer choices of land-based providers in any given market.
The absence of true consumer choice has driven prices up and services down. Wednesday'sNew York Times reports that in some parts of the country the situation has had a direct impact on economic growth, education and public safety.
"This is about our overall competitiveness," Jonathan Adelstein of the Rural Utilities Service told the Times. "Without broadband, especially in rural areas, kids might not reach their full potential. And we can’t expect to be competitive in a global economy."
via:
h/t: Boing Boing. Image: US Mail, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from stephoto's photostream
Amazon Reviews
Web reviews from online everymen are either low-hanging fruit for DIY marketers, the best thing to ever happen to e-shopping, or bait for angry cheapskates. But good or bad, they're often an unexpected source for entertainment. Here are some of the best.
by Adam Penenberg
Twal from the UK touts Wolf Urine Lure as "one for the cellar." He lauds its "elegant, pale straw hue with an appealing peachy fruit on the nose," the "effervescent bead--the whole glass teams with bubbles--culminating in a frothy layer at the head," and notes its "firm, mineral acidity that cuts through a rather elegantly styled, poised meaty presence."
Denice Bee from Detroit, MI gives it 5 stars. "At last, a Wolf Urine that's easy to use! My laundry has never been so fresh and clean! It removes those hard to remove wolf-crap stains on our Three Wolf Moon shirts… Why scour when Wolf Urine does the work? Get two jugs and share with a friend!"
And the winner is…
J. Laury: Good: This is soooooooo much easier than trying to get the Wolf Urine directly from a Wolf. Wolves are, from my experience, VERY possessive of their urine. Until the advent of the The Mountain Men's Three Wolf Moon Short Sleeve Tee (which acts to calm the wolves) let's just say vicious bites and deep lacerations were the norm when trying to "milk" the wolves of their urine (how else can you get it?). Even with the The Mountain Men's Three Wolf Moon Short Sleeve Tee it was never easy. This product had changed all of that!
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Stockbox
by Zak Stone
A group of Seattle entrepreneurs has come up with one solution to the urban food desert problem, and it doesn't involve adding traditional supermarkets to underserved areas. Their new venture, Stockbox Grocers, is taking the favorite building block of the green-building movement—the shipping container—and adapting it into a miniature food emporium, packed from floor to roof with fresh produce and other staples.
"Our goal is to bring food back to communities, and focus on communities that don’t currently have good access to food and are heavily dependent on public transportation," says founder and owner Carrie Ferrence. This week, Stockbox celebrates the opening of a 160-square-foot prototype store in a parking lot in a neighborhood where corner stores are the only source of food. Up to five customers can shop at once, said Ferrence, and only one person is needed to staff the operation.
This first store—housed in a temporary structure that's actually smaller than a shipping container—is intended as a six-to-eight-week experiment to feel out the needs of the community and gather feedback. "A lot of people who come in are breaking down the myth that people of low income and mixed income don’t want access to organic or natural food," Ferrence says. By the end of next year, she and partner Jacqueline Gjurgevich hope to have four permanent shipping container stores up and running.
"Everyone’s really excited to have a grocery store in the community," Ference says. "The community’s been asking for years."
via: Good
A group of Seattle entrepreneurs has come up with one solution to the urban food desert problem, and it doesn't involve adding traditional supermarkets to underserved areas. Their new venture, Stockbox Grocers, is taking the favorite building block of the green-building movement—the shipping container—and adapting it into a miniature food emporium, packed from floor to roof with fresh produce and other staples."Our goal is to bring food back to communities, and focus on communities that don’t currently have good access to food and are heavily dependent on public transportation," says founder and owner Carrie Ferrence. This week, Stockbox celebrates the opening of a 160-square-foot prototype store in a parking lot in a neighborhood where corner stores are the only source of food. Up to five customers can shop at once, said Ferrence, and only one person is needed to staff the operation.
This first store—housed in a temporary structure that's actually smaller than a shipping container—is intended as a six-to-eight-week experiment to feel out the needs of the community and gather feedback. "A lot of people who come in are breaking down the myth that people of low income and mixed income don’t want access to organic or natural food," Ferrence says. By the end of next year, she and partner Jacqueline Gjurgevich hope to have four permanent shipping container stores up and running.
"Everyone’s really excited to have a grocery store in the community," Ference says. "The community’s been asking for years."
via: Good
New Relationship
by Sarah Lyall
Ireland is in the midst of a profound transformation, as rapid as it is revolutionary: it is recalibrating its relationship to the Roman Catholic Church, an institution that has permeated almost every aspect of life here for generations.
This is still a country where abortion is against the law, where divorce became legal only in 1995, where the church runs more than 90 percent of the primary schools and where 87 percent of the population identifies itself as Catholic. But the awe, respect and fear the Vatican once commanded have given way to something new — rage, disgust and defiance — after a long series of horrific revelations about decades of abuse of children entrusted to the church’s care by a reverential populace.
While similar disclosures have tarnished the Vatican’s image in other countries, perhaps nowhere have they shaken a whole society so thoroughly or so intensely as in Ireland. And so when the normally mild-mannered prime minister, Enda Kenny, unexpectedly took the floor in Parliament this summer to criticize the church, he was giving voice not just to his own pent-up feelings, but to those of a nation.
His remarks were a ringing declaration of the supremacy of state over church, in words of outrage and indignation that had never before been used publicly by an Irish leader.
“For the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual abuse exposed an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry into a sovereign, democratic republic as little as three years ago, not three decades ago,” Mr. Kenny said, referring to the Cloyne Report, which detailed abuse and cover-ups by church officials in southern Ireland through 2009.
Reiterating the report’s claim that the church had encouraged bishops to ignore child-protection guidelines the bishops themselves had adopted, the prime minister attacked “the dysfunction, the disconnection, the elitism” that he said “dominate the culture of the Vatican.”
He continued: “The rape and torture of children were downplayed, or ‘managed,’ to uphold instead the primacy of the institution — its power, its standing and its reputation.” Instead of listening with humility to the heartbreaking evidence of “humiliation and betrayal,” he said, “the Vatican’s response was to parse and analyze it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer.”
The effect of his speech was instant and electric.
“It was a seminal moment,” said Patsy McGarry, the religious affairs correspondent for The Irish Times. “No Irish prime minister has ever talked to the Catholic Church before in this fashion. The obsequiousness of the Irish state toward the Vatican is gone. The deference is gone.”
Read more:
Ireland is in the midst of a profound transformation, as rapid as it is revolutionary: it is recalibrating its relationship to the Roman Catholic Church, an institution that has permeated almost every aspect of life here for generations.
This is still a country where abortion is against the law, where divorce became legal only in 1995, where the church runs more than 90 percent of the primary schools and where 87 percent of the population identifies itself as Catholic. But the awe, respect and fear the Vatican once commanded have given way to something new — rage, disgust and defiance — after a long series of horrific revelations about decades of abuse of children entrusted to the church’s care by a reverential populace. While similar disclosures have tarnished the Vatican’s image in other countries, perhaps nowhere have they shaken a whole society so thoroughly or so intensely as in Ireland. And so when the normally mild-mannered prime minister, Enda Kenny, unexpectedly took the floor in Parliament this summer to criticize the church, he was giving voice not just to his own pent-up feelings, but to those of a nation.
His remarks were a ringing declaration of the supremacy of state over church, in words of outrage and indignation that had never before been used publicly by an Irish leader.
“For the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual abuse exposed an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry into a sovereign, democratic republic as little as three years ago, not three decades ago,” Mr. Kenny said, referring to the Cloyne Report, which detailed abuse and cover-ups by church officials in southern Ireland through 2009.
Reiterating the report’s claim that the church had encouraged bishops to ignore child-protection guidelines the bishops themselves had adopted, the prime minister attacked “the dysfunction, the disconnection, the elitism” that he said “dominate the culture of the Vatican.”
He continued: “The rape and torture of children were downplayed, or ‘managed,’ to uphold instead the primacy of the institution — its power, its standing and its reputation.” Instead of listening with humility to the heartbreaking evidence of “humiliation and betrayal,” he said, “the Vatican’s response was to parse and analyze it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer.”
The effect of his speech was instant and electric.
“It was a seminal moment,” said Patsy McGarry, the religious affairs correspondent for The Irish Times. “No Irish prime minister has ever talked to the Catholic Church before in this fashion. The obsequiousness of the Irish state toward the Vatican is gone. The deference is gone.”
Read more:
Silvio Berlusconi Wiretaps
[ed. This reads like something out of the Onion, with a kicker by Putin at the end. Gives whole new meaning to the term "Prime" Minister.]
by Tom Kington
by Tom Kington
The wiretaps were released at the conclusion of an investigation into entrepreneur Gianpaolo Tarantini, who is accused of paying women to sleep with Berlusconi, 74, at his homes in 2008 and 2009. The Italian prime minister is not under investigation, although the wiretaps throw doubt on Berlusconi's claims that he has never paid for sex.
"They are all well provided for," Berlusconi tells Tarantini of the girls passing through his Rome residence in one of the thousands of recorded conversations released, which filled Italian newspapers on Saturday.
In another conversation, a woman named Vanessa Di Meglio sends a text from Berlusconi's residence to Tarantini at 5.52am asking "Who pays? Do we ask him or you?"
Tarantini first made the headlines through the revelations of prostitute Patrizia D'Addario, who claimed Tarantini recruited her to have sex with Berlusconi. A second scandal has erupted over Berlusconi's parties at his villa near Milan, with the prime minister on trial accused of paying underage Moroccan dancer Karima El Mahroug for sex.
The newly published wiretaps give startling insight into Berlusconi's sexual appetites. "Last night I had a queue outside the door of the bedroom… There were 11 … I only did eight because I could not do it anymore," Berlusconi told Tarantini in 2009. "Listen, all the beds are full here … this lot won't go home, even at gunpoint."
Berlusconi, who boasted to one TV showgirl that he was only "prime minister in my spare time", told Tarantini in September 2008 that he needed to reduce the flow of women since he had a "terrible week" ahead seeing Pope Benedict, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and Gordon Brown. Berlusconi has long insisted that his private parties are informal but elegant affairs, that extend only as far as joke telling and songs, but is revealed on the tapes as putting pressure on Tarantini and his associates to conjure up beautiful female guests.
Read more
Trust Issues
[ed. Fascinating essay on compound interest and perpetual trusts. Really.]
by Paul Collins
Hartwick College didn’t really mean to annihilate the U.S. economy. A small liberal-arts school in the Catskills, Hartwick is the kind of sleepy institution that local worthies were in the habit of founding back in the 1790s; it counts a former ambassador to Belize among its more prominent alumni, and placidly reclines in its berth as the number-174-ranked liberal-arts college in the country. But along with charming buildings and a spring-fed lake, the college once possessed a rather more unusual feature: a slumbering giant of compound interest.by Paul Collins
With bank rates currently bottomed out, it’s hard to imagine compound interest raising anyone much of a fortune these days. A hundred-dollar account at 5 percent in simple interest doggedly adds five bucks each year: you have $105 after one year, $110 after two, and so on. With compound interest, that interest itself get rolled into the principal and earns interest atop interest: with annual compounding, after one year you have $105, after two you have $110.25. Granted, the extra quarter isn’t much; mathematically, compound interest is a pretty modest-looking exponential function.Modest, that is, at first. Because thanks to an eccentric New York lawyer in the 1930s, this college in a corner of the Catskills inherited a thousand-year trust that would not mature until the year 2936: a gift whose accumulated compound interest, the New York Times reported in 1961, “could ultimately shatter the nation’s financial structure.” The mossy stone walls and ivy-covered brickwork of Hartwick College were a ticking time-bomb of compounding interest—a very, very slowly ticking time bomb.
One suspects they’d have rather gotten a new squash court.
The notion of a “Methuselah” trust has a long history—and as with many peculiar notions, Benjamin Franklin got there first. Upon his death in 1790, Franklin’s will contained a peculiar codicil setting aside £1,000 (about $4,550) each for the cities of Boston and Philadelphia to provide loans for apprentices to start their businesses. The money was to be invested at compound interest for one hundred years, then a portion of the fund was to be used in Boston for a trade school. For Philadelphia, he recommended using the money for “bringing, by pipes, the water of Wissahickon Creek into the town”—or perhaps “making the Schuylkill completely navigable.” The whole scheme was perfectly suited for a man who once half-jokingly proposed that, in preference “to any ordinary death” he be “immersed in a cask of Madeira wine” for later revival, as he had “a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence.”
Franklin’s plans soared beyond a mere century, though. After a portion of the funds were to be paid out for a first set of public works, the remainder was then to grow for another century—until, by Franklin’s estimate, in 1990 both cities would receive a £4,061,000 windfall from their most famous native son.
“Considering the accidents to which all human affairs and projects are subject in such a length of time,” Franklin admitted, “I have, perhaps, too much flattered myself with a vain fancy that these dispositions, if carried into execution, will be continued without interruption and have the effects proposed.”
Nonetheless, Franklin’s experiment inspired Peter Thellusson, a London merchant and a director of the Bank of England, to even dizzier heights. Thellusson had an impressive fortune of some £600,000 by his death in July 1797, worth about $68 million today. But at the reading of the old financier’s will, his reckless sons received the shock of their lives. “It is my earnest wish and desire,” he lectured them from beyond the grave, “that they will avoid ostentation, vanity, and pompous shew; as that will be the best fortune they can possess.”
It would also be almost the only fortune they’d possess. Most of the estate was to be invested at compound interest until every currently existing heir was dead, whereupon upward of £19 million would cascade onto their distant descendants. It was as if, one legal scholar marveled, Thellusson had “locked his treasure in a mausoleum and flung the key to some distant descendant yet unborn.”
His heirs did not take the news well: one took out a pistol and shot the old man’s portrait.
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The Descendants
[ed. What's not to like? Hawaii, Clooney, Alexander Payne (Sideways), and one of my favorite character actors, Robert Forster (Jackie Brown)].
by Andrew O'Hehir
More of a muted, bittersweet Hawaiian-themed cocktail than a masterful cinematic experience, Alexander Payne's new family comedy-drama "The Descendants" clearly emerges from the Toronto International Film Festival as a leading Oscar contender. I suppose that's partly a commentary on the middling quality of this year's Toronto lineup, which features many small-scale delights but few smash hits. But it's also an endorsement of the low-key, seemingly casual charm of "The Descendants," which begins as a rambling tale about an inept father wrestling with tragedy and gradually builds toward a satisfying emotional payoff.
This is George Clooney's star vehicle this fall -- as opposed to "The Ides of March," which he directed and in which he plays a supporting role -- and this is the one that may see him collecting gold figurines during the cold-weather months. Clooney's gotten better and braver as he's aged, and no longer seems the least concerned with nurturing his personal vanity or protecting his star image. He is unquestionably the star of "The Descendants," but his character, a slightly disheveled Honolulu lawyer named Matt King who seems to view chinos and a Hawaiian shirt as formal attire, is not exactly a glamorous movie hero.
Matt faces a number of crises at once, and is ill prepared for all of them. His wife is in a coma after a serious boating accident, and his daughters, 17-year-old Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and 10-year-old Scotty (Judy Greer) are in open rebellion against parental authority. Matt's superficially eager to seize the moment and become a better husband and father, but essentially has no idea how to manage it. Then there's the immense land trust he manages for his extended family, 25,000 pristine acres on the island of Kauai that represents the last untouched inheritance of Hawaiian royalty. (Matt and his tribe are "haoles," or white Hawaiians, but are descended from the House of Kamehameha through a great-great-grandmother.) The time to sell out to a developer, and reap an enormous payoff that will make the whole family rich, seems to have come -- but the final decision lies with Matt.
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by Andrew O'Hehir
More of a muted, bittersweet Hawaiian-themed cocktail than a masterful cinematic experience, Alexander Payne's new family comedy-drama "The Descendants" clearly emerges from the Toronto International Film Festival as a leading Oscar contender. I suppose that's partly a commentary on the middling quality of this year's Toronto lineup, which features many small-scale delights but few smash hits. But it's also an endorsement of the low-key, seemingly casual charm of "The Descendants," which begins as a rambling tale about an inept father wrestling with tragedy and gradually builds toward a satisfying emotional payoff.This is George Clooney's star vehicle this fall -- as opposed to "The Ides of March," which he directed and in which he plays a supporting role -- and this is the one that may see him collecting gold figurines during the cold-weather months. Clooney's gotten better and braver as he's aged, and no longer seems the least concerned with nurturing his personal vanity or protecting his star image. He is unquestionably the star of "The Descendants," but his character, a slightly disheveled Honolulu lawyer named Matt King who seems to view chinos and a Hawaiian shirt as formal attire, is not exactly a glamorous movie hero.
Matt faces a number of crises at once, and is ill prepared for all of them. His wife is in a coma after a serious boating accident, and his daughters, 17-year-old Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and 10-year-old Scotty (Judy Greer) are in open rebellion against parental authority. Matt's superficially eager to seize the moment and become a better husband and father, but essentially has no idea how to manage it. Then there's the immense land trust he manages for his extended family, 25,000 pristine acres on the island of Kauai that represents the last untouched inheritance of Hawaiian royalty. (Matt and his tribe are "haoles," or white Hawaiians, but are descended from the House of Kamehameha through a great-great-grandmother.) The time to sell out to a developer, and reap an enormous payoff that will make the whole family rich, seems to have come -- but the final decision lies with Matt.
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